Quasi-Materials and the Making of Interior Atmospheres

Main Article Content

Issue Vol. 1 No. 1 (2018)
Published Feb 27, 2018
Section Articles
Article downloads 1191
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7454/in.v1i1.8
Submitted : Feb 18, 2018 | Accepted : Feb 20, 2018

John Stanislav Sadar

Abstract

In The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Reyner Banham presents a parable in which, having come across an amount of wood, a nomadic tribe must decide how to use it to keep warm overnight: build a structure or build a fire (and burn the wood as fuel). The first of these uses the materials directly to create an amenable interior condition using the tangible materiality of geometric construction. The second, however, generates heat from combustion, thereby creating an intangible, graduated, thermal interiority, which one can draw deeper into, by moving closer to the fire, or recede from, by moving away.


Interior architecture has largely been concerned with achieving shelter and creating an interior atmosphere through the dependability and predictability of physical materials. Less often has interior architecture considered the interiority achieved through the temporal contingency of atmospheric quasi-materials (taking a cue from Tonino Griffero’s quasithings), phenomena such as light, sound, temperature, and humidity. While these often strike one as outside of the realm of designers, their effects profoundly colour our experiences of our environments: the smells of street food, the heat of the metro air exhaust, the veil of fog rolling in. A selection of student projects probing quasi-materials in interior architecture reveals their nature and potential for making interior environments. More akin to building a fire than fitting out a shell, these projects question existing tenets of interior architecture, while they enable types of interiority that are fluid, graduated and temporal.

Keywords: atmosphere, materiality, interiority

Article Details

How to Cite
Sadar, J. S. (2018). Quasi-Materials and the Making of Interior Atmospheres. Interiority, 1(1), 49–63. https://doi.org/10.7454/in.v1i1.8

References

Banham, R. (1984). The architecture of the well-tempered environment (2nd ed.). London: Architectural Press.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Binggeli, C. (2016). Building systems for interior designers (3rd ed.). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.

Böhme, G. (1993). Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics. Thesis Eleven, 36(1), 113-126.

Böhme, G. (2006). Atmosphere as the subject matter of architecture. In P. Ursprung (Ed.), Herzog & DeMeuron: Natural History (pp. 398-407). Montréal: Lars Müller Publisher

Griffero, T. (2017). Quasi-things: The paradigm of atmospheres. Albany, NY: State University of New York.

Heschong, L. (1979). Thermal delight in architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Moxon, S. (2012). Sustainability in interior design. London: Laurence King.

Pallasmaa, J. (2006). An architecture of the seven senses. In S. Holl, J. Pallasmaa, & A. Pérez Gómez (Eds.), Questions of perception: Phenomenology of architecture (pp. 27-37). San Francisco, CA: William Stout.

Pallasmaa, J. (2014). Space, place and atmosphere: Peripheral perception in existential experience. In C. Borch (Ed.), Architectural atmospheres: On the experience and politics of architecture (pp. 18-41). Basel: Birkhäuser.

Pilatowicz, G. (1995). Eco-interiors: A guide to environmentally conscious interior design. New York: Wiley.

Rahm, P. (2005). Décosterd & Rahm, Distorsions: Architecture 2000-2005. Orléans: HYX.

Zumthor, P. (2006). Atmospheres: Architectural environments; surrounding objects. Basel: Birkhäuser.