Platform Spring 2004

Platform[e] printemps/Spring 2004 The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture

Le design d’intérieur, en d’autres mots*

* Interior Design, In Other Words

Looking in from the Outside

the slide projector, I noticed the peeling frescos circling the sala. I thought about the irony of presenting images of Arizonan suburban sprawl in this room full of classical allegories. The Italians possess considerable experience in adapting spaces from the past.

Frederick R. Steiner, Dean

Interior design plays an increasingly important role in the School of Architecture. The profession is well positioned to play an even bigger role both within our School and in the larger society. To realize this potential, interior design educators and practitioners need to seize several contemporary opportunities.

At least five areas are ripe for advancement, including: the link between health and the built environment, the need to restore and conserve existing buildings, the growing interest in green design and sustainability, the prospects for making stronger connections between the indoor and outside environments, and the necessity to bring greater diversity to the design professions. In addition, there has been significant advancement of interior design practice, but with a concurrent vacuum of theory.

The materials comprising indoor environments can facilitate the spread of disease too.

Increasingly, leading floor covering manufacturers, such as Interface and Shaw Industries, recognize this fact and have made significant commitments to producing healthy products.

We need to assess every element of our indoor habitat for their health effects—carpets, wall coverings, furniture, and window shades.

Public buildings of the past possessed many windows. Today’s post offices, museums, courthouses, and schools lack windows. As a child and teenager, school windows rescued me from

Photograph by Marsha Miller.

Health and the Built Environment Buildings shelter us from the elements. Protection from heat and cold, rain, and snow extends our lives. Like crustaceans, we create second skins. But are our skins too impervious? As a result of air conditioning technology, buildings became increasingly disconnected from the outdoors. This separation affects our health and well-being. Bad air can be recirculated with various allergens, viruses, and bacteria.

Some interiors require restoration, others transformation, still others conservation. The recent renovation of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center by Lake/Flato provides a dramatic example of positive transformation. Lake/Flato converted the dreary concrete box into a delightful space of light and openness.

boredom. I recall watching the birds and the rain to counterbalance the abstraction of algebra and Latin. If I were a young student today, Ritalin would probably be prescribed to keep my mind from wandering. Indeed Dr. Richard Jackson, formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, links Ritalin use, teen depression, and obesity to school design.1 Our time in school is formative and fundamental. As a result, that time should contribute to our physical and mental health.

The CDC has also connected physical activity to our health, noting that more than 60 percent of American adults do not exercise enough.2 The problem is even more acute with children.

Our unhealthy eating habits coupled with the lack of physical activity account for over 300,000 preventable deaths a year, which is second in preventable deaths only to tobacco.3 Interior design can help encourage physical activity and better eating habits.

For example, the location of stairways and of soda machines have health consequences. Since state licensure in interior design

is based on the protection of human health and safety, interior designers should actively pursue the design of healthy and safe interiors.

Many architecture and interior design firms are devoted to health-related practices, mostly to health care facilities. For example, Donald R. DeBord [B.Arch. ‘78] leads RTKL’s health care practice in Dallas.

RTKL advocates “well-designed compassion-driven facilities.”4 There is much to be learned from RTKL and other health care oriented practices. This knowledge needs to be applied to the interiors of our schools, our businesses, and our homes.

Restoration and Conservation We face the challenge of rebuilding much of our built environment. Buildings age and require restoration. Structures will need to be adapted to new and constantly evolving technologies.

I recall giving a lecture at the school of architecture and planning in Turin, Italy. The school is housed in a sixteenth century palazzo. As I fumbled to set up

Historic preservation presents an important opportunity for interior design. Considerable research is necessary to understand the conservation of materials as well as the cultural history of a building. Rooms possess memories and remnants of past building technologies. We need to capture the essence of those fragments to forge new spaces.

Inside Green Sustainable design presents another frontier. Designers need to creatively balance economic, environmental, and equity concerns. The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards are a wonderful platform to begin to pursue sustainability.

A starting point is for interior designers to ask two basic questions about the spaces they create and the materials they specify.

Where do the products come from? And, where will they go?

The planet is a source and a sink of resources. We need to understand if that source is renewable or finite. If it is renewable, then the product might be used sustainably. If it is not, then it should be avoided. Also, if the product is renewable, but impossible to dispose, then it might possess limited usefulness. And, if it is finite and lasts forever (or at least a very long time), then that may be fine.

If interior designers can pursue these questions of where products originate and of how they are disposed, then they can be on the front lines of the green design. If those of us in allied fields do the same, then we will assume leadership too.

Inside-Out I write these observations from the perspective of someone who focuses on outdoor environments. I write from an outside perspective, but always write indoors. Right now, I write at my kitchen table. It is red and black, a designer’s table made in Denmark. I look out to the umbrella formed by the live oak canopy and want to go outside.

Interior designers need to connect the spaces we inhabit on a day-to-day basis with the larger, living landscape. The CDC has linked daylight to our health and well being. Lighting design, in general, and daylighting in particular offer significant opportunities to advance interior design.

Day-lit classrooms can improve student performance by 10 to 25 percent, decrease sick building syndrome by 5 to 10 percent, and save up to 30 percent in energy costs.5 Diversity Interior design must nurture a more diverse population of practitioners. In the United States, we are becoming more Latino, black, and Asian. What would our interiors look like if they reflected Asian, black, and Latino cultures? Maybe spaces would be smaller, more expressive, and more colorful. Perhaps, they would also reinforce personal connections and interactions.

Diversity strengthens our nation.

Our diversity can also provide a competitive edge in the global marketplace. As we are exposed to, and even immersed in, different cultures, we can learn new ways to arrange space. Such variety is especially important for interior design. Should a hotel in Istanbul look the same as one in Dallas? Perhaps, yes, if we seek the familiar, but I believe that one of the joys of travel is the discovery of different ways of living.

Interior design has much to gain by embracing diversity. Scholar­ ship, as well as practice, can be advanced. We have much to learn from other cultures. We can study how different cultures organize interior spaces through time and how they are adapting to contemporary technologies.

See “Looking In,” continued on page 20.

Platform Published by the School of Architecture The University of Texas at Austin.

Guest Editor: Robert Michel Charest Managing Editor: Pamela Peters Assistant Editor: Elpitha Dimitrios Sifantonakis Spring 2004: Interior Design, In Other Words 2 Interior Design—

at the end of the day

Robert Michel Charest 3 Outreach and Development 3 Alumni Activities 4 Friends of Architecture 6 Home Design and Personality Type

Carl Matthews, F. Duncan Case, and Caroline Hill

12 Inside Berlin

Lois Weinthal 14 See the Forest and the

Trees: Ornament and Phenomenology

Timothy Parker 16 The Despecialization of Objects

Philippe Carreau and Hubert Pelletier

8 Temporary: Mapping the Interior

Nichole Wiedemann

18 Between Painting and Architecture—The Essence of Interior Design

Robert Michel Charest

9 An Ode to Ellen Birkelbach

Gerlinde Leiding

20 Friends of Architecture Membership

10 Wright versus Schindler at the Freeman House

Jeffrey Chusid

21 Platform Contributors

Advertisement in the March 1955 issue of House and Garden for Hathaway Manufacturing Company’s nylon marquisette.

The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture 1 University Station B7500 Austin, TX 78712-0222 512-471-1922 FAX 512-471-0716 p.peters@mail.utexas.edu www.ar.utexas.edu To our Readers: We welcome any ideas, questions, or comments— in other words, feel free to share your thoughts with Editor Pamela Peters or Assistant Dean for Development Marjie French at the above e-mail address.

Platform • 1

Interior Design — at the end of the day

lies not the real problem. Such a myriad of outlets for a field which addresses so many aspects of the immediate built environment seems only appropriate. However, critical thinking and analysis towards interior design is not rampant. It is actually quite difficult to unearth converging views, or conflicting ones for that matter, which address the condition of interior design. Such views are necessary in order to engender a much needed discussion.

This “Platform” explores the thing called interior design in a relatively unfamiliar manner.

Contributors from the interior design community, as well as neighboring disciplines, have come together to participate in an unscripted discussion on this amazing, yet elusive, field. The success associated with the practice of interior design is effortless to illustrate; however, it is seldom recognized for its body of theoretical work. This being the crux of the discussion, reader permitting, we have “loosened” the strings binding the definition of the word theory in order to promote a worthwhile exploration. After all, this is Interior Design, in Other Words.

“At the end of the day” is an [in]famous, as well as, convenient expression within Interior Design. It enables the one uttering these words to bypass much of the “ancillary” discourse surrounding practice in fields blessed with a split nature—a condition which characterizes many “making” disciplines. This split nature is understood—in an academic context at least—as one which includes, on the one hand, a part involved in making and on the other hand, a part involved in studying what is made. In most cases both parts are not mutually exclusive or inclusive—they just seem that way! Admittedly, this split is

School of Architecture Administration Frederick R. Steiner, Dean Kevin Alter, Associate Dean for Graduate Programs Louise Harpman, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs Robert Paterson, Associate Dean for Research and Operations Marjie French, Assistant Dean for Development Raquel Elizondo, Assistant Dean for Administration Jeanne Crawford, Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Programs P l a t f orm • 2

Photograph by Liat Urman.

Robert Michel Charest, Guest Editor

Madly falling for architecture in the summer of 2000 at Caesaria, Israel.

On était bien, on se sentait seuls au monde, on n’avait rien, mais on avait toute la vie… elle m’aime et je l’aime aussi, on marche en parlant, on refait la philo, je la prends mille fois en photo. —Joe Dassin, Le café des trois colombes. often responsible for the complexities which surround “making” disciplines. However, seen through the eyes of criticism and theory it is also responsible for their richness.

This particular Platform is the first to tackle the condition of interior design, by exposing— albeit not as a cohesive front or lineage—punctual views and to help un-conceal an outline of interior design. We mean to draw an initial map that underscores some of its characteristics, as well as the undeniable overlaps with neighboring disciplines involved in making. This, we believe to be the healthiest way to flesh-out a more complete picture of interior design and to engage [meaning]fully the other disciplines. In this unprec-

edented issue, contributors from The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and beyond, are reporting from the front lines—academia—their positions and views. Actually, very few publications have undertaken such a task in the past. Ultimately, the aim is to initiate a discussion on interior design from within and “without” the community, as well as places in between. We have not explicitly chosen to exclude the part perceived as making, in the orthodox sense, from this Platform, but rather to emphasize its less broadcasted alter-ego, the part that studies the making of interior design artifacts.

Clearly, the “orthodox” understanding of interior design benefits from a solid economic

School of Architecture Foundation Advisory Council Lex Acker Frank Aldridge, III Rick Archer John Avila, Jr. Ray Bailey Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Bobbie Barker Betsy Barlow Rogers David Barrow Marvin Beck Ken Bentley Susan Benz Myron Blalock, III Bill Bonham Bill Booziotis Bob Breunig Alexander Caragonne

Dick Clark, III Tommy Cowan Hobson Crow, III Gary Cunningham Leisa Durrett Biby Dykema Darrell Fitzgerald Melissa Fleming Everett Fly Tom Forbes Larry Good Tom Green Deborah Green Charles Gromatzky Stan Haas Jay Hailey, Jr. Willard Hanzlik Catherine Hardwicke

viability and a healthy exposure of its produced artifacts. This “mainstream” appreciation refers to the variety of expressions by which the profession of interior design engages the business of the built environment—it is often expressed as the professional practice side of things. Without exaggeration, one can easily count five interior design journals—under various guises—for any one of the neighboring discipline’s (e.g., industrial design, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning). What is more, interior design practice is also perceived in a broad range of ways depending on who one asks. One can expect responses ranging from “decoration” to “interior architecture,” not to mention “space planning” and “spatial problem solving.” There

Chris Hill Ken Hughes Martha Hyder Mary Margaret Jones Diana Keller Ellen King Chris Knapp Reed Kroloff David Lake Alan Lauck Charles Lawrence Debra Lehman-Smith Katheryn Lott Graham Luhn Pat Mast Gilbert Mathews Jim McBride, III Mike McCall

The interior design community has nearly always chosen an “end of the day” approach over critically studying the act of making and the artifacts of interior design. It would seem that of all the neighboring disciplines, perhaps only fashion design is less represented in terms of its body of theoretical work. It is doubtless that there is a lack of synchronicity between the professional and scholarly presence of interior design. Moreover, it is also in a fantastic state of flux and expansion of its “territory.” For many engaged professionals and scholars, this juxtaposition signifies the crucial need for a re-defining of its presence.

The Interior Design program at the UT-Austin School of Architecure cultivates a passionate awareness and an engaged participation towards this re-defining.

The cross-pollination of the School’s departments is coupled with an interior design faculty who dares address the split nature of our wonderful discipline. We aim to generate a discourse that outreaches the current borders of the “thing” called interior design—in other words—beyond a myopic “end of the day.” P

Jana McCann Laurin McCracken Bill Mitchell Vic Neuhaus, III Judy Pesek Charles Phillips Janis Porter Boone Powell Leilah Powell Howard Rachofsky Gay Ratliff Jim Reichert Chandler Robinson Deedie Rose Cyndy Severson Will Shepherd Dan Shipley

Beverly Silas Madison Smith Pat Spillman Ruth Carter Stevenson Emily Summers Jerry Sutton Helen Thompson Courtney Walker David Watkins Kirk Watson Terry Wegner Frank Welch Coke Anne Wilcox

Outreach & Development in the School of Architecture Partnering between Education and Practice: “An exemplar of how to do it right.”

In 2002, Fritz Steiner, Dean of The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, found himself in an interesting position. After the Interior Design degree program was transferred from the Human Ecology Department to the School of Architecture, the accreditation board of FIDER (Foundation for Interior Design Education Research) wanted to make sure that the level of the interior design program met its standards for quality.

Dean Steiner’s goal was to not just address the FIDER concerns, but also to take the interior design program to the next level.

He called UT-Austin graduate Judy Pesek [B.S., Interior Design, ’78], who also is Principal/ Managing Director of the Dallas office of Gensler…Architecture, Design & Planning Worldwide.

Would she be interested in teaching a course? “Absolutely yes,” said Ms. Pesek, a self-described “ardent Longhorn alum.”

“From the initial discussions with Dean Steiner and Assistant Dean for Development Marjie Young French, I proposed a course outline that would accomplish two goals—first, to be of benefit to the students, and second, to bring some of the best experts at Gensler to the Studio,” said Ms. Pesek. Thus the UT-Austin Gensler Studio was born.

Focused on an actual project that Gensler had just completed in Austin, the interiors for Tivoli Software’s new building, the Studio was taught by ten Gensler professionals. In addition to two other UT graduates from the Dallas office, Chuck Hagemeier [B.A., History, ’75] and Kris Walsh [B.S., Interior Design,

“We hope that the Overland Partners Endowed Scholarship will assist and encourage deserving students who have demonstarted excellence in design while at UT-Austin School of Architecture.”

—Madison Smith

Associate Professor Carl Matthews interviewed Judy Pesek on the “Gensler Studio” (see article at left): CM: Why is Gensler willing to donate so much to education?

Judy Pesek. ’83], associates from Gensler’s Houston and San Francisco offices participated.

“We had buy-in at all levels. Our IBM/Tivoli client representative, Craig Anderson, agreed to serve as the Studio’s client.

Debra Lehman-Smith, Principal, Lehman/Smith/McLeach, Washington, D.C., was a guest lecturer. Jim Furr, Gensler’s managing principal of the South Central region, taught our students about contracts and best practices. In addition, our chairman, Arthur Gensler, came in for a fireside chat on the state of the industry with design students and faculty,” Ms. Pesek said.

Dean Steiner cites the Studio as “an exemplar of how to do it right. The Gensler Studio created the model from which others could follow suit, continuing the participation of other architecture and interior design firms, as well as other interior design degree programs,” he said.

“The Gensler Studio is beneficial with both accreditation and recruitment of faculty. Site visitors from FIDER raved about the Gensler Studio and saw it as addressing the issues of concern.

The UT-Austin Interior Design program since has been given full accreditation,” he said.

See “Gensler Studio,” continued on page 4.

JP: Education has always been important to the firm. Arthur Gensler believes in giving back to the community and to students. Our philosophy is that students are the future. If we invest in the students then it will pay on the back-end. We like to be linked to the schools and good programs. We like to identify good students as future hires, and we want to help create future leaders for the industry.

CM: Your team contributed a great amount of energy and knowledge. What if anything did they gain in the experience?

Overland Partners, from left: Rick Archer [B.Arch. ‘79], Becky Rathburn, Robert Shemwell [M.Arch. ‘86], Robert Schmidt [B.S.Eng. ‘79], Tim Blonkvist [B.Arch. ‘81], Madison Smith [B.Arch. ‘80], and Mark Headley [B.Arch. ‘78]. Photograph courtesy of Overland Partners.

Overland Partners Endowed Scholarship Announced The School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Overland Partners, Inc., of San Antonio, Texas, has created the Overland Partners Endowed Scholarship. Scholarships will be awarded to “Overland Scholars” who have demonstrated excellence and future promise in architecture and design.

Alumni Activities

JP: The staff was saying, “Let me be a part of the program.” They were excited to connect with the students and teach. Staying in touch with students and mentoring is energizing.

To get back into the classroom is refreshing. It is a nice change to be able to teach the students about reality, but still be in a protected environment where exploring new ideas is encouraged.

CM: The first Gensler Studio at UT-Austin addressed some needs in our program to help get through an important accreditation review. Now that we have addressed those needs throughout the program, what visions or goals do you have for future Gensler Studios?

Above: All-Class Reunion Participants, March 6, Goldsmith Courtyard.

Photograph by Charlotte Pickett.

Upcoming Alumni Events: June 11: Chicago Alumni Reception at the American Institute of Architects National Convention October 21: Houston Alumni Reception at the annual Texas Society of Architects Convention We encourage all alumni to contact alumni coordinator Stephanie Palmer at stephanie.palmer@mail.utexas.edu or 512-471-0617 for information on upcoming events, to share your personal and professional news, or to update your contact information.

JP: We need to build on it. We discovered in the first Studio that a lot of the basics of practice needed to be addressed. Now we want to build on that and reinSee “Pesek Interview,” continued on page

Platform • 3

“Gensler Studio,” continued from page 3.

A key example of the positive influence the Studio has had on faculty recruitment is Carl Matthews, an Associate Professor, Interior Design, School of Architecture, who is in his first year on the faculty.

Teaching at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln when UT came knocking, Professor Matthews notes, “One of the key things in my decision to come to UT was the Studio…, that and the Austin weather.”

Having worked with major interior design firms in New York and Chicago before becoming a full-time teacher, Professor Matthews says, “The strong relationship between education and practice is one reason I went into teaching.”

Professor Matthews cites the Studio as reinforcing the message in the well-respected study, The Boyer Report, Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice. The Report challenges

architects to become a “unified profession” by forming a strong partnership between education and practice. “The Studio is extremely unique…I have been overwhelmed by the generosity of firms that support it. They show a real commitment to UT-Austin, and to education in general, by devoting billable hours and travel to teaching,” he said.

and some have to work harder at it. But whatever you can do to teach good communication skills, is a step in the right direction.

“Pesek Interview,” continued from page 3.

force the strengths.

CM: Design students always ask: “What qualities or skills do design professionals most want or need from graduates?”

CM: If we consider structuring a studio around the issue of communication skills, it could present an interesting challenge.

JP: Client communication and understanding is the most important skill that students need in order to really succeed in this profession.

Ms. Pesek estimates that Gensler invested $70,000 worth of time and expenses in the fall 2002 Studio. In addition, the firm has made the commitment to spearhead the Studio again in fall 2004. In addition to being motivated to give back to the profession, Gensler professionals have other reasons to be enthusiastic about the UT-Austin Studio, according to Professor Matthews.

JP: One of the more interesting things we discovered the first year was the importance of team projects. We assigned people to teams because it is what happens in a real practice. Design professionals work in teams. Even if one team member is not pulling his or her weight, you still must present the work as a team. It is a great lesson to learn early. You always have to work as a team, and you don’t necessarily get to pick your team members.

I will say this again, and again, and again. I face it everyday with our young, talented designers.

They come rushing in the office upset after a client meeting and say, “They didn’t accept my design.” I reply, “Time out. It’s not your design. It’s not about you. It’s about the client.”

CM: What can the School do to help students develop client skills?

“There is a lot of give and take,” he said. “The Studio infuses youthful enthusiasm, creativity, and a sense of experimentation to the practice. The Gensler professionals who participate in P the Studio have an opportunity to step back into the pure world of ideas.”

CM: Your firm has been very generous to the School. How can we best reciprocate?

JP: Integrate classes or programs that teach listening skills. The importance of good communication skills is a topic that gets glossed over. Some people by nature are good communicators,

The School reciprocated by being truly receptive and letting us make an impact in the Studio.

They did not tie our hands with too many requirements. We had the flexibility to structure the

Photograph by Charlotte Pickett.

Spring Mixer participants: Above, top: Eleanor McKinney, Paul Holden, and Cyndy Severson.

Above: Susan and Robert Lindell.

Right, above: Dick Clark, Suzi Dunn, Mac Mounger, and Carolyn Grant.

Right, middle: James Carpenter.

Right, bottom: Hope Hudson, Kevin Alter, and Ann Clark.

Photograph by Charlotte Pickett.

P l a t f orm • 4

Photograph by Charlotte Pickett.

Our Members Friends of Architecture members are patrons, practitioners, and aficionados committed to increasing knowledge and awareness of superior architecture, and supporting excellence at The University of Texas School of Architecture.

Members have the opportunity to tour significant regional, national, and international architecture and design, including exclusive access to interiors of notable homes, behind-the-scenes tours of museums and historic buildings, and walking tours of downtown districts and university campuses.

Photograph by Charlotte Pickett.

Our Mission Friends of Architecture (FOA) is a non-profit, member-supported organization devoted to advancing public understanding and appreciation of architecture, planning and design. FOA achieves its mission by providing enriching educational and involvement opportunities through publications, tours, lectures, symposia, and exhibitions.

Photograph by Charlotte Pickett.

Friends of Architecture Becoming a Friend FOA invites all with a passion for architecture and design to join at one of the following annual membership levels: Student, $25; Individual, $50; Organization, $150; Supporting, $500, Director’s Circle, $1,000.

Member Benefits • Subscription to Platform magazine • Insightful reminders and biographies regarding the School’s calendar of lectures, symposia, and exhibitions • School of Architecture’s biweekly e-mail publication, eNews • Invitations to join prominent architects, designers, and patrons at FOA member receptions and educational tours Additional Benefits (Organization Level and above) • Three additional guest invitations to all FOA events and tours (Organization,

class and teach what needed to be taught. That is something I had not personally experienced with academia. The barriers were removed, and that is what made it successful and truly let it have an impact.

We determined the structure of the course by interviewing graduates from many different universities. After doing that, it was easy to see what was missing—an understanding of the entire design process. Our approach was to instill that understanding.

The first piece of the process, which is so important, is the program phase. That is where you build your foundation.

CM: Programming can be a tough thing to teach in school because we don’t necessarily have clients around to go through the process. When students or professors are making up a program, they can perhaps take too many liberties with it.

JP: Yes. Craig Anderson, who was our client, agreed to be the client for the class. He let the students interview him. That is about as close to reality as you can get. Then, the students had

Supporting and Director’s Circle) • Complimentary copy of award-winning publication CENTER: Architecture and Design in America (Sup­port­ ing and Director’s Circle) • Discounted reservations for FOA tours (Director’s Circle) • Name printed on FOA letter­head (Director’s Circle) Recent Tours In March, Friends of Architecture traveled to Arizona with Dean Fritz Steiner, a former twelveyear resident of Phoenix. Along with local guides, he led a tour of art and architecture in the greater Phoenix area. FOA’s weekend included tours of the Arizona State University campus with Ron McCoy, Director of ASU’s School of Architecture; the impressive residence of local architect Eddie Jones, led by his brother and partner Neal Jones; and cutting-edge public art projects including the Burton Barr

to adhere to a program that came from a real client that they met.

CM: Do you see repeating that process for a future studio?

JP: We do. We have already discussed it with some clients, and they seem open to it. As a matter of fact, we are thinking about bringing in client representatives at several phases of the project—not just programming.

For instance, if we do a law firm project, we could bring in a law firm administrator and let the students know what attorneys really look for.

Emily Niksich, center, and Allison Kolle, left, peer down from the skylight above the dining room at the Antoine Predock-designed house visited by the Gensler Studio. Photograph by Bob Brendle.

On April 28, FOA members and guests welcomed famed architectural designer James Carpenter at downtown Austin hotspot Oslo for FOA’s third annual Spring Mixer. James Carpenter, an artist and sculptor renowned for developing emerging glass and material technologies, was the featured guest for an evening of refreshing drinks, delicious

LIGHTING SYMPOSIUM— April 16-17 The School of Architecture Foundation Advisory Council member Gilbert Mathews, of Lucifer Lighting in San Antonio, organized and sponsored a Lighting Symposium at the School, bringing in four world renowned lighting specialists—Charles Stone of Fisher Marantz Stone, New York; Janet Lennox Moyer of Rensselaer Polytechnic University in Troy, New York; Randall Whitehead of Randall Whitehead Lighting, San Francisco; and James Benya of Benya Lighting Design, Portland, Oregon.

Gary Smith, Senior Lecturer in landscape architecture Mary Margaret Quadlander, Lecturer in fashion design; Christopher Long, Associate Professor of architectural history; Ann Clark, chef and author; Andrew Dell’Antonio, Associate Professor of musicology; Susan Whyne, Associate Professor of studio art; Robert Michel Charest, Lecturer in interior design; and, Larry Doll, Professor in archi-

Carpenter and his studio, James Carpenter Design Associates, have worked collaboratively with major architects and engineers in the U.S. and abroad on projects including the Austin Convention Center’s glass atrium and the redesign of New York’s Seven World Trade Center. Known for his aesthetic exploration of the natural phenomena of light, his work has crossed the boundaries between architecture, engineering and fine arts.

FOA 2004 Calendar June 24-27—Marfa, with Associate Professor Larry Doll September 22-October 2—Spain, with Associate Professor Juan Miró FOA always welcomes new members and new ideas. For details on FOA or upcoming tours, contact Stephanie Palmer at 512-471-0617 or stephanie.palmer@mail.utexas.edu.

Photograph by Don Cohen.

food, and one-on-one conversations following his lecture, “The Structure of Transparency.”

Photograph by Stephanie Palmer.

The visit to Phoenix also included a very special meeting with Paolo Soleri and a tour of his bio-climatic architectural environment, Cosanti; an intimate dinner under the Desert Botanical Garden’s wildflower pavilion; and a behind-the-scenes tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, with a memorable sunset cocktail reception.

The client is the person driving P the project. I believe that a good designer can both have excep-

An impressive fire-breathing dragon overlooks the Taliesin West dining room.

Above, left: The garden of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.

Photograph provided by Jerry Wright.

Central Library by bruderDWLarchitects and WaterWorks at Arizona Falls, a park-like hydroelectric plant, with the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture’s Greg Esser and Andrea Galyean.

CM: That would be great. Last fall, at the end of the semester in the Trisha Wilson Studio (Wilson & Associates), the students went to Boston and presented to the clients. I must say, it was one of the most profound days for those students to hear real client feedback as opposed to professors’ and designers’ feedback. Clients critique in a very different way. By the end of the day, students were excited and thankful for the opportunity.

ORNAMENT—A Continuing Education Mini-Symposium February 20-21 The “Ornament” symposium challenged a popular view that our modern world has been exorcised from a need for superfluous ornamental surfaces and decorative objects. This mini-conference generated a truly stimulating discussion, between the participants and speakers, on the condition of ornament. The lecturers presented varying views on the subject. Organizer Susan Benz invited the following speakers from UT-Austin and the community to the intimate venue:

JP: What a terrific lesson. We are back to the idea that “it’s about the client.” Recently, a young designer in our office was upset because the client changed the proposed design. I asked him if he had ever heard of the Midas Rule. He looked at me strangely, and I told him one of the most important rules to learn: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

Left: “Arizona – Design by Nature” tour participants (back, left to right) Richard Davis, Ann Clark, Chuck and Diane Cheatham, Fritz Steiner, Milinda Hall, Jerry Wright, and Stephanie Palmer; (front, left to right) Eleanor McKinney, Judy Cohen, Molly Block, and Don Cohen.

Platform • 5

Extroverted people prefer open interior spaces. Introverts prefer closed spaces. To most designers and architects, these two statements would seem obvious.

However, little research has addressed how the nuances of personality type, as defined by common psychological testing methods, actually affect a person’s preference in architectural and interior design. For the past four years, researchers at the

University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Architecture have been carefully analyzing this issue, specifically how personality type relates to an individual’s design preferences in the home.

In 1921, Carl Jung proposed a system of personality typing that now forms the basis of the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment tool. The MBTI instrument consists of

Home

Type

• create more direct entry sequences • prefer open interior spaces • have less separation between private and public space • avoid “a room of one’s own, window place, and window overlooking life”

to make decisions based on personal or social values.

• like open interior arrangements in their homes • prefer warm colors • prefer not to have grid, complexity, and progression • prefer not to have “entrance transition or entrance room” Perceiving Personalities tend

P l a t f orm • 6

having a “secret place,” prefer less direct paths into their home, and less openness in the interiors). However, people defined as rationals can be very extroverted and the strength of their extroverted nature can outweigh other personality characteristics. More meticulous study is required to discover the subtleties related to

the expression of dominant, secondary and tertiary personality components.

There are relationships between design preferences and personality as measured by formal ordering principles, pattern languages, and design characteristics of the home. As multiple layers of

The MBTI and Kiersey Temperament Sorter are widely recognized psychological tests focusing on personality traits that are used throughout business, organizational management, personal and group psychology, counseling and education. Designers and architects seemingly integrate and demonstrate many of the personality theory concepts into their projects instinctively. However, • create indirect entry sequences • prefer less open interior space • have more separation between public and private spaces • like “a room of one’s own, window place, and window overlooking life”

Extroverts tend to focus on the outer world—on people and objects.

By Carl Matthews F. Duncan Case Caroline Hill

It is important to remember that personality theory is a fairly complex matrix. For example, on the surface it appears that extroverts (who tend to prefer more direct entry sequences, more open interior spaces, and less separation between private and public space) are directly opposite of rationals (who tend to like

are sixteen possible different personality types. These sixteen types are then condensed into four groups based on sets of basic preferences that strongly suggest habits for decision-making. These four groups, or “temperament types,” are identified as Guardian (SJ), Idealist (NF), Artisan (SP) and Rational (NT) (Kiersey and Bates, 1984).

Design &

Personality

four separate indices that are directly related to the way people perceive and judge the world around them. These four indices are Extroversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuiting, ThinkingFeeling, and Judging-Perceiving (Myers and McCaulley, 1985).

Subjects who take the MBTI receive feedback indicating their dominant preference on each of the four indices, meaning that, in varying combinations, there

Sensing personalities tend to Introverts tend to focus on the inner world—on concepts and ideas.

to rely on senses and intuition in making decisions about the outside world.

They prefer to experience and adapt to circumstances.

to rely on thinking or feeling processes in making decisions about the outside world. They prefer to organize and rationalize decisions they make about the outside world.

• prefer connectedness between public and private areas of their homes • prefer to have “own room, window place, and window overlooking life” • dislike order, grid, and additive geometries

• use grid to organize space • avoid additive/subtractive geometries • dislike “a room of one’s own, window place, and window overlooking life”

Judging Personalities tend

Guardians – SJ are reliable,

personality theory are explored, further study will strengthen and clarify the patterns outlined above. If the patterns observed are true, it makes sense that architects and designers may find value in becoming knowledgeable about a client’s personality profile as part of the design process. In doing so, the

results can be used to guide the designer to create options that are more likely to satisfy the client’s preferences. Designers may also find value in knowing their own personality types so they can attempt to avoid persuading clients based on their own personality-related biases.

Finally, personality awareness

with a more rigorous and indepth knowledge of the theory and its application to decision making in the design process, it is likely that they can make conscious design decisions that are both more meaningful to their clients and more conceptually robust. They may also come to understand how their own personal preferences and personality type can affect the decisions that drive the design process. A bet-

ter understanding of the theory implemented into practice has the potential to lead to better design solutions and more satisfied clients.

Over the past four years, 91 third-year interior design students took the MBTI and Kiersey Temperament Sorter personality tests. Additionally, researchers assigned them the task of studying formal organi-

zational principals (as defined

by Ching and Clark and Pause, 1996 2nd ed.) and the concepts of pattern languages (as described by Alexander, 1977).

Armed with this information, students were then given the fantasy assignment to design a home for themselves. Professors Carl Matthews, F. Duncan Case, Caroline Hill, and Tom Allisma have documented the project results and run statistical analyses

to explore the relationship of personality type to the following seven categories: formal organizational principals (such as grid, hierarchy, symmetry, unit to whole, etc.), pattern languages (such as “place of one’s own, secret place, entrance transition, half-open walls, flow through rooms,” etc.), use of color, use of texture, open versus closed space, public/private spatial relationships, and directness of entry.

The following preferences were found for form-making patterns, ordering principles, pattern languages, and texture usage among the subjects. Student work examples include digital models, plans, and concept models.

tionships, progression, and grid • like having an “entrance transition or entrance room” • prefer less open interiors in their homes • prefer cool colors Feeling Personalities tend rely on observable facts or direct experiences through the five senses in the process of perception.

space • prefer direct entry paths • prefer order • avoid texture richness and having a secret place

• use symmetry to organize

T E M P E R A M E N T T Y P E S

Intuiting Personalities tend

in search of security, concrete communicators, and co­operative in working toward goals.

• prefer having an “entrance transition or entrance room” Rationals – NT are abstract

to rely on meanings, relationships and possibilities that are not necessarily part of the conscious mind.

• prefer having a “secret place” • prefer indirect entry paths to their homes • tend to prefer richer texture in their homes Thinking Personalities tend

to make decisions impersonally based on logical consequences.

• like complex spatial rela-

communicators, constantly in search of knowledge, trust in reason, excel at planning and organizing.

• like having a “secret place” • prefer less direct paths into their home • prefer less openness in the interiors of their home • prefer warmer colors Idealists – NF are abstract

communicators, often speak metaphorically, search for their unique identity, trust their intuition, and seek meaningful relationships.

• avoid organicism • celebrate a bathing space • prefer warm colors

communicators, adaptable, value spontaneity, and strive to have an impact on others.

• like “a room of one’s own” • manipulate shape of indoor space • prefer less richness of texture

Artisans – SP are concrete is also important in the design classroom. Design educators need to be aware of their biases and how it affects interaction with their students. Students need to be aware of their biases so that they can develop design strategies beyond initial inclinations stemming from personality types.

P

References

Alexander, Christopher; Sara Ishikawa; and Murray Silverstein.

(1977). A Pattern Language. Oxford University Press.

Ching, Francis. (1979). Architecture, Form, Space, and Order. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Clarke, Roger and Michael Pause.

(1996). 2nd Ed. Precedents in Architecture. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Cooper Marcus, C. (1974). The House as a Mirror of Self. In J. Lang,

C. Burnett, W. Moleski, and D. Vachon, Eds., Designing for Human Behavior.

Cooper Marcus, C. (1995). The House as a Mirror of Self. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press.

Dovey, Kim. (1985). Home and Homeless. pp. 33-64 In Irwin Altman and Carol M.Werner, editors, Home Environments. New York: Plenum.

Keirsey, David, and Marilyn Bates.

(1984). Please Understand Me:

Character and Temperament Types. Del Mar, CA: Promethean Nemesis.

Myers, I.B. and McCaulley, M.H. (1985). Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of the MyersBriggs Type Indicator. Palo Alto.

CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. http://keirsey.com.

Platform • 7

TEMPORARY: Mapping the Interior

by Nichole Wiedemann “The permanence of even the most frivolous item of architecture and the instability of the metropolis are incompatible.”

—Rem Koolhaas, “Elegy for a Vacant Lot,” 1985.

In examining the “temporary” in architecture, this graduate design studio at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture co-taught by Larry Doll and the author uncovered the poetics of the habitual—the frequent, the regular and the everyday—in the space of the interior. The studio questioned a set of seemingly dialectical (and biased) set of relationships including “temporary” versus “permanence,” “time” versus “space,” “form” versus “function,” and “interior” versus “exterior.” During the course of the semester, we hoped to discover an architecture, not exclusively founded on the authority of space or permanence, but of the temporary (lasting for a limited time; passing; worldly) that, perhaps, more appropriately embraces our current frenetic and diverse existences.

What is the architecture of a “one-night stay?”

Where lies the stability of “fours days a week on the road?”

With the understanding that design itself is a form of research, the students initially located and mapped examples of a temporary existence, a “timespace”1 condition, including those presented here: a suitcase deployed, the motel in films, and the transformations of a bag. In turn, the findings exposed in their analysis, where tactics of claiming unknown territory, the correlation between occupation and duration or the seaming of activities which emerge, were tested at two scales—the building and the room—with the program of the motel. Interestingly, an American building typology which surfaces at the advent of car culture in 1925, the motel (motor + hotel = motel) is truly an invention of the temporary condition.

Without conventional preconceptions, the students attempted to understand and make an architecture that is formed out of change, multiplicity and ubiquity. For Elpitha, the motel room is a horizontal landscape waiting to be uniquely claimed by each guest. For Jesse, the hotel is a multiplicity of actions that are sized relative to their durations. Each guest selects a set of activities and intervals in order to choose the most suitable room combination. For Sarah, its interior—an infrastructural surface stitching together programs, light, and views, rather than the exterior of the building itself— defines the room. Revealed within the projects is an architecture that is inspired and produced by the everyday2—the placement of one’s possessions, an illicit activity or the mutability of time, as it meters our lives and, potentially, designs our buildings.

P Elpitha Dimitrios Sifantonakis During the motel stay, possessions expand from the suitcase. Placement during this expansion satisfies a territorial tendency to claim space. Mapping this placement reveals a relationship between the things and a consistent elevation of 3-4 ft (approximately table level). This led to an emphasis on height and section in design of the interior. How does change in section facilitate or shape this expansion from the inside of the boundary?

P l a t f orm • 8

Notes 1. Jon May and Nigel Thrift.Timespace: Geographies of Temporarity, 2001.

2. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1988.

by Gerlinde Leiding More than forty years ago I received a present in the form of a cylindrical vessel for holding cigarettes. It is still with me!

Four fingers high, my thumb the measure of the diameter, light “as a feather,” sleek—yet warm to the touch, the container became my worry bead.

This project explores the nature of time and duration within architectural space. The interior is contextualized through film and distributed according to a narrative structure.

Volumes are not determined by the physical requirements of an activity but rather in response to the demands of time.

I became cognizant of the connection between visual impact and tactile experience, as well as the sensual power color can possess.

The bottom of the cylinder bears a discrete silver stamp and the word “Japan.”

Walls, ceiling, and floor were not consistently in a predictable perpendicular relation to each other. Aluminum strips were bent and punched into benches, tables, counters, and light fixtures. Aluminum screens, shelves, and baskets provided “order” for holding coats and hats. A seemingly random arrangement of horizontal rods dangling from the ceiling near the entrance were designated to hold umbrellas. Instant clouds, sometimes dripping clouds with water falling into shallow grooves, criss-crossing the slate floor, which extended through the frameless glass-enclosed vestibule.

Curiosity led to inquiry into this alien culture’s distinctive design sense and with it my affinity for Japan. Soon thereafter, “form follows function” and “less is more” were introduced as principles for “good” design, in particular for architecture and interior architecture. I was taught, that following these “rules” meant creating an expression of refined contemporary appropriateness.

Testimony to this is my little vessel.

How clever of me to guide the water back to where it came from: blurring the line between entry and exit. I was a “cool” designer, whose design decision reflected both rational and technical thinking common to the maker of form and formed space.

Ellen Birkelbach challenged me: “Where is the pulse? We look at the built, but we experience the void.” I had the “less” addressed and was charged with defining the “more.”

Integrity of form, craft, and image together create the basis for a pleasing aesthetic.

As a bag reacts to its contents, expanding and contracting, it becomes a record of daily ritual.

At a very different scale, the motel reacts to temporal use of travelers and their automobiles.

Through the stitching together of program­ matic spaces, wrapping surfaces set up function and orient interior spaces to sources of light and views of downtown Austin. Set beneath a typical overpass, the motel has the flexibility of being produced in numerous locations along this international transportation route.

I have quit smoking. Now the darkness with the magenta outline makes me think, remember, and see MA and KU— in Japanese, “void” and “interval.”

I remember my fourth semester, combined architecture and interior architecture, design studio project: a small town “Theater + Lobby.”

Definite magenta—lacquer— covers the outside with the interior in illusive black. It makes a striking presentation.

Firm looking, my container is made of wood, turned to perfection. The rim, tapered from the inside to the thickness of the material’s limit, is further dematerialized, reduced by the interior darkness to read as a thin magenta line defining a black disc.

Sarah Gamble

Form derived from function plus its image—provocative in and out—establishes the rebuttal to the popular re-phrase “less is a bore.” Only when seeing and feeling—the senses—stir involvement is less more.

Photograph by Charlotte Pickett.

Jesse Hager

The appeal for holding it and turning it rested as much in its visual appearance as in its physical dimensions.

It holds a pack of cigarettes, fits nicely into my hand, and makes offering a smoke an enticing gesture …

Photograph by Charlotte Pickett.

An Ode to Ellen Birkelbach

Between ceiling and floor suspended, quivering gauze banners sub-divided, layered and softened the hard white “shell.” Sprinkled about were hot pink to deep purple silk cushions tempering the aluminum seats. Freestanding lanterns marked gathering spots and invited shadow games.

for the body; and, we look for the “small in the large.” The opposite marks Japanese design aesthetic. Preference is given to the discovery of the “large in the small”—expansion of the mind and mystique. I like comfort, but prefer the latter—it is borderless, it is MA, KU, and KUKAN—the space between heaven and earth.

I considered the relationship between the locale, its purpose, its users, the role time plays; and desired to create a fresh, fluid, tantalizing “feeling.” Theater, I reasoned, is where the imagination replaces reality. Lobby is a space to arrive in, to mingle, to see as well as be seen, and to depart from. The users are spectators, or, for an instant, actors, also time is measured as intervals, and it is as such registered. The “Theater + Lobby” is a timed “in-between” place for a prolonged participation in an illusionary world and to prepare the transition to the material world. If the space between stage and street is conceived as a thematic set, it yields a onetime, fixed impression. If the space is a neutral—no matter how well proportioned and constructed—shell, it will remain “empty,” neither here nor there.

This assignment called on the architect and interior architect to join forces in defining and creating a meaningful environment.

Recognizing that the accommodating—tactile—visual linkage is interchangeable but not separable, reveals that no part is good without the other.

The beauty found in ambiguity is not determined by the “how much,” but by the “how” something is offered. As the saying goes: “too much candy spoils the appetite.” An interior architecture of pomp will soon turn the “AH” (new) to “UH” (obsolete). The essence of beauty in ambiguity can be revealed by light, inclusion or exclusion of reality, material, color choice, and integrity of construction. A decisive whole, composed of interchangeable but inseparable parts, will always be “alive” if presented as a parallel projection instead of a one-point perspective. It is the timeless quality versus the fixed impression that distinguishes interior architecture from interior decoration.

BAU and AUSBAU—architecture and interior architecture stand for the whole, and best served with a twist of ambiguity! Ambiguity, understood as the subtle stimulus that affords more than one meaning to the space/place experience. In the making of interiors, we typically seek containment and comfort

Like the potter’s hands influence the quality of the vessel—the architect/interior architect transmit the poetics of form and space from person to person.

Thank you Ellen Birkelbach for making me weave with pink silk thread.

P

Platform • 9

Wright versus Schindler at the Freeman House

By Jeffrey Chusid

This view of the living room from around 1970 shows a pair of Schindler-designed folding chairs flanking the balcony overlooking Highland Avenue, as well as a pair of his ottomans, his dining table, the Wright dining table cut-down down into a coffee table, a Jawlensky painting in a Schindler-designed frame, and Schindler’s ceiling light fixtures.

The two stools under the dining table are souvenirs of Harriet’s extensive travels, as are most of the other objects in the room.

When Samuel and Harriet

Freeman moved into their new Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in March of 1925, their happiness was tempered. The project had gone two and a half times over budget, and there were 16 liens on the house. They had to spend three years living out of cardboard boxes, with only a few pieces of Wrightdesigned furniture in the living room. Later, Sam Freeman would say that the experience of living in a near-empty house made them understand it better, and made them better clients for the furnishings and alterations they undertook in later years.

But at the time, it is clear that they were wondering whether their scoffing friends had been right, when they laughed at the piles of thousands of concrete tiles being assembled for Sam and Harriet’s new home.

P l a t f orm • 10

The new house leaked; it was damp, drafty and smelled of mildew. Yes, it was also a spectacular work of art. The living room, perched high above Hollywood, with its full-height corner glass windows, has been praised as one of Wright’s most beautiful rooms. But that beauty was marred for the clients by the presence of furniture that the Freemans quickly realized they did not like. All in all, as a friend would later recall, “Sam Freeman wanted to kill Frank Lloyd Wright.”

The pieces Wright designed suffered from two problems.

(See photograph top left, next page.) First, they were not placed appropriately. Second, they were uncomfortable and ill-suited to the taste of the clients. The first problem was due to the many difficulties and compromises that arose during construction of the home. Two high-backed benches were to sit on either side of the living room hearth, form-

ing an inglenook. Two bookcases would flank these. The bookcases were 16 inches shorter than the benches (from left to right), because the benches were to sit inboard of a pair of pilasters.

However, in order for this suite to work, the block border for the living room floor, and the hard-

Freeman House by Frank Lloyd Wright with Lloyd Wright, Hollywood, California, 1924.

Photograph, ca. 1928, courtesy of the University of Southern California.

wood strips that formed most of the flooring, would have to be at the same level. That was to be achieved by using two different sizes of floor joists, with 2x10s in the center carrying the hardwood at the same elevation as the 2x8s supporting the thicker tiles at the border. As the construction of the house descended in chaos and cost overruns, that subtle construction detail was abandoned. The result was that if the benches were fitted against the wall at the hearth, they would have been 2 inches higher on one end than the other. Instead, they abutted the pilasters, resting completely on the oak flooring.

The bookcases now stopped short for no apparent reason; and the benches were too far apart to make a successful area for conversation. In addition, the “church pews” were not appreciated by their owners. Harriet, a dancer and teacher, and the prime force behind the house, much preferred to lie or recline.

Therefore, as soon as they could afford to do so, the Freemans hired former Wright apprentice, and family friend, Rudolph Schindler to design new furnishings for the house.

Schindler is an important part of the story of modern architecture in California. Trained in Austria, he had come to the U.S. to work for Wright. He spent the First World War in the U.S. labeled as an enemy alien, which allowed Wright to use him with little or no pay. Schindler arrived in California to work on Wright’s projects for Aline Barnsdall, including Hollyhock House. His own home, built in 1921 in what is now West Hollywood, would become one of the most important works of early modernism in America. The Schindler-Chace double house, constructed of tilt-up concrete slabs, redwood, celotex, glass and canvas, was not only innovative technologically, but socially as well, since the rooms were designated not by function, but by inhabitant.

The roof held the “baskets” that allowed for “healthy” outdoor sleeping, and oil cloth sheets allowed that even in the rain. At the Schindler house, as at the Freeman House, the lifestyle of the residents was as important a

part of the aesthetics of the environment as was the architecture.

Dancers, philosophers, artists of all types, performed and socialized in the avant-garde settings of the two houses, from Edward Weston to Martha Graham to Xavier Cugat. Dress was bohemian; and sometimes close to non-existent. Traditions, such as Thanksgiving, were re-thought, and new ones developed. But a new type of modern living was being created.

Harriet’s sister, Leah, five years older than Harriet, but the one of her four siblings she was closest to, had married a “naturopath” doctor in 1920 named Philip Lovell. By the time Schindler was designing furniture for the Freemans, he had already built another one of the great early works of modern architecture, the Lovell Beach House, for Leah and Philip, along with a number of other recreational homes and additions. But in 1928, Philip essentially turned away from Schindler, and gave the commission for their newest house to

This Schindler-designed tea cart with rotating shelves uses the tripartite stepped pattern from the original Wright living room trim as its main decorative element. It also uses rubber wheels from a children’s wagon. Many of the Schindler designs for the Freemans included clever mechanical features, often to save space.

Photographs by author.

another Austrian émigré, and former schoolmate of Schindler’s, Richard Neutra. This was made doubly uncomfortable by the fact that Schindler had helped bring Neutra over after the war, and was actually housing the family (including Neutra’s wife, sons, sister-in-law and her husband) at his own home. But while the Lovell Health House was being built, Schindler was designing furniture for the living room and bedrooms at the Freeman House.

Wright-designed furniture for the Freeman House living room included a pair of high benches backed with bookcases. This ensemble lasted only four years before Schindler began his 25 years of furnishings and interventions.

This was actually the beginning of a twenty-five year relationship between Schindler and the Freemans. Both Harriet and Sam adored Schindler, and worked hard to get him work. Twenty friends, family, and neighbors of the Freemans would end up hiring Schindler for built and unbuilt projects, from minor remodelings to completely new homes, and even apartment buildings. This despite, or because of, the fact that Harriet had an affair with Schindler, and that she would later be possessive and hurt when he was no longer interested in her.

This view of the living room looking north shows its appearance shortly after Harriet Freeman’s death in 1985.

(Sam Freeman died in 1981.) The Schindler designed furniture includes his first pieces, the low sliding couch/bed on the left from 1928, and his last designs for the Freeman House, the cantilevered couch from 1953. The painting on the cabinet panel is by Gjura Stojano. Photograph by author.

The Schindler furnishings, and remodels, which included carving two apartments out of the small house, can be seen as both celebratory and hostile towards the original Wright architecture.

Over 25 years, the many different projects included some of each, and many that were both. Especially in the early years, Schindler made an effort to pick up on elements of the Wright design vocabulary, and to respond playfully but respectfully to the grid and character of the 16” square concrete blocks of the house. These were masterpieces of cleverness: with trick storage, clever mechanical parts, and unusual lighting locations.

They were also embellished with gleaming figured gum veneers and the capacity to display works of art by others (something Wright was never particularly willing to do).

But later, Schindler’s willingness to accommodate the Freemans and their desires began to diminish the most important and powerful aspects of the Wright architecture. Walls cut across hallways meant to invite movement towards light and the outdoors. A toilet was placed where

The “garage” apartment (actually located under the garage in the former laundry room) is seen here circa 1953. The table holding the cactus is attached to the block wall.

It, and the built-in shelf and other fixtures, all use the 16” dimension of the original architecture. The large windows were installed by Schindler several years after the apartment was first constructed.

The front door of the main house can be seen through the window.

Photograph by Julius Shulman.

one was supposed to stand and contemplate tree tops. More, accretions of built-ins invaded the pure geometries of the mathematically-rigorous Wright volumes.

In the last few years, the Freeman House has been undergoing a substantial reconstruction project. To date, $1 million has been spent stabilizing the structure and repairing damage from the Northridge earthquake.

The house can be visited, but it is empty of furnishings by either architect, pending reconstruction of the doors and windows, ceiling, and other elements.

No decision has been made about whether to re-install the Schindler furnishings, or go back to the Wright design, or to create a synthesis of the two. That is a fascinating preservation question to be debated for some time to come.

This article is excerpted from Jeffrey Chusid’s book: Modernist Threads: The Life, Death, and Reconstruction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Freeman House, forthcoming in the fall of 2004 from the University of Southern California and Balcony Press. P

Schindler’s drawings often included both sketches torn out of small notepads and hard-line construction drawings. The above drawings are an example of the former.

The 3” x 5” piece of notepaper shows the 1932 apartment fireplace seen in the photograph at left.

Drawings courtesy of the Rudolf Schindler Archive, Architectural Drawings Collection, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Platform • 11

Figure 1.

Inside Berlin

By Lois Weinthal

Can an interior space exist at the street level between the façades of buildings, or is the interior just the space behind the window façade that we see from the street?

The question of where does an interior exist at the urban scale is addressed through a project titled Berlin: A Renovation of Postcards.

This project began in Berlin with a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). It’s aim was to investigate the layers of public/ private and interior/ exterior through postcards; revealing thus the changing cityscape of Berlin, in parallel to its shifting political regimes. The postcard as a snapshot documents a moment and continues to transcend time until it becomes a vintage postcard. As the postcard follows a path from sender to receiver, it finds its way into the mailbox, followed by the interior of a home; thereby conceptually making the interior a container of the exterior.

The role of the postcard offers a reading of the cityscape and its changes over time as seen through its architecture, people, and landscape. As I look at the vintage postcard in the present, I question: how does one negotiP l a t f orm • 12

ate two different times and two scales? First, how does one negotiate two different times—the time the postcard was taken and the present time at which the postcard is being viewed? Second, how does one bridge the smallscale image of the postcards

Figure 2. with that of being in the actual place viewing both the old and new? This investigation seeks to show changes found within the city that begins with an objective photograph and focuses on the details as a clue to such changes. These details include monuments, the clothing on occupants, modes of transportation, and political markers. Most recently, the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the migration of western ideology and capitalism, have changed the cityscape of the

former East Berlin, while retaining buildings from both preand post World War II. As the cityscape offers views to buildings that have been built, renovated, demolished, and re-built, I have to raise the question: “What does interior mean to these images?”

As I look at a postcard from 1912, there are layers in the image that I would like to enter, returning me back to my questions about how to find the interior of these spaces and how to enter into the conceptual space of the postcard (Figure 1). I look at the postcard and see the historic façade and wonder about the view to the interior. The first layer I encounter is initiated by holding a tangible view from another time. In this image, I see an overall view of a place, but I am unable to access the inside of the buildings. The postcard is a window that I can visually enter but never physically occupy. When I flip the card over, I see the writing of the sender who used a fountain pen and wrote in a cursive manner that is hardly legible.

To the right is the address of the receiver, an address that I can look up on the map and find in Berlin. At one time, this postcard went from the sender’s hands, through the postal system, was

delivered to the addressee’s mail box and brought to the inside of the home (Figure 2). I like to imagine that the mailbox is actually more of a threshold between interior and exterior than the windows. The mailbox is used by various sets of hands, those of the post deliverer and the occupant of the home. The mailbox is one of the few attachments to architecture that requires a physical engagement from the public and private realm to enable the transfer of a private object.

This realm becomes a strange threshold of public and private at a very intimate scale. My desire to enter the interior of these postcard places allows me to pass through many scales, whether it be the scale of the city, the search for the postcard picture on a map, or the address of the house to which it was delivered. The connection of interior to exterior allows for subtle thresholds to be acknowledged by tracing the path of the postcard.

ing three-piece suits and women long heavy dresses, as was only proper at this time. The ghosts of these people walk through the site, as I hold the postcard and look out to the same site in December 2003—91 years later.

I show my friend who is visiting me this postcard, and she immediately knows where it is because of the big granite bowl in front of the Altes Museum by Friedrich Schinkel. Everything across the street has changed as a result of shifting political regimes. The original palace would be destroyed in World War II and its remains demolished in 1951 in order for the East German palace to be built in the 1970s. The Berlin Wall would come down in 1989—indirectly leaving the current palace in its present state—vacant. The fate of the current palace is now under debate—whether or not to demolish it and replace with a replica of the original are being considered.

Old postcards are physically dated not only by their sepiacolored image, but also through the people and the clothing they wear. In the postcard image of the original palace, I imagine it being a hot summer day in 1912, where men are seen wear-

The ghosts in the postcards walk through the garden between the old palace and the big granite bowl, eventually returning home and carrying the memory of their day walking through the gardens. The memory of what one brings from the outside to

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

the inside conceptually acts as a threshold. Soon, the exterior becomes part of the interior, even if only as a mental recollection. As the people strolling in front of the palace in the postcard of 1912 return to the interior of their home, the threshold of the interior and exterior is merged as they sit inside—yet, they recall the memory of their perceptions from the day in the gardens. This split between the memory of place and the actual physical location of recalling these memories returns me back to the question of how to exist at one time while trying to enter a postcard from another. The interiors in these postcards contain

an era that is currently outside of one’s personal experience, being the Collective Nostalgia. The postcards link these two types of nostalgia through a search for the history of a place.

Returning to the palace postcard, the debate about whether or not to re-build the original palace reveals the yearning of Collective Nostalgia in architecture and interiors. Interiors, in particular, often succumbed to historic styles as clients yearn for the fashion of a previous era of which they have never experienced. The debate in Berlin about whether or not to demolish the existing palace and replace it with a replica of

former East Berlin dated 1970 (Figures 4, 5, 6, 7). The view shows an apartment building called the “Sporthaus,” with a small bookstore across the street that is adjacent to a bridge. The series of postcards begins with a grid over the image, allowing me to focus towards the interior of the “Sporthaus” and begin the renovation. The grid coordinate system used in organizing maps is re-oriented vertically, as a window over the postcard, to depict the urban fabric through a vertical section rather than a horizontal map. The façade of the building becomes a threshold, allowing me to dissolve parts of it while retaining others, such as the exterior

Figure 5.

Figure 8.

Figure 6.

Figure 7.

Figures: Figure 1. Lustgarten, 1912 and 2003, 2004; collage; 16 x 14 in.

Figure 2. Mapping the Postcard, 2004; collage; 15 x 20 in.

Figure 3. Leipzig Crates, 2004; collage 12 x 14 in.

Figures 4, 5, 6, and 7. Sporthaus 1, 2, 3, 4, 2004; collage; each 8 x 5 in.

Figure 8. Sporthaus Renovation, 2004; collage; 12 x 9 in.

the memory of people and their thoughts, becoming not only the place where one sits, works, eats, bathes, and sleeps, but also a container of their memories throughout the day (Figure 3).

Postcards carry a sense of nostalgia. Arthur Phillips writes about nostalgia in two different ways in his 2003 fictional book Prague.

His character, Mark Payton categorizes nostalgia as being either “Personal Nostalgia”—nostalgia for events within one’s own past, or, “Collective Nostalgia”— nostalgia for eras or styles or places that were outside of one’s personal experience. The use of old postcards in this project bridges these two forms of nostalgia. One can personally experience the places in the present time, which become part of their own past, and therefore, Personal Nostalgia; but the old postcards provide a view into the past from

the original has raised questions about the meaning of architecture and the longing for nostalgic styles. What makes one long for a style in which they were never a part of? Is there safety residing in a familiar style; although, it is not a part of one’s past?

For this project, the postcard acts as a base upon which the image is drawn over, re-organized, and re-constructed to make new views of the city—mediating between the Collective and Personal Nostalgia. The postcard images are enlarged and zoomed in until windows on the exterior become large enough for the interior to be re-designed, thereby dissolving the exterior façade.

The five images on this page show “renovated” postcards stemming from an original postcard image of Schönhauser Allee, an “S-bahn” transit stop in the

signage and the window frame that connects the interior to the city (Figure 8).

Traces of Berlin’s political history are evident in the facades, courtyards and interiors of its architecture. The quiet markings on these buildings are familiar to its occupants; yet for a visitor, these markings are overwhelming. With their sense of history, they reveal war-marked façades and the names of former businesses throughout East Berlin.

As the East continues to be renovated, the process requires mediation between old and new, between the collective and personal nostalgia. Berlin is constantly changing as one can see cranes across the skyline and scaffolding across façades.

Everything is in a state of flux while people live among the process. This project Pwill find an Platform • 13

Ornament is the mediator that keeps the irreducible whole of a work of architecture wedded to the detail without distorting either level of scale.

Ornament plays an important role in mediating our experience of even the broadest of forms.

Patterns are in large part defined and clarified by ornament, and one could argue that they give architectural form much of its power. When approached with neither skeptical disregard nor reactionary nostalgia, careful attention to ornament can help

Figure 2.

See the Forest and the Trees: Ornament and Phenomenology

By Timothy Parker

Whatever else it may be, phenomenology is a method.1 It is often taken to be much more, of course, on the view that returning with Husserl “to the things themselves” gives us at least a glimpse of the way things really are. Architects are especially susceptible to the hints in Heidegger that, if we really look and listen to a place, it will kindly reply, giving us clues about what is suitable to its spirit. And historians who care about artifacts and ideas cannot help but be intrigued by suggestions that the flow of time remains bound to at least certain, singular moments of human expression. But appeals to the genius loci and the Zeitgeist display an inclination towards Gnosticism that threatens to leave us in midair, paradoxically too far removed from “the things themselves” to see as clearly as we ought.

squinting and able to see only the rough aggregate of forms.

Phenome­nology does indeed insist upon the irreducibility of human experience, and with it that of our overall perception of the built environment. But to lose adequate sight of the details is to strip architecture of much of the richness for which it warrants careful and sustained study in the first place.

Yet even if phenomenology is unburdened by any existential import and taken strictly as a method for interpretation of such earthbound things as buildings, there is a problem of scale that tends to obscure the details for the sake of grasping the whole. Phenomenological interpretations of architecture too often result in just the barest of outlines, as if one were Figure 1.

P l a t f orm • 14

achieve the richness that phenomenological interpretations of architecture promise.

The role of the interior is important in this regard, for it is here that fundamental patterns of perception are most concretely fixed in memory. This can be seen in such an implausible example as Diocletian’s Palace at Split (ca. 300-309 CE), where

seventeen centuries of constant inhabitation present the modern scholar with a curious mixture of very well preserved elements in some areas and almost nothing remaining in others. Research on the Palace has understandably focused on documentation, indefinitely forsaking interpretations for want of a fuller picture. But the recent study of its ornament by Sheila McNally, The Architectural Decoration of Diocletian’s Palace: Ornament in Context (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1996), provides enough detail to illustrate not only how ornament forms patterns that reinforce phenomenological interpretations, but also how the interior helps to set such patterns in the mind.

The interpretation outlined here is that the Palace of Diocletian exhibits a layered ordering of spaces through which an entry motif is carried forward in modified form; this motif and this layering suggest an ordered hierarchy of spaces comprising the Peristyle, the western temenos, and the Temple of Jupiter. The importance in this hierarchy of the Temple of Jupiter is in large part signaled by its interior, particularly the ornament of its barrel vault.

The standard view of the Palace regarding formal and spatial hierarchy tends to see the residential quarters and the Peristyle as the places of greatest emphasis. The suggestion that the Temple of Jupiter is also accorded special value relies on considering the multiple routes into the Palace phenomenologically, including the patterns implicit in the ornament throughout. In Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1978), E. Baldwin Smith identified a formal motif, appearing first in Diocletian’s Palace and recurring frequently thereafter, that signals entry. Smith’s city-gate motif, in its most basic formulation, comprises towers flanking a monumental archway with an arcade above. This is evident in the main point of entry, the north gate. It is also implicit phenomenologically in the assembly that makes up the west temenos.

The street from the north gate continues beyond the center of the Palace about a third of the way to the south wall, in the form of a court colonnaded on three sides, the so-called Peristyle. This leads to the south into a vaulted vestibule, and then into the basilican hall in the midst of the residential block.

The block runs the width of the Palace and is two-storied, with a wharf in the center of the lower floor and a full-length arcade along the upper. Thus, roughly half of the Palace to the south of the east-west street is occupied by the residential block; the remaining half is dominated by two temenos areas, set opposite one another across the Peristyle. Facing one another, the Mausoleum occupies the east temenos and the Temple occupies the west temenos. There are also two small buildings of some kind in the west temenos, set symmetrically in front of the Temple just outside the Peristyle.

Patterns of enclosure are evident here that tend to emphasize the relative importance of the west temenos, the argument for which is beyond the scope of this essay.

What is particularly remarkable about this group of buildings in the west temenos, however, is that while the Temple is one of the last Roman temples built and one of the best preserved, the round buildings were only discovered in the 1950s and very little remains of them. Additionally, Figure 1. Diocletian’s Palace at Split, plan. Elements mentioned in the article: the Peristyle, III.A; the west temenos, comprising the recently discovered round buildings, III.E, and the Temple of Jupiter, III.D; the north gate, I.C; the Mausoleum, III.C. Figure 2. Temple of Jupiter, doorway detail.

Figure 3. Temple, coffered stone barrel vault of interior.

Figure 4. North gate; the towers are no longer standing.

Figure 5. Temple, acanthus leaf console at doorway.

according to Joanne Mannell, the configuration of two round buildings in front of a temple is apparently “unprecedented in Roman architecture” (“The monopteroi in the west precinct of Diocletian’s palace at Split,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 8 [1995]: 235).

Despite the minimal remains of the round buildings, their size and placement suggest a parallel first noted by Professor Penelope Davies—they tend to recall the octagonal towers originally flanking each of the gates. This observation can be joined by two others, to suggest the other elements of the city gate motif—an arcade above a monumental arch. The west wall of the Peristyle itself is a straight­ forward arcade, and, viewed from within the Peristyle, the proximity of the arcade would raise it up perceptually, certainly in relation to the Temple at the rear of the temenos. Might the coffered barrel-vault ceiling of the Temple cella constitute an analogue of the monumental arch, thus completing a kind of phenomenological echo of the city-gate motif—towers flanking a monumental archway with an arcade above? Though itself not visible from the Peristyle, the distinctiveness of the cella vault is assumed to warrant an assumption of the knowledge of its (veiled) presence, and so also of some perceptual awareness of the form. This interpretation relies on not only a phenomenological reading of the forms, but also the power of ornament to fix form in memory.

McNally observes that the execution of ornament on the Temple “sometimes shows a delicacy not found elsewhere, combined with at least as much irregularity.” The Temple crown molding is one of the few friezes in the Palace with figures; the Temple doorway displays more ornament than that of the Mausoleum, especially with regard to framing—“three bands, each different, each unique in the Palace” surround the Temple doors. And the anthemion in two of the bands around the Temple doors “achieves its most intense expression of the power of bloom while departing most wildly from description of any actual bloom.” These points not

the doorframe of the Temple on the exterior; both strengthen the exuberance of the varied motifs by setting up a stronger, tighter contrast. A similar strategy is apparent within each elaborated frame; degrees of variegation range widely, yet enough continuity is maintained to function as a frame. This explicit and dynamic interplay between constraint and freedom characterizes the role of ornament throughout the Palace, and it allows for— even encourages—the subtle and careful balance between discrete parts and coherent whole.

Figure 3. only demonstrate the distinctive position given to the Temple, but also illustrate the careful balance between disparate parts and consistent whole.

The interior of the Temple shows this as well, albeit in a heightened and compressed context. According to Mannell, a coffered stone barrel vault over a temple cella is—like the setting with the round buildings—unique in Roman architecture. The distinctiveness of the form is heightened by the way in which its ornament ties it to the temple’s exterior, together increasing the plausibility of the barrel vault being “read” from outside as an analogue

Figure 4.

to a monumental archway and thereby completing the city-gate motif. It must be acknowledged that direct comparisons with triumphal arches do not suggest an exact parallel. McNally writes, “the variety [of coffer motifs], the more elaborate framing, and the irregular execution give the ceiling a total visual effect that is completely unlike that of the arches.” Yet broader formal and iconographic comparisons based upon ornament reveal a group of associations marked by a mixture of playful fecundity with gravity and order, an ornamental attitude made stronger by the link with its exterior counterpart. The elaboration of frames on the coffers parallels the elaboration of

These observations fit nicely with McNally’s general conclusions regarding ornament in the Palace. The building is notable for exhibiting a wide range of ornamental forms and patterns that include the traditional as well as surprises. Heads are frequent; rinceaux rare, but most prominent are anthemion, hollow tongue and overlapping leaf forms. Furthermore, variations in execution are greatest with the most prominent patterns.

It is clear that ornament was considered important for the Palace, if only from the fact that the amount of acanthus-based ornament is unusual, as is the regularity of its use as accents.

Such choices must have been deliberate, and could have been neither casual—considering the amount of work involved—nor the mere result of traditional practice. Together these observations constitute, for McNally, the four main principles that characterize the role of ornament in the Palace: 1) a high degree of variation in execution and amount is present; 2) the variation is consistently widespread, and so is not haphazard but rather planned; 3) irregularities are a matter of “ignoring consistency in favor of profusion and invention;” and 4) an emphasis upon “tight bonding of disparate parts” is evident.

The “tight bonding of disparate parts” effected by ornamental patterns in Diocletian’s Palace at Split serves to strengthen patterns of experience, which in turn suggest more subtle patterns of phenomenological significance. From the distinctive form of the Temple of Jupiter’s interior to connotations of procession and entry that give

the Temple a heightened status within the experiential hierarchy of the Palace, the fine points of ornament signal patterns that may otherwise go unnoticed.

A careful attention to the details of ornament, even in a work from late antiquity that poses archaeological as well as architectural challenges of exegesis, may give phenomenological interpretations precision and clarity they otherwise tend to lack. Though not explicitly concerned with phenomenology and its appropriation by other disciplines, the provocative suggestions made by Oleg Grabar in his 1989 Mellon Lectures, published as The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), offer a view of ornament that emphasizes the interrelationship between human experience and artefacts of human creation. His reflections, which aim to define ornament across all the arts, may provide a fruitful setting in which to develop the ideas presented P here, in order to appropriate the insights of phenomenology as Figure 5.

fully and as richly as possible.

Notes 1. Phenomenology, which insists on a holistic view of human experience, has a rich history of appropriation by other disciplines. Wherever interpretation is an issue, the work of German philosopher Edmund Husserl (18591938) and its progeny offer a philosophical basis from which to approach phenomena of human perception and understanding in a manner that is critical, yet not reductive. One of the most influential of Husserl’s students in this regard has been Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), whose work on dwelling has been absorbed especially into architectural discourse, in both theory and history. Phenomenological interpretations of architecture deserve careful study, for they have produced compelling, but also strangely limited, results.

Platform • 15

The despecialization of objects

By Philippe Carreau and Hubert Pelletier

Tool Series.

Salone Satelllite, Milano, 2003.

Introduction In these post-industrial times, our relationship with the material world is significantly contrived by an overabundance of things. We produce, use, and waste an overwhelming number of unnecessary objects that clutter both our systems of production and our everyday lives. We already know too well the side effects of this gratuitousness, the most spectacular one undoubtedly being the rapid deterioration of our environment. However, the insidiousness of this high level of consumption affects our personal lives more intimately— albeit subtly—making us trivialize and undervalue objects.

Faced with this super­saturation, designers often inappropriately try to perfect things through specialization, by giving objects greater distinctive, expressive, and aesthetic qualities.

As a result, paradoxically this exacerbates the banalizing and anesthetizing process. We believe that we must search for ways in which design might reframe the terms of our relationship with objects. For example, how might we learn to live with less, without making such streamlining feel like deprivation? This project is an experiment on what we P l a t f orm • 16

consider to be a possible answer to this question—the despecialization of objects.

Contextual Framework In a domestic environment, our various needs generally translate into a requirement for numerous objects; each conceived to accommodate a specific function.

This hyper-specialization is often an unnecessary fragmentation of functions. We must find ways to simplify, to generate new socially and ecologically responsible ways of living. From this premise, we derive our starting point and question: in a domestic environment, is it possible to live with less and have all our needs fulfilled, that is, without losing the functions served by many specialized objects?

We believe so. How? By proposing to work on a larger system and take advantage of the position of objects as active parts of a larger whole. Since they are all more or less bound in different functional groups, an intervention vis-à-vis a single object can influence the entire group. We can streamline the system by acting upon its composite parts.

A means of achieving overall reduction is to introduce objects into the system that can func-

tion versitilely and thus, perform more functions. Along this vein, two approaches are possible: despecialization and multifunctionality. We define these two concepts as follow: 1. Despecialization To despecialize an object is to revert its function to a more generic state, so that it no longer answers an ultraspecific need, but instead is capable of satisfying a broader spectrum of needs. For example, a simple kitchen knife has a very basic function: to cut. However, it can also carry out a great number of tasks normally accomplished by other specialized objects in the kitchen: we can crush with the flat side of the blade, pierce with the tip, chop in various ways, etc. Hence, the more an object is specialized, the less versatile it is.

2. Multifunctionality Multifunctionality is subtly different. A multifunctional object combines in a single entity, several different constituting parts, each with its specific function (e.g., the Swiss Army Knife); its grouping endows it with great versatility (see Figure 1).

Litho Chair.

Comfort Objects.

APPROACH From the beginning, in regards to our objective of reduction; despecialization seemed the most appropriate between both approaches. Compared to multifunctionality, simplicity the “basic” character of despecialization makes it possible to obtain a maximum of services via a minimum of means. A despecialization of objects would help in reaching better material output by maximizing the versatility of their use. Moreover, in order to increase the functional performance of objects, we propose to create what might be called “clusters of despecialized functions”; materializing them in a single body, that will promote the elimination of a greater number of objects in a system.

In a domestic environment, objects are organized into functional groups for activities such as sleeping, eating, and relaxing. This organization more or less dictates the architectural framework and spatial setup.

Therefore, to ensure the (continuing) effective functioning of a system, redefining the living space through a despecialization of its constituting parts must be done in a way that respects the existing organization of groups and sub-groups. In this project, we focused on the living room as a functional group. Upon analysing this nexus of objects, we proceeded to split it into two sub-groups: on the one hand, “tool-objects” which fulfill mostly utilitarian functions and on the other hand, more personal, bodily “comfort-objects.”

resources—become harder to justify towards the collectivity.

Sustainable development begs us to find and establish healthier, long-sighted means, with which to navigate the material world.

Figure 1.

We generally use objects according to the functions for which they have been created. The understanding of this use is assured by a code, a semiotic language based on object typology.

This code didactically prescribes specific uses. Since we wanted to avoid this predefinition of use, we had to conceive objects

Figure 2. outside of any recognized conventional type or language. This neutrality favors a definition of the object by the user rather than the opposite; instead of the object imposing its function on the user, the user has the possibility of appropriating it by creatively attributing a usage.

CONCEPTS The Tools The development of Tools proceeded as follows: first, the task was to isolate the primary functions of a living room—such as sitting down, containing, and arranging—in order to bring them back to their elementary formal incarnation, such as planes, containers, and cylinders (see Figure 2). Then, from this basic vocabulary, we were able to recollect formal elements and create new clusters without any predetermined specific functions, but rather by favouring a variety of possible uses (see Figure 3).

Although it was desirable for the user to be incapable of recognizing a type or predefined function in the object, it was nonetheless necessary for its functional potential to be grasped. It is this paradoxical characteristic that was challenging to the materialization step. To obtain the desired result, the object had to remain abstract, while signifying to the user that one can use it as one wishes. Even the paradigmatic notions of top and bottom (normally necessary for our understanding of objects) had to be blurred so that the defining quality of the object could generate its freedom of use. The objects could be rotated in space,

letting the user determine its orientation and use. But if the nature of these objects was to generate ambiguity in order to avoid a referencing to known typologies, the formal language itself had to be clear and without distraction, in order for the user to directly perceive the functional potential of the object.

ible mobile cushion, adaptable to three different positions on the chair in addition to that of being layed flat on the floor. The cushion mediates between the floor and chair such that it joins the two, making it desirable and interesting to sit.

CONCLUSION

These issues constitute for us the main motivation for our research, and this work on the despecialization of objects attempts to point at some possible answers.

Our objects, by the questions they ask the user, provoke both reflection and change in attitudes. Of course, because of the inversion of the user-object relationship proposed here, nothing is possible without the user. It is the user’s curiosity, creativity,

For the Tools series, shaping naturally stems from the conceptual process. The basic vocabulary emerged by dissecting abstract functions of habitation and was transmitted through a recomposing, in order to produce despecialized, elementary, geometric forms. Our objects are not a collection of functions (like the Swiss Army Knife), but are truly autonomous objects embodied in a single monolithic volume.

Since they all came from the same shaping process, we can find in the Tools a cohesion supported by the consistency of details like wall thickness, chamfers at the end of cylinders, fillet radii, etc. However, even if the formal approach creates a strong visual cohesion amongst the objects, each has its own dominant geometric structure, its own specific “personality.”

The “Litho” Chair Although it is not conceived like a Tool, to be rotated in space, the Litho chair is also despecialized. Its geometry suggests a number of possible seating positions, not hierarchized by signs.

This blurring of codes generates the interpretative ambiguity necessary to let users freely determine its use. Moreover, to encourage using the floor as a seat (a naturally non-specialized element of the home), the Litho chair is conceived as a physical continuity of it. The pleated form of the object connotes a topographic deformation, a tectonic uprising, as if a strong force had been applied to a rectangular portion of the ground.

To ensure comfort, however, the object is coupled with a flex-

Figure 3.

This project sets the foundation for an experimental practice of design, one which in the first instance, possesses an autonomous value, but that also nourishes our current, more prosaic work—industrial and interior design. This theoretical reflection is extremely important because we truly believe that with the act of designing comes responsibility. Using matter, energy, and space to produce trifling objects is something that will—with the continual exhaustion of our

and participation in the end, that will reveal (or not) the potential of these objects. Instead of believing in the determination of person by material, we prefer to consider a reversed relationship where the person defines the object and its attendant value.

There lies perhaps the essential intention of our project: to give back some power and responsibility to the individual.

P Platform • 17

Between Painting and Architecture — The Essence of Interior Design

By Robert Michel Charest

The following exploration is a fragment—not quite a synopsis—of research undertaken to flesh-out a philosophically oriented theory of interior design.

A later incarnation of this work is intended to become a treatise on making, meaning, and representation in interior design. For now, the nature of this particular text is somewhat schizophrenic.

It represents on the one hand, a philosophical questioning, a critique even, which by its very nature seeks to perform an exegeses of interior design beyond shifting historical paradigms (i.e., an “untimely” essence). On the other hand, it also tracks said shifting paradigms within an unfolding history, which includes society and culture— our given world (i.e., a historical grounding). The essence referred to here is of a philosophical nature, even if the utterance philosophy has lost much of its potency and philosophizing is seldom remunerated. Nonethe­ less, I believe such an exploration is long overdue and will serve to contextualize interior design—a profession and academic discipline in the midst of re-defining itself. This pursuit is key—at least academically, for now—if interior design is to buttress its stake in the “built environment.”

A reasonable expectation since a solid academic presence stands at the foundation of professional development.

Of philosophy, Alexandre Koyré writes that “[it] makes little progress. It deals with simple things. It deals with being, with knowledge, with man. The questions it asks, moreover, are simple questions—simple and therefore permanently alive.”1 I believe that very slow moving forces occurring at a world scale shape(d) the contemporary condition of interior design. These “world forces” occur at a societal

P l a t f orm • 18

level and are, doubtless, reflected in cultural artifacts. However, from one’s own horizon when looking at artifacts from another, one must be critically aware of the translation taking place. In other words, the nature of cultural sediments is shaped by societal paradigms from the moment at which these are made—as well as by the societal paradigms which frame the one who is engaging the recovered artifact.2 Societal paradigms include, at the very least ontological, political, cultural, moral, and religious habits. Hence, a critical recovery of charged artifacts is paramount for a meaningful interpretation within a field of study such as interior design.

Philosophy and criticism in every imaginable form—from stoicism to deconstructive thinking— have been appropriated by the architecture, painting, sculpture, and literary communities (at times methodologically, but not always) as a means of situating artifacts within a broader culture (ethics, aesthetics, and phenomenology easily come to mind).

However, from an interior’s perspective, critical thinking and philosophy are often overlooked as legitimate because of their misperceived fusion with painting, architecture, and sculpture.

Similarly, in the case of historical research, even the most linear of accounts accommodates the discursive and complex provenances of art. Hence, no one could possibly be led to believe that the modus operandi of an architect, painter or sculptor has remained the same from “before philosophy” to the post-enlightened modern world. Works of art are intrinsically woven in the very fabric of our culture and the craftsman’s relationship with the world has continually shifted through time. Moreover, the significance of art and of works of art has certainly not remained

constant. To Plato, the ontological value of the work of art was considered weak because artists made copies of copies by imitating nature3—itself an approximation of an immutable model not of this world but of the supralunar realm.4 While Christian Iconography, during the Middle Ages, was at times annihilated for blasphemously depicting Divinity, in other instances, “[the object] could be the occasion of miracles not as a relic but as an image; standing beneath it the believer could be healed as the Saint’s shadow fell upon him.”5 In the eighteenth century, German Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel6 sought to recover— through ancient mythology, mysticism and Hermetic symbolism—the “lost” essence of the work of art. Since early modernism, the work of art has been “banished” to an ornamental position within our skeptical society. However, in contradistinction to Platonic mimesis, this is not analogous to a Greek epistemology of the work of art.

Actually, this modern condition is symptomatic of the “death of God” pronounced by Nietzsche.

This drastic up-rooting has left the Western world without a transcendental frame of reference: “that is to say, […] the disappearance of any kind of absolute reference that might coordinate, or close, the system of our knowledge […].”7 Beginning in the fifteenth century, this 400-year “overnight” revolution began with Providential skepticism and the deterioration of the Aristotelian cosmos in the early Renaissance. It culminated in the Enlightenment, shifting endeavors such as art, towards their current “peripheral” and ornamental positions.8 In other words, the relationship—through time—of works like the Hall of Bulls at the Lascaux Caverns, Christ Judging the World (ninth century), Holbein’s French Ambassadors,

Eakin’s The Gross Clinic, and Duchamp’s Grand Verre vary tremendously and cannot be reduced to a taxonomic comparison or positivistic lineage.

Stories of Interior Design Unfortunately, such worldly accounts—albeit Western biased—are seldom mentioned in the history of interior design.

This is actually quite surprising. Of all the fields invested in “building the environment,” interior design is the least of all relieved from the influence of human activity. Unlike other fields whose constructed artifacts benefit, or suffer, from a perceived sense of permanence— either because they are in situ (physically permanent), in museums (ethnologically permanent), or in catalogues (taxonomically permanent)—interior design is first and foremost reliant on the event taking place within its set places. In the case of architecture, it is an event par excellence—“where we play and make up rules as we go along.”9 However, in interior design, the event reaches far beyond the act of making, it actually extends into the “life-cycle” of the set place; the dwelling of the incarnated artifact. It then migrates into the realm of memory, and at times the event imbeds itself into “after the fact” artifacts of representation (such as photography). Hence, the fundamental similarity between interior design and architecture is placedness; the fundamental difference is an undissociable relationship between these places and their social rituals. Simply put, human rituals are at the crux of interior design making, meaning and representation.

If the “actors” and the “audience” of the theatrum mundi are essential to interior design, for obscure reasons, they are often purged from most accounts depicting its history. These accounts are construed in two seemingly distinct ways. In the first lineage, interior design is depicted as having been around since the very beginning of humankind—from prehistoric to post-deconstruction times. Where, the interior designer “in every one of us” has strived to improve their immediate surroundings; from cave dwellings to “Trading

Places” (i.e., the historically flattened account). In the second lineage, interior design suddenly, without warning, emerged in the early twentieth century somewhere during the decorative arts and the modern movement period (i.e., the sprout theory).

Interestingly, both are very modern “histories” which focus on weaving a taxonomic “encyclopedia” of pathological artifacts. In other words, catalogues depicting surfaces and ornamental objects that describe origin, geographic provenance, as well as material qualities. Unfortunately, these wonderful encyclopedias rarely narrate the societal context and cultural events for which the objects prop human rituals and events.

Between Painting and Architecture Imbedded discretely in the threefold of the great arts—architecture, painting, and sculpture—is theatre/set making (scenography). This fourth art is nestled curiously between painting and architecture. Clearly, theater/setmaking is strictly neither the former nor the latter. Though the work is sited—much like architecture—the sense of time, place, and their representation share greater similarities with painting.

In theater/set-making, the notion of event, narrative, and memory are paramount. This “phenomenological” connection resonates back to the Renaissance. In Alberti’s De Pictura, he is teaching the reader, with Costruzione Legittima, how to paint “what he sees.”10 The implications of this run deep, since at that time, sense-perception had little to do with “truth,” superseding Husselrian phenomenological inquiry by centuries. We ought to remind ourselves that in the early fifteenth century “Truth” does not yet reside in the sublunar world and that the senses, associated with human flesh, are treated very suspiciously.11 Hence, such proto-phenomenological revelations allude not to the concordance of the senses with “reality” or truth, but rather to a magical and skewed depiction of it. Not surprisingly, this “surface” treatment of reality is quite prevalent in the arts. In the twentieth century, one need only think of the surrealist and avantgarde explorations, where depth of surface was extensively challenged.12 Moreover, it is needless

to prevaricate about the bush— interior design is on the surface, along with painting, architecture, and sculpture. Engaging degrees of relatively thin depth, our human condition allows us almost exclusively to experience tectonic places and objects as surfaces.

What is particularly interesting about surfaces in interior design is that they address an immediate interface with our constructed world—they are participative by nature.

Theater/set-making is also intrinsically linked to the unfolding of our world. What binds the paradigm of the theatrum mundi to the theatrical realm reaches far beyond a metaphoric expression for the representation on stage of dramatic events analogously occurring in our given world.

Actually, the uncanny similarities between real-world events and their dramatic representations on stage are only part of the story about the connection between both worlds.13 Case in point is the dramatic shift occurring from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century with regards to participation in the public realm.

Until the early nineteenth century “role-playing”14 was at the crux of public life. Thereafter, societal shifts in politics, social semiotics, urban growth, scientific positivism, and industrial anonymity, brutally curbed public interaction. These are, of course, reflected in the subject matter of theatrical representations, but more importantly, in the way theaters are configured, the manner in which actors play, and how the audience participates in the unfolding of dramatic representations.

The theater—seen as either the place of theatrical representation or as the place of public life—and interior design conjure powerful images of the ephemeral. This is true of events at large, but also of interior design tectonic artifacts. If for no other reason than their lack of tangible permanence, very few expect these artifacts to hold a central ontological (or meaningful) position. The ephemeral condition of interior design promptly raises a paramount concern, one of legitimate significance in the sense of iconographic or symbolic meaning when subjected to the passing of time. The poten-

tial longevity of interior design artifacts is relatively weak compared to those of architecture or even painting. Dwelled artifacts in architecture benefit from a double-likelihood of subsistence.

They “remain” through a sturdy physical incarnation (often associated with monumental permanence), but also like those of painting or sculpture, modern architectonic objects stand very well on their own.

Obviously, this could be perceived as the reason “weak thought” is associated with interior design and brings into question its very legitimacy as meaningful work. I would argue that on the contrary, this ephemeral condition is actually its strength. Much like all events, it lives in the collective memory and does not rely as much on pathological artifacts, nor their representation, to Be. Interior design sets places for living occupants and ephemeral acts—not as crystallized or sedimentary remains—to continually be reperformed.

What is more, the ephemeral condition of interior design— like the arts of the three-fold—is compounded by a weak method of auto-communication. Fields involved in “building the environment” are ill-equipped to clearly signify in comparison to those who make use of written or spoken languages. Unlike the opaque “language” of art, written and spoken language benefits from a structure which enables a relatively transparent way of communication. This is problematic in a global modern context that seeks to assign/recover meaning, while suspiciously, purging all that does not express clarity of structure or function.

However, if language is at all an issue in interior design, it is set within the paradigms of mythos and logos; in a slanted way, it bears to mind the lost oral tradition. The Greeks called mythos a “story” told by one not a witness to the event. Logos, on the other hand, referred to first-hand accounts, where the one telling the story was present and accountable. In De Pictura,

Alberti painstakingly describes the costruzione legittima and its crucial relevance to good paintings; however, he also stresses that paintings are “incomplete without the storia, the eloquent poetic narrative.”16 Storia inevitably resonates strongly with the scripts of theatrical representation and especially the recounting of these. Similarly in everyday life, we experience, and most importantly, recount experiences through narrated stories. This recounting takes place in the form of social rituals in which stories are shared with others to describe first or second-hand events. Moreover, for each of us, even the greatest of monumental artifact resides in memory and re-lives when we narrate our visits to it.

Founding moments in the making of our world’s artifacts are traceable to the mythical works of Dedalus,17 of Saints and heroes. As an initial exploration into the question of founding essence, it seems only reasonable that no over-reaching occurs when connecting interior design with theater/set-making.

However, for reasons unclear to me, it is difficult for many to recognize interior design’s loaded, complex, and rich roots.

I believe that it is within this “skewed” reality—the one closest to our human condition—of theater/set-making that interior design finds its founding essence.

The underlying paradigms of theater resonate so strongly with those of interior design that they can no longer be overlooked.

Henceforth, this unconcealed thread represents at once a bridge and a door. Where forthcoming work can connect with parallel research in neighboring fields while, concurrently encouraging the pursuit of significant theoretical forays within interior design.

P

Notes 1. Alexandre Koyré, Descartes After Three

Hundred Years, p.5; see also From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.

2. I am referring here to hermeneutical discourses by Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Gianni Vattimo.

3. Plato, The Republic.

4. Plato, Timaeus, 27d5.

5. Mathew, Byzantine Aesthetics, p. 105; see also Jean Baudrillard, Simulation et Simulacres.

6. See Friedrich Schlegel, Aphorisms; Talk on Mythology; Athenaeum.

7. Ignasi De Sola Morales, Differences, Weak Architecture, p 58.

8. See Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity.

9. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; see also Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, p. 126.

10. See Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective.

11. See Nicholas Cusanus, On Learned Ignorance; The Vision of God. 12. See in particular the work of Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte.

13. See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man; Flesh and Stone.

14. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Chapter 2.

15. I am referring here to structuralism, semiotics, and language in architecture. See Umberto Eco, Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture; also, Peter Eisenman, Architecture and the Problem of the Rhetorical Figure.

16. Alberto Pérez Gómez, Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation, p. 20.

17. See Alberto Pérez-Gómez, The Architect’s Métier.

Interior Design Program Faculty at The University of Texas at Austin Dr. Nancy Kwallek, Gene Edward Mikeska Endowed Professor in Interior Design Director, Interior Design Program Ph.D., Purdue University; M.S., Oregon University; B.S., Kent State University Dr. Kwallek teaches foundation level design classes and advanced design studios. Her research interests include the effects of interior environments on individuals, with concentration on the ambiance of color on office workers.

Carl Matthews Associate Professor M.S. in Interior Design, Pratt Institute; B.S. in Interior Design, Oklahoma State University Professor Matthews is interested in the relationship between design education and practice.

He has award-winning projects in large-scale commercial design and residential projects and has practiced in major firms in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.

His recent research focuses on personality theory and design/ build projects.

Samantha Randall Assistant Professor M.F.A., Cranbrook Academy of Art; B.Arch., The University of Kansas Following a two-year study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Professor Randall will join the faculty in the fall and looks forward to teaching foundation level interiors and upper division studios, as well as developing material and fabrication seminars.

Lois Weinthal Assistant Professor M.Arch., Cranbrook Academy of Art; B.Arch., B.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design Professor Weinthal’s work focuses on the layers that surround the body that contribute to an identity of the occupant.

This work is realized through design projects that include clothing, furniture, and paintings, along with constructions that seek to test the space of interiors. Her research focuses on Platform • 19

“Looking In,” continued from Inside Front Cover Page.

Advancing Theory Practices such as Gensler have made considerable progress in advancing the profession of interior design. Several large, multidisciplinary firms include significant interior design components.

Increasingly, interior designers are integrated with architects, landscape architects, and graphic designers on practice-group teams specializing in health care, hospitality, corporate, and retail design.

Theory lags behind practice in interior design. While the profession is robust, interior design as an academic discipline lacks stature. The papers that guest editor Robert Charest has assembled for this issue of Platform address this gap. Professor Carl Matthews explores the relationship between practice and the academy with his interview of Gensler’s Judy Pesek [B.S., Interior Design ‘78]. He also pursues the theme of relating

research and design in his article with Duncan Case and Caroline Hill. They explore the relationship between personality types and home design to illustrate how research might inform design.

Professor Nichole Wiedemann reports on a studio where students mapped interior spaces. As someone captivated by maps myself, I thought of Kevin Lynch’s cognitive mapping exercises of urban places and pondered how we might create mental maps of the interior spaces where we work and live. Whereas Professor Wiedemann provides a perspective of student exercises from the vantage point of a teacher, Professor Gerlinde Leiding reverses the view. She provides an ode to one of her teachers and the teacher’s lasting influence.

Professor Jeffrey Chusid provides a preview of his forthcoming book about the Freeman House in his article. He analyzes how Rudolph Schindler designed new

furnishings in the Los Angeles house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Samuel and Harriet Freeman in 1924. Such historical explorations help us understand how designed interior spaces evolve and change.

Professor Lois Weinthal takes us inside another culture and also addresses history. She illustrates how old postcards can help us understand places that have disappeared or been radically transformed. Professor Weinthal paints a portrait of a place in Berlin before the two world wars and helps us see the changes that have affected the people who lived there.

Timothy Parker explores the role of interior spaces to the human experience. He notes how interior patterns influence and shape our memories. He advocates that we pay “careful attention to the details of ornament” to better understand “the interrelationship between human experience and artifacts of human creation.”

Friends of Architecture Membership Director’s Circle Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Mark A. Calhoun Winstead Sechrest & Minick Joan and Steve Clark John and Bibiana Dykema Mr. and Mrs. H. Mortimer Favrot Jr. Robert N. Floyd Jay and Ann Hailey Willard Hanzlik Robert G. Ikel George H. Mitchell University Co-Operative Society Mr. and Mrs. William B. Mitchell Judy Pesek Gensler Janis Porter Dale and Susan Rabe Deedie and Rusty Rose John F. Skelton, III, AIA David and Ann Sutherland Jerry Sutton and Mary McCleary Courtney Walker Courtney and Company David Watkins P l a t f orm • 20

Watkins Hamilton Ross Architects Inc. Supporting Members Ms. Janice Abrams Mr. and Mrs. Frank M. Aldridge, III Mr. Alexander Caragonne Mr. Tommy Cowan, FAIA Mr. and Mrs. Larry Good Mr. Kenneth Hughes Mrs. Gay Ratliff Mrs. Emily Summers Organizations Mr. Randy Ackerman Ackerman & Savage LLP Mr. Dan Alexander 3D/International, Inc. The University of Auckland Ms. Debbie Baxter, ASID, IIDA Baxter Design Group Mr. and Mrs. Jim Beckman Beckman Construction Company Mr. Myron Blalock, III

Senterra Corporation Canadian Centre for Architecture Mr. Dick Clark, AIA Dick Clark Architecture Mr. Robert H. Clark Robert Clark & Associates, Inc. Ms. Susie Clark Maharam Mr. Robert Coffee Robert R. Coffee Architect & Associates Mr. Charles W. Croslin Croslin & Associates, Inc. Ms. Mercedes de la Garza Mercedes de La Garza Architect Studio Mr. Rick Hawkins id2 Mr. Gilbert Mathews Lucifer Lighting Company Mr. Mike McCall McCall Design Group Ms. Jana McCann Mr. Clayton Morgan Mr. Lionel Morrison, FAIA

I find Robert Charest’s observation an exciting possibility. His paper and those others he gathered and edited help raise new possibilities for interior design theory, research, and teaching.

A goal for interior design in our School of Architecture is to explore critical areas of scholarship to advance theory which will in turn improve practice.

Philippe Carreau and Hubert Pelletier also explore the meaning of our material world.

They suggest that the way to simplifying our surroundings in this increasingly complex world is through the concept of despeciali­zation, which they define as a way to bring a function of an object back to a more generic state. They illustrate how this can be employed in interior and industrial design.

Notes 1. Richard J. Jackson, “Land Use Presentation” (Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2003). www.cdc.gov/healthyplaces 2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Physical Activity and Good Nutrition” (Atlanta, 2003). http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/aag/ aag_dnpa.htm 3. Ben Rasmussen and William M. Lyons, “Annotated Bibliography on Health and Physical Activity in Trans­ portation Planning” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Volpe National Trans­ portation Systems Center, U.S. Depart­­ ment of Transportation, April 2004).

4. Constance Nestor, “Healing Environment Provides a Competitive Edge,” Oncology News International (Volume 11, Number 10, October 2002).

5. Jackson, “Land Use Presentation.”

Robert Charest addresses the theory issue explicitly in his article. He places interior design between painting and architecture, arguing although related to both, it is also distinct. He also connects interior design to scenography. Theater design and set making is, like interior design, “nestled curiously between painting and architecture,” according to Charest. With a rich theory, Charest believes theater/set making can help interior design disP cover a founding essence.

Left: Caroline Favrot and Jeff Rojas at FOA’s Third Annual Spring Mixer.

Photo by Charlotte Pickett.

Morrison Seifert Murphy Charles Naeve and Pat Brockie Architectural Engineers Collaborative Mr. Larry Olson Mr. Patrick Ousey FAB Architecture Mr. Peter L. Pfeiffer, FAIA Barley and Pfeiffer Architects Ms. Sarah Reilly November Design Group Ms. Fern Santini Abode Ms. Lloyd Scott Scott + Cooner Ms. Cyndy Severson Severson Studios Mr. David Shiflet Shiflet Group Architects Mr. Robert F. Smith Ms. Mary Stanley Mr. Rodney D. Susholtz Individual Members

Ms. Meredith Aughtry Mr. David B. Barrow, AIA Mr. John Beach Mr. Marvin E. Beck, AIA Emeritus Mr. Ken Bentley Ms. Susan Benz, AIA Mr. Edward Blaine Ms. Molly Block Mr. Bill Booziotis, FAIA Ms. Yvonne Bryant Mr. and Mrs. George Cape Ms. Virginia Carmichael Mr. Henry R. Carranco Mr. Chris Carson Ms. Juanita Caskey Mrs. Diane Cheatham Ms. Ann Clark Mr. Sherman Clarke Ms. Judith S. Cohen Mr. Kent Collins Ms. Rebecca Connally, Assoc.

AIA Mr. Larry Connolly, AIA Ms. Jeannette S. Cook Mr. James Coote Ms. Marty Craddock

Platform Contributors Duncan Case is an Associate Professor in the Interior Design program at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. His research has focused on the relationship of environment and behavior with an emphasis on housing and the work place.

Philippe Carreau and Hubert Pelletier are two young designers based and working in Montréal. “We met in 1995 at the School of Industrial Design at Université de Montréal and discovered an intellectual and creative compatibility.”

Their work embodies a broad approach; working on industrial objects, furniture and spaces purposefully avoiding any kind of specialization. Their work was exposed during the Montréal interior design show, at the 2002 biennial of St-Etienne and in the Salone International del Mobile 2003 of Milan.

Mr. and Mrs. Juan Creixell Mr. H. Hobson Crow, III Mr. Richard Davis Ms. Mandy Dealey Ms. Claire Dewar Ms. Danae Durio Diana Mr. and Mrs. David L. Dowler Ms. Suzi Dunn Mr. Don Eckols Neal and Eddie Jones Greg Esser and Andrea Galyean Ms. Caroline Favrot Mr. Ted Flato Ms. Leslie Fossler Mr. Robert W. Garrett Mr. Rick Geyer Mr. David Gill, AIA, MRAIC Mr. Enrique S. Gonzalez Mr. Mark Gonzalez, AIA Ms. Connie Goodrich Mr. Stan Graham Ms. Carolyn Grant Mr. Mike Gray Ms. Elizabeth Greenman Mr. Michael Guarino Mr. Chuck Hagemeier Mr. and Mrs. EG Hamilton Mr. Darwin Harrison Mr. David Harrison Mr. Philip Hendren Ms. Jane U. Henry Mr. Trey Herschap Ms. Catherine Hevrdejs Mr. J. Brantley Hightower Mr. Jeffrey Hill

Robert Michel Charest is a Lecturer in the School of Architecture. He holds a Post Professional Master of Architec­ ture in History and Theory from McGill University, a B.Arch. from Université de Montréal, and an Interior Design degree.

He has taught design, theory, building and drawing in interior design and architecture at Université de Montréal.

Professor Charest has practiced in Montréal and Boston; he is a licensed builder in Québec and a trained carpenter as well.

Jeffrey Chusid is Director of the Historic Preservation Program in the School of Architecture.

From 1985 to 1997, he lived in the Freeman House, first as a tenant of the original client, then as director of the house for the University of Southern California. He was also the project architect for the restoration.

Mr. Tom Hinson Mr. Paul Holden Mr. Nic Holland Mr. John Hustace Mrs. Martha Hyder Mr. Brian Johnson Ms. Grace Johnston Ms. Grace Jones Mr. Grant R. Jones, FASLA Mr. Kevin Keim Ms. Diana Keller Ms. Susanne D. King Mrs. Melinda Koester Poss, AIA Ms. Dorothy Kosinski Dr. Nancy Kwallek Ms. Sita Lakshminarayan Mr. Charles Lawrence, FAIA Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Leahy Mr. Dan Leary Mrs. Martha Leipziger-Pearce Mr. Joseph Loiacono Mr. and Mrs. Jack Luehrs Mr. Graham B. Luhn, FAIA Mrs. Alice A. Lynch Mr. Ron McCoy Mr. Don B. McDonald, AIA Ms. Eleanor H. McKinney Ms. Heather McKinney Mr. Paul C. N. Mellblom, AIA Mr. Max Menefee Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Miller Ms. Ann Maddox Moore Mr. Mark F. Moore Mr. and Mrs. Bob Morris Ms. Caroline Mounger

Caroline Hill is a designer at lauckgroup, a commercial interior design firm with offices in Dallas and Austin. From a personal and academic research perspective, Caroline is interested in design psychology which, by definition, looks for ways to use psychological methods and concepts as tools in the design process.

Gerlinde Leiding, Meadows Professor in Architecture, was professionally educated and practiced both in Germany and the U.S. She has travelled globally and has taught at the School of Architecture since 1968.

Carl Matthews is an Associate Professor in the Interior Design program at the School of Architecture. His practice has focused on large scale corporate projects in New York, Chicago,

Ms. Nan Nelson Mr. Lynn L. Northrup, Jr. Mr. James M. Parkey Mr. Chris Pellegrino Mr. Josh Peterson Ms. Cathy Phillips Ms. Helen Pointer Mr. Boone Powell, FAIA Ms. Jane Cheever Powell Mr. Howard Rachofsky Ms. Ellen Ray Mr. Zeb Rike Ms. Gary Robinson Mr. Ron Roeder Mr. Alan Sadeghpour Ms. Elizabeth Salaiz Ms. Nancy Wilson Scanlan Mr. Dan Shipley, FAIA Mr. Louis H. Skidmore, Jr., AIA Ms. Sandra Bearden Smith Mr. W. Gary Smith Mrs. Sandra E. Snyder Mr. Lawrence W. Speck, FAIA Mr. and Mrs. Nelson H. Spencer Ms. Kathryn Stephens Mr. James Susman, AIA Ms. Susanna Sustare Mr. John Greene Taylor Mr. John Teinert Ms. Helen Thompson Ms. Cynthia Toles Roger Tomalty and Mary Hoadley Ms. Rose T. Trevino

and San Francisco. As an educator, Professor Matthews is most interested in strengthening the relationship between academia and practice.

Timothy Parker is an architect with a graduate degree in philosophy, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in architectural history at the School of Architecture. His research interests include Roman architecture and post-World War II architectural historiography.

influence of politics in the domestic interior in the German Demo­cratic Republic continues with a grant from the Graham Founda­tion for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Elpitha Dimitrios Sifantonakis is pursuing a masters degree in architecture at the School of Architecture. She holds a bachelors of science in architecture from the University of Utah.

Nichole Wiedemann is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture. In her teaching, research and practice, Wiedemann believes that the fundamental elements of architecture—program, site, and material—are places for continual investigation rather than simply givens in the architectural equation. She has maintained an independent practice since 1992 with projects and buildings in Georgia, Florida, Texas and, most recently, Tennessee.

Lois Weinthal is an Assistant Professor in the Interior Design program at the School of Archi­ tec­ture. Her research on the

Special thanks to Natacha Boucher, an interior designer from Montréal for editorial and content input.

Ms. Meggan Weeks Mr. Anthony J. Weisman Ms. Judy Whalen Mr. and Mrs. Ted Whatley Ms. Anne Wheat Mr. Leon Whitney Mr. Jerry L. Wright Mr. Christopher Yurkanan

Mr. Matthew Abrahamson Ms. Claire Eddleman Mr. James Hargreaves Ms. Maria Kilgore Ms. Michelle Modisett Ms. Kate Musselman Ms. Molly Powers

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