For years, the interior played second fiddle to ‘proper’ architecture, but there are signs a shift is taking place. Stagnant economies, shrinking populations, environmental imperatives, all signal that there is less reason to build, and more reason to make better use of what we have. Digging deeper, we find the interior is a powerful marker of who we are and what we want to be; ‘lifestyle’ in other words. Political ideology, social norms and psychology all get played out on the inside. The interior relates intimately to the society we live in, and it’s up to us to understand this dynamic, to provoke it. Like the old adage ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’, let’s ‘open up’ architecture and take a closer look inside.
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Archis 2012 #3 Per issue € 19.50 (NL, B, D, E, P) Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-Lab … Ansuya Blom Jimenez Lai Shane Krepakevich Inara Nevskaya Philippe Rahm Klara van Duijkeren Vincent Schipper Andrés Jaque Ignacio González Galán Ronald Rietveld Erik Rietveld Petra Blaisse Mark Pimlott Adam Frampton Jonathan D Solomon Clara Wong Simona Rota Ernst van den Hemel Rob Dettingmeijer Agata Jaworska Dirk van den Heuvel Brendan Cormier James Khamsi Ethel Baraona Pohl Anna Puigjaner César Reyes Nájera Hans Venhuizen Jessica Bridger Carrie Smith Vincent van Velsen Lin Ying Tzu Mehruss Jon Ahi Armen Karaoghlanian PLAYBOY ARCHITECTURE INSIDE
Transcript
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Interiors | fall 2012
Archis 2012 #3Per issue € 19.50 (nl, b, d, e, P) Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-lab …
To beyond or not to be
Ansuya blomJimenez laiShane KrepakevichInara nevskayaPhilippe RahmKlara van duijkeren Vincent SchipperAndrés JaqueIgnacio González GalánRonald Rietvelderik RietveldPetra blaisseMark PimlottAdam FramptonJonathan d SolomonClara WongSimona Rotaernst van den HemelRob dettingmeijerAgata Jaworskadirk van den Heuvelbrendan CormierJames Khamsiethel baraona PohlAnna PuigjanerCésar Reyes nájeraHans VenhuizenJessica bridgerCarrie SmithVincent van Velsenlin Ying TzuMehruss Jon AhiArmen Karaoghlanian
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Osaka1–17 September 2012design museum de sign de >
Paris6 – 27 September 2012Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture
Helsinki 12 – 29 September 2012Artek Helsinki
Tokyo21–23 September 2012KUAD · TUAD gaien campus
Brussels5 October – 3 November 2012Faculté d’ArchitectureLa Cambre-Horta (ULB)
Santiago de Chile 17 October – 11 November 2012 Gabriela Mistral Cultural Centre Library
Archizines.Exhibition World TourAutumn 2012
Curated by Elias Redstone
Bratislava5 – 23 November 2012Slovak Technical University
Dublin15 November 2012 – 12 January 2013 Irish Architecture Foundation
The touring exhibition was initiated in collaboration with the Architectural Association, London, and Folch Studio, Barcelona. For more information about the tour and related events visit archizines.com.
Archizines Live: Publishing Provocations at the Venice Architecture Biennale, hosted by Salon Suisse 21 November 2012
A showcase of new architecture magazines, fanzines and journals from over 20 countries around the world.
www.archizines.com
subscribe noWwww.volumeproject.org/subscribe
Volume #13 ambitionArchitect’s ambitions in a landscape of misguided purpose
Volume #9 suburbiaOn opportunities for suburbiaafter the crash
Volume #5 Power 1A photographic essay focusing on the relationship between powerand architecture
Volume #12 al ManakhHistory, culture and architecture of the Gulf region and beyond
Volume #8 chinanew ideas about the futureof the Chinese city
Volume #4 sharewareA portable exhibition of ideasto break through architecture
Volume #11 cities unbuiltArchitectural dimension of destruction – special focus on the Caucasus, Kosovo and lebanon
Volume #7 Power 3On architectural thinking asfoundation of power structures
Volume #3 broadcastOn methods and potentials ofbroadcating architecture
Volume #10 agitationAgitation as vitalizing conditionfor architecture
Volume #6 Power 2Power at the scale of the building
Volume #2 do less!An analysis of the architectural willand how to decide on the right dose
Volume #25 Getting there being thereliving on the Moon
Volume #26 architecture of PeaceHow can we materialize peace?
Volume #27 aginglife beyond the nursing home
Volume #28 internet of thingsWhen things start talking back …
Volume #29 the urban conspiracyThe grey take-over of city and society
Volume #30 Privatize!We are all individuals
Volume #31 Guilty landscapesThe creative use of guilt
Volume #32 centers adriftCenters are on the move: are you in or are you out?
Volume #21 the blockHousing for the billions:mass-produced, custom-made
Volume #17 content ManagementCollecting, organizing and sharing information through architecture
For years, the interior played second fiddle to ‘proper’ architecture, but there are signs a shift is taking place. stagnant economies, shrinking
populations, environmental imperatives, all signal that there is less reason to build, and more reason to make better use of what we have.
Digging deeper, we find the interior is a powerful marker of who we are and what we want to be; ‘lifestyle’ in other words. political ideology,
social norms and psychology all get played out on the inside. the interior relates intimately to the society we live in, and it’s up to us to understand
this dynamic, provoke it. Like the old adage ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’, let’s ‘open up’ architecture and take a closer look inside.
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of interviews and reviews, but also with the right spatial surroundings, the correct setting for such a life. furniture, apartment, and house were all part of a particular profile that the urban man and reader of Playboy would want to identify with. one of the interesting finds is that this was an almost exclusively interior world.
In the early 1970s, the Dutch Goed Wonen merged with an architecture magazine and shifted its attention to the social dimensions of the city. This was not by coincidence as it was the period in which interior space became contested, as expressed by squatting. This movement revolutionized not only received ideas of property and (spatial) rights, it also revolutionized the very notion of living. It didn’t take a Rietveld chair, Pastoe cupboard, or a bruynzeel kitchen – not even a threeroom apartment – to live a decent urban life. The aesthetics of the house and its spatial arrangement were as subject to revolt as ownership, fashion, and looks.
We don’t have to spell out all the events since. The interior became subject to fashion societywide and fully part of consumer logic, aggregating more and more ‘capital’ inside.
on average, westerners spend most of their lives indoors. These internal worlds (home, office, leisure) have become almost transparent and intermingled to a considerable extent, but they still exist and will do so in the near future. We’ve seen inventions like the open kitchen, the loft, the flex office, and more. We’re witnessing a major shift in architecture from
If I say ‘battlefield’, do you think ‘interior’? If I ask: “who shapes society?”, would you answer: “The interior architect”?
less than sixty years ago, the battle for emancipation and class education was fought on private territory: inside the apartment. Today one’s house is supposed to be an expression of one’s individuality, but in those days the interior was subject to ideology and class struggle. During the first phase of the industrial city, newcomers in Western european cities had to be educated to behave like citizens: clean the house, manage waste, mind the children, in short conform to urban social rules. The right to live in a social rental apartment would be the reward for disciplined and confirmative behavior. After the second World War, the focus of attention shifted to how to live a modern life: clean, healthy, and there fore happy, with simple, welldesigned modern pro ducts in spartan, light, efficient spaces. one of Archis’ predecessors was dedicated to this very task. Inspired by socialdemocrat and modernist ideals, monthly magazine Goed Wonen [Good living] showed what a good interior should look like as part of a program of education and emancipation.
on the other side of the world a magazine with a seemingly different focus had a similar goal to educate via the interior. Included in this issue is research on Playboy’s role in creating ‘the bachelor’, a new ‘specimen’ in society at that time. beatriz Colomina’s research shows that Playboy actively promoted and in part even invented this ‘man of the world’. It came with the right products as represented by its advertisers, with the intellectual profile
DomesticationbY ARjen oosTeRmAn
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3constructing new to reusing existing spaces over the last years (again, in the western world, but other regions will follow) due to the economic crisis, but also stimulated by the whole sustainability debate (on average, it’s more sustainable to maintain than to construct).
but despite this history and despite recent developments, we hear little or nothing from architects about the interior as subject for research and design. We hear very little from interior architects in general. Well for those with really good ears, some quarreling over professional boundaries can be over heard. In some countries an interior architect is something other than an interior designer. And the interior designer (who shouldn’t touch construction) is not the same as the interior decorator. All three have their specialty, but apart from makeover TV shows, their status is relatively low, certainly in comparison with architects, urban designers, and urban planners. maybe related to this status issue is a tendency among interior architecture schools to include the ‘urban interior’ in their curriculum. Curiously these departments are predominantly part of art schools, and rarely connect to technical universities, which separates interior architecture from the larger scales.
This move ‘into public space’ could be thought of as defensive or flight forward, it can also be seen as forwardlooking, in the sense that this fusion of public and private is played out in both domains. so instead of moving into new territory and leaving old territory behind, interior architecture could claim and create a pivotal role.
It would certainly be a good thing to include the interior in our thinking about society and its futures. And also to realize that the private interior is just as political as the town square or the internet. Architecture has ‘always’ claimed to do more than accommodate function and program, so now it’s interior architecture’s turn to provide more than comfort in private space; a more inclusive approach would be needed. There is a world to be had in creating arrangements that take flexibility and temporariness serious and start from interaction.
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someone to a higher ground than other people – this simple act establishes a social hierarchy, where the person on the pedestal becomes the spectacle and can no longer be anonymous among the masses. Conversely, stairs can reverse the height relationship by making the lower position the spectacle. This type of engaged performance demands the watched person to heighten their notable at-tributes and diminish the unat trac-tive ones. Windows, on the other hand, can partially frame a person and create a mystery narrative. If a person is only framed around the foot, this reveal leaves many clues to the watcher as to what
kind of shoes, socks, gender, and size the person behind the window is. This can only invite the watcher to curiously imagine the rest of the picture, and project their own fantasies. In doing so, the weight of character plasticity shifts heavier to the watcher than the watched, as the watched may or may not be aware of an external surveillance. The watcher now transforms into a voyeur, or a flâneur, a wanderer partaking in the fragments of the city and its culture.
Three Little Worlds, my installation in the London Architecture Foundation, is ingrained in the above-mentioned thoughts. The relationship between perfor-mances, public/private, framing, exposed domesticity, and character plasticity form the composite core of this exploration. Furthermore, this project wants to con struct a stage for stories – the frames are physical comic book frames that a person can walk into to become a different person. The visitor stepping into the frame will be fully aware of its transparency to the outside, since they saw the frames from the storefront before entering the gallery. The visitor inside the frame completes the piece, as the awareness of surveillance transforms the visitor into a performer. At the same time, the glass barrier and dis-tance erases the immediacy, as the exchange of stares can be gratuitous with little consequence. I lived inside the piece for eighteen days as an experiment to decon-struct privacy and break the typical domestic diagram. In addition, I painted ‘cave paintings’, remembering the plans and sections of buildings that I like and then cartoonishly reenacting them. The windows that frame the three frames also frame the cave-painting mural, with a transformed character swerving between the layers. Initially conceived as a previous working title, Hefner Beuys House, this project also wanted to ask the question: who is the extrovert between Hugh Hefner and Joseph Beuys – who represent two different kinds of perfor-mance artists – when Beuys took himself out of context and staged his life, whereas Hefner merely invited people to his own house?
1.a “I like your apartment.”b “It’s nice, but it’s only big enough for one person – or two people who are very close.”a “You know two people who are very close?”b “When I look in the mirror I only know that I don’t see myself as others see me.”a “Why is that, b?”b “Because I’m looking at my-self the way I want to see myself. I make expressions just for myself, I don’t make expressions other people see me make.”a “I want to look in the mirror and see nothing. People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see? I like that I don’t exist today.”b “Maybe you make better expressions when people stare at you.”a “or maybe I really don’t enjoy being stared at all day, or sitting by the windowsill with strangers glaring or tapping on the glass.”b “Oh, A,” [said impulsively] “You should be an actor! That way you’ll never feel this way. You’ll always be some-one else, and always with better expressions. Imagine that, a grown man running around pretending to be dif-ferent people.”a “sure. but I can’t do unattractive things in public – nose picking, slouch on the couch… I just don’t feel I can be myself here.”b “Isn’t it great to be someone else sometimes?”
B folded her clothes as she packed. Her cleanliness was making me a little jealous.
2.We attempt better facial expressions when we have the awareness of being watched. In private, people generally don’t desire to make better facial expres sions, groom their hair, sit with good posture, or dress well because no one is watching. Being watched transforms a person to become a slightly different character, with an appli ca-tion of man ners, depending on who is watching. Whether the watcher and the watched are love interests, pro-fessional affiliates, or simply strangers, the dynamic will influence the behavior. As well, the position, distance, and location between the watcher and the watched will contribute to the bond. This is to say, the relation-ship between two people can encourage character plasticity, and architecture can directly establish such relationships.
Frames, platforms, stairs, and windows are some of the ways that architecture can directly induce character plasticity. A plat form, for example, can elevate
character plasticitybY jImenez lAI
Jimenez Lai is sitting in a gallery space at the London architecture Foundation drawing furiously.
he is occupying his own installation, Three Little Worlds, living there for
eighteen days as an experiment in performance, framing, exposed
domesticity and, what he calls ‘character plasticity’. at its root the
installation looks at the degree to which an architectural situation affects our behavior. the ‘caveman’ paintings he’s working on start to
fill up the space, while from behind a plate-glass window that separates him from the street, people watch.
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waking up sleeping
sleeping
sleeping
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stumbling home
working
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sex
coke + sex
dancing
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3.Another accompanying facet to Three Little Worlds was the drawing Cartoonish Metropolis, where an urban section through a set of towers reveals an interior with episodic and pluralistic rooms, where no one room is alike. The physical installation Three Little Worlds can also be thought of as an excerpt of the drawing, a frag-mented physical blow up of this reality. This drawing is a counter-argument to Koolhaas’ article Typical Plan; perhaps it is true that towards the end of the twentieth
century, there was a spirit of the times that yearned for the stacking of generic spaces. However, we are now witnessing the aftermath of such a spirit – typical plans encourage typical behaviors. It encourages monoculture: a world where being crazy is rare and striving for the typical life is the expected way. The ongoing mutation of culture, however, needs more crazies. It is through misbehavior that newness can be uncovered, rehearsed and emerge out of sameness.
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1 km 8
Shun Tak Centre & Sheung Wan .............................p. 36IFC & Exchange Square ............................................p. 38Central .........................................................................p. 40Graham Street & Soho ..............................................p. 44Admiralty .....................................................................p. 46Wan Chai.....................................................................p. 50Lockhart Road Municipal Services Building .........p. 52Causeway Bay ...........................................................p. 54Taikoo Shing & Quarry Bay ......................................p. 56Olympic .......................................................................p. 66West Kowloon.............................................................p. 68Tsim Sha Tsui West ....................................................p. 70Tsim Sha Tsui East .....................................................p. 72Hung Hom ...................................................................p. 74Temple Street .............................................................p. 76Mong Kok ....................................................................p. 78Mong Kok East & Bird Street ....................................p. 80
1887 Coastline
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ueStreets in the SkyBy aDaM FraMpton, jonathan D SoloMon, clara wong
While in the eighties Hong Kong took the Asian spotlight for its vibrant film industry, bustling street scenes, and accessible brand of capitalism,
since then attention has drifted to Shanghai, Beijing, and beyond. But worry not, Hong Kong has kept its cool; and still has plenty of curb appeal for the intrepid urban voyager. Take for instance its vast network
of elevated pedestrian streets, footbridges, and escalators. The city has taken three-dimensionality to heart by adding extra layers of
infrastructure to manage what is one of the most congested cities in the world. Lucky for you, there’s a guidebook out there to help you manage
these streets in the sky. In Cities Without Ground, Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon, and Clara Wong take you through the vast interior public world of Hong Kong’s pedestrian street network. With this guide
you can travel for miles and miles without ever touching the ground: an interior world superimposed on the city. In an age of rapid
urbanization and unstable climate, might this be a model for the future?
Dra
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1887 CoastlineApprox. 460 m to Current Coastline
3 stories
...IFC mall is a hub for more ferries from outlying islands, more trains from the airport, and buses from all over the city...
The warning comes early, in the editorial of the very first issue of Playboy magazine with Marilyn Monroe on the cover and the promise of her naked body inside:
“We don’t mind telling you in advance – we plan on spending most of our time inside. We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discus sion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”1
The playboy man is an indoors man. But why “we don’t mind”? Why would they mind? What’s there to mind? The editorial is clear. Other magazines for men “spend all their time outofdoors – thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast flowing streams.” The playboy is a different kind of animal. He is also a hunter but the metropolitan apartment is his natural habitat. He knows everything about it and keeps adjusting it to better catch his prey. In fact, he cares more about the lure than the catch. It is the apartment itself that is the ultimate object of desire. The playboy and his magazine are all about architecture.
This philosophy is embodied in the figure of Hefner himself, who famously almost never left his bed, let alone his house. He literally moved his office to his bed in 1960 when he moved into the Playboy Mansion on 1340 North State Parkway, Chicago, turning it into the epicenter of a global empire and his silk pajamas and dressing gown into his business attire. “I don’t go out of the house at all!!!… I am a contemporary recluse”, he told Tom Wolfe, guessing that the last time he was out had been three and a half months before and that in the last two years he had been out of the house only nine times.2 Fascinated, Wolfe described him as “the tendertympani green heart of an artichoke”.3 Even when Hefner went out, he was not really out, but wrapped in a succession of bubbles, all designed to extend his interior: the specially outfitted vehicles; the Big Bunny jet, a stretched DC9 designed by Ron Dirsmith, the architect of the mansion, with a gourmet kitchen, a dancing floor, a living room/conference space, discotheque, a wet bar, stateoftheart cinemascope projectors, sleeping quarters for sixteen guests, and Hefner’s suite with shower and an elliptical bed covered with Tasmanian opossum skins; the home away from home of the Playboy clubs, starting with the Chicago club in 1960 and rapidly grow ing from seven Playboy clubs in 1963 to seventeen by 1965 and ultimately thirtythree around the world. Playboy is produced in a radical interior and is devoted to the interior, devoted like a lover.
The magazine was filled with interiors from the very first issue. No detail of domestic space is left untouched, from the furniture, lighting, hifi, and dress code, to the mixing of a good martini. The first page of the first issue of the magazine, facing the editorial, shows a cartoon of the proud playboy (a male bunny) at home in his pajamas and bathrobe, standing beside his modern furniture, highlighting the Hardoy Butterfly chair of 1940, which became a signature piece in the playboy interior, often acting as a kind of portable home for the Playmate. Already in the second issue, a feature on naked playmates keeps describing in detail the ‘modern’ design, flooring, and furnish ings of the California ranchstyle house where the models are photographed. “Some say you can judge a man by the way he furnishes his home”, the article sympto matically begins, in what will become a kind of mantra in the mag azine.4 Design is the key to the Playboy lifestyle. Frank Lloyd Wright and Wallace Harrison are praised in the fourth issue for bringing modern design to the house
and the skyscraper. “The exciting simplicity of modern architecture” stimulates Playboy.
The role of design for Playboy becomes even clearer when the next issue provides a guide to the twentyfive steps of a successful conquest. The sequence is mapped in a modern apartment as if the layout and equipment itself choreograph the dance of seduction. As the playboy maneuvers his prey towards the bed, each detail of the apartment assists the movement. Not by chance does the journey begin with the lightweight curves of the butterfly chair and the deep sensuous folds of Eero Saarinen’s 1946 Womb chair, another signature chair of Playboy. It is as if the designers are in the room, helping out. The Playboy apartment is a cocktail of modern design, martinis, and music. Far from simply providing an array of seductive images, Playboy analyzes the architecture of seduction. It offers a kind of user’s manual to the reader. And in the end, the sophisticated playboy needs to know more about modern design than about women.
Everything is seen through the lens of design. Even a spoof on psychoanalysis offers a detailed drawing of the couch and plan of the room. Likewise, the movement of furniture is broken down, as are the precise movements of the martini production. Playboy relentlessly dissects each dimension of the interior.
This dedication to the perfected interior culminates in September 1956 with the Playboy Penthouse – the first Playboy designed apartment lavishly illustrated in an eight page spread, longer than any typical feature, and continued with another six pages in the following issue. Rejecting the convention in which “the overwhelming percentage of homes is furnished by women”,5 the point was to create an interior that is unambiguously masculine, with equipment that stays and women that come and go:
“A man yearns for quarters of his own. More than a place to hang his hat, a man dreams of his own domain, a place that is exclusively his. PLAYBOY has designed, planned and decorated, from the floor up, a penthouse apartment for the urban bachelor.”6
Atmospheric renderings conjure up a continuous landscape of entertainment. Each successive space is described in great detail with all the individual items separately identified, including designer, manufacturer, and price: Knoll cabinets, Eames and Saarinen chairs, Noguchi table, etc. The house is full of the latest electronics and media. A signature feature is the electronic entertainment center with hifi, FM radio, TV, tape recorder, movie and slide projectors. The entire environment can be controlled from the bed which is the epicenter of this idealized interior. The imagined occupant/driver of the space is the reader. In a canny seduction, the magazine describes the most advanced interior architecture design for “a man perhaps very much like you”. The reader, or the reader’s fantasy, is the client and is offered the keys to the apart ment in the first page of the article.
Architecture turned out to be more seductive than the playmates. The penthouse feature was the most popular in the magazine’s history, surpassing even the centerfolds.7 Architecture became the ultimate playmate, the only one allowed to stay. Playboy received hundreds of letters requesting more information on the house, asking for more detailed plans and where to buy the furniture. In response, the magazine started a hugely popular series of features on ‘playboy pads’, including the Weekend Hideaway (1959), the Playboy Town House (1962), the Playboy Patio Terrace (1963), the Playboy Duplex Penthouse (1970), and so on. In each case, the fantasy is the same: the bachelor and his
