Thinking beyond dualities in public space: the unfolding of urban interiority as a set of interdisciplinary lenses

Abstract

In his reflection on the Inside the City interior educators conference (London, November, 2018), Andrew Stone acknowledged the growing confidence of interior designers in engaging with the city, which poses a natural conduit for the discipline’s inherent interdisciplinarity. Within this provocation, a central position is taken up by the concept of urban interiority. Breaking out of the confines of domestic and private interior space, urban interiority transposes the mobile notion of interiority into an urban context. This expansive understanding holds the potential to blur the boundaries between interior and urban design disciplines, and foster innovative thinking that goes beyond the fixed dualities of public-private or interior–exterior. Furthermore, this article approaches urban interiority as a spatial condition going beyond the classical understanding of interiority as the subjective feelings of our inner life. Hence, we construct a set of lenses as ways of seeing the spatial configurations of interiority in an urban setting: Time (Ephemerality-Adaptation), Movement (Bodies in Space-Accessibility), Transition (Boundary-Permeability). Using the arcades of Brussels as a test situation, the lenses framework offers a non-deterministic analyzing method by proposing different readings of the historical and analytical data collected through research on the material culture of the arcades, and spatial analysis of the sites through personal observations and cartographic layering. The knowledge gained through the implementation of these set of lenses will be a foundation for design principles which address the configuration of fundamental elements of interior public space.