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# Manifesto of Interiors: Thinking in the Expanded Media

Javier Fernandez Contreras

► To cite this version:

Javier Fernandez Contreras. Manifesto of Interiors: Thinking in the Expanded Media. HEAD – Publishing, 2021, Manifestes, Julie Enckell, Anthony Masure, 978-2-940510-45-0. halshs-03626065

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Public Domain
Manifestes
1

Javier Fernández Contreras
Manifesto of Interiors:
Thinking in the
Expanded Media
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
# Manifestes
## 1
—HEAD■○
Publishing
*Javier Fernández Contreras*
Manifesto of Interiors:
Thinking in the
Expanded Media
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>
MANIFESTO OF INTERIORS 9

LABORATORIES OF MODERNITY 23

THINKING IN THE EXPANDED MEDIA 55
1
MANIFESTO OF INTERIORS

‘Between words and objects one can create
new relations...’<fnref n="1" />

René Magritte

<footnote n="1">¹ ‘Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.’ René Magritte quoted in Foucault, 1983, p.38</footnote>
When in 1929 René Magritte presented the work *Ceci n'est pas une pipe*, he essentially revealed, apart from a fascination with the seduction of images, the role of art as an intermediary between the world and the observer. Aware that interferences may arise in the representation of things, he articulated a manifesto as evident as it was provocative: images of things are not things themselves, but rather representations, and as such they do not need to respect the same rules.

The reference to Magritte's painting is revealing in the contemporary world, in which contact with architecture is no longer fully the result of direct experience, having been gradually replaced by a 'mediated experience'. The first question that should therefore be asked when speaking of interior design nowadays is: which media construct the relationship between interior spaces and their perception, between physical reality and how it is thought about?

This question addresses, as in the case of Magritte's painting, the format of representation itself. Ultimately, what is the medium (or media) of interior architecture today? The issue is epistemological and affects how the discipline is envisioned.

This diagram means essentially three things:

1) The direct experience of space is a fragment of a larger, complex whole.

2) The articulation between physical and mediated spaces defines contemporary interiors.

3) The internet and online platforms amplify the complexity of this diagram n-fold.
## INTERIOR SPACE

<table><tr><td>Perspective drawing</td><td>Painting</td><td>Theatre</td><td>Conversation</td><td>Exhibition</td></tr><tr><td>Orthographic drawing</td><td>Photography</td><td>Cinema</td><td>Radio</td><td>Installation</td></tr><tr><td>Diagram</td><td>Illustration</td><td>TV</td><td>Music</td><td>Performance</td></tr><tr><td>Model/Mock-up</td><td>Collage</td><td>Cartoon</td><td>Literature</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Software 2/3D - BIM</td><td>Comic</td><td>Video game</td><td>Magazine</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Digital Reality</td><td></td><td>(n) Online</td><td>Publicity</td><td>Direct Experience</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>...</td><td></td><td></td></tr></table>
*Medium* has two plurals, *media* and *mediums*. While there is some liminal area between them, media is mainly used in reference to communications—publishing, advertising, broadcasting, streaming—whereas *medium/s* traditionally refers to the materials, techniques, and technologies associated with particular representations of information and knowledge.

The entanglements of these definitions constitute an epistemological debate in itself, from the prosthetic thinking of Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, envisioning media as 'extensions of men',<fnref n="2" /> to contemporary visions of authors such as Lisa Gitelman, defining them as 'socially realised structures of communication',<fnref n="3" /> to insist upon the relation between technology, cultural context, and popular ontology of representation. To a certain extent, media can be considered a relational term, whereas *medium/s* is structurally linear.

The thinking of interior architecture nowadays is produced through different media and systems of representation. Texts, drawings, photographs, films, and their endless crossovers on online platforms have replaced in many cases the physical experience of space. This matters because contemporary thinking is relational. When envisioning, talking, and reflecting upon space, society does not discriminate between different disciplines. Designers, artists, filmmakers, programmers, or publicists all inform the agency of

<footnote n="2">2 McLuhan, 1964</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Gitelman, 2006, p.7</footnote>
contemporary interiors through multiple formats, temporalities, and intersections.

The origins of this cross-fertilisation, by which different disciplines influence the agency of space design, can be traced back to the Renaissance. Whereas the beginning of modern philosophy is situated in the 17th century with René Descartes, it is clear that the image of the modern world emerges in the era of Italian humanism and the Renaissance. This is relevant because the reasoning that informed this 'modern image' was produced through a new apparatus of systems of spatial representation that were both shaped and developed through multiple transversal associations that blurred their disciplinary borders.

Spanning a timeframe between 1420 and 1590, the Renaissance witnessed the successive discovery of linear perspective in architecture and painting, the institutionalisation of the use of orthographic projections in architectural drawing, the development of models and set designs for theatre, and the transition from inaccurate to 'photographic' painting, i.e., the capacity to capture precisely three-dimensional reality on a flat, two-dimensional surface. The history of each system of representation can be traced back independently, but it is their cross-fertilisation that anticipates—or informs—modern thinking.

Linear perspective was devised by Filippo Brunelleschi between 1415 and 1420 through a series of graphic experiments conducted in Florence,
<caption>[Fig. 1] Villa Almerico (Villa Rotunda)</caption>

from: Andrea Palladio. *I quattro libri dell'architettura* (Book 2, 19), 1570

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>
which culminated in a famed public demonstration in front of the Baptistery comparing the reflection of his one-point perspective drawing on a mirror with the actual building. The full system was later documented by Leon Battista Alberti in his 1435 treatise *Della Pittura*, which prompted nearly every artist in Florence and in Italy to use geometrical perspective in their paintings thereafter, in what is considered one of the major points of inflexion in the history of Western art and spatial thinking.

Orthographic projections—plan, section, elevation—had been used independently for centuries, but their combined use as a standard for architectural representation was progressively institutionalised in the 15th and 16th centuries with the drawings of Leon Battista Alberti and Andrea Palladio, becoming a graphic canon that has dominated architectural conventions for centuries. The radical consequences of this shift for architectural thinking have been discussed by Robin Evans in his seminal book *The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries*, published in 1995. Evans argues that, despite its rejection of tradition and classicism, architecture was the sole discipline that did not question its representation codes in the early 20th century avant-garde, which means spatial representation mechanisms can be read seamlessly from the Renaissance into Modernism: ‘The triumvirate of plan, elevation, and section were not identified as part of the problem and so continued as
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>
working desiderata of the profession. [...] Modern painters attacked perspective vociferously, dubbed it a mere convention, removed evidence of it from their work, and claimed that vision itself was not perspectival. For them the dominant means of representation was an issue, for modern architects apparently not.<fnref n="4" />

The same can be argued for models, whose regular use in various scales came to prominence in the same historic context of 15th-century Italy and reaches into the present, having gained progressive objecthood and disciplinary autonomy in recent decades. As Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen propose in the 2018 book *The Model as Performance*, the Italian Renaissance saw the simultaneous development of the use of models in architecture and theatre, arguing that their articulation was critical in the development of new spatial practices.<fnref n="5" /> These experiments broached issues such as the relationship between the objecthood and representational condition of models, their epistemic autonomy and independence from full-size architecture, and their association with the human body and sense of visual inhabitation, exploring the agency of scale in the construction of space.

Projects such as Andrea Palladio's Teatro Olimpico (1580-85) and Vincenzo Scamozzi's Teatro all'Antica (1588-90)

<footnote n="4">4 Evans, 1995, p.119</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Brejzek and Wallen, 2018</footnote>
[Fig. 3] Dieric Bouts. *The Last Supper*. 1464-1468

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>
created immersive 1:1 models with their set designs. The stage scenography of both schemes is simultaneously representational (directly alluding to urban scenarios), manipulative (deforming them both visually and spatially), and autonomous (becoming both the content and the objective of their own representation). Moreover, both could only be designed combining the mechanisms of orthographic projections with linear perspective and model making, blurring representational and, more importantly, disciplinary boundaries between architectural and scenic design. As Scamozzi’s drawings for the Teatro all’Antica show, the set was drawn not as a separate element or addition but as part of the original architectural plan-section-elevation, attesting to their conceptual unity and creating new practices of space design that had to be, literally, performed.<fnref n="6" /> The Renaissance therefore marks a critical moment in the history of spatial design, when different systems of representation begin to influence each other, and in that it heralds, albeit with fewer means, the contemporary era.

The scope of this epistemological shift goes beyond architecture and can easily be recognised in other coetaneous revolutions affecting other disciplines. As explained by David Hockney in his seminal work *Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters*, first published in 2001, a similar relational way of thinking can be recognised in painting. According to the au-

<footnote n="6">6 *Ibid*.</footnote>
thor, the incorporation of linear perspective into Western painting cannot be separated from the use of optical instruments (curved mirrors, *camera obscura*) to fix the image of things on the flat surface of the canvas.<fnref n="7" /> Aside from the technical achievements this implied, it meant a radical shift in spatial thinking, allowing for the combination of different diachronic elements and spaces on the synchronic surface of the canvas. As Hockney explains in relation to Dieric Bouts' painting *The Last Supper*, the characters and objects assembled in the painting were collaged through separate mirror-lens views.<fnref n="8" /> The capacity to see things and objects projected and decontextualised on a flat surface is, in Hockney's words, 'photographic', or when things move, as in his recreation of Sánchez Cotán's *Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber*, a 'television picture.'<fnref n="9" />

The Renaissance thus represents the first historic period when the quantity and relational use of different systems of representation increase significantly. Space-model, space-theatre, space-painting, the set designs by Palladio and Scamozzi, and the paintings analysed by Hockney share a capacity to produce spaces that are both representational and performative, physical and mediated. They all imply an understanding of space as physically ephemeral and representa-

<footnote n="7">7 Hockney, 2006</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 *Ibid.*, p.86-89</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 *David Hockney: Secret Knowledge*, directed by Randall Wright (BBC Production, 2001), 30'35''</footnote>
tionally durable. In that sense, they anticipate the
modern understanding of interiors as media and
fundamentally multiply the directions in which
representation, as tool and practice, operates.
2
‘There are liquids which, cubic inch for cubic inch, are heavier than many solids, but we are inclined nonetheless to visualize them all as lighter, less “weighty” than everything solid. We associate “lightness” or “weightlessness” with mobility and inconstancy: we know from practice that the lighter we travel the easier and faster we move.

These are reasons to consider “fluidity” or “liquidity” as fitting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways *novel*, phase in the history of modernity.’¹⁰

Zygmunt Bauman
Interior spaces are nowadays laboratories of modernity. Whether through renovation projects, temporary scenography, or emergency setups, interiors have become an endless arena for the exploration of social, environmental, and political agendas that transform the contemporary condition from within.

In the book *Liquid Modernity*, first published in 2000, philosopher Zygmunt Bauman defends the contemporary era as a continuation or late development of early modernity. As opposed to 'postmodern', he suggests the notion of 'liquid' to better epitomise the condition of constant change and displacement within contemporary societies. According to Bauman, modernity has always been dichotomous. On the one hand, it is characterised by an idea and ideal of perfection and order—the image of an improved world as an objective: rational, civilised, and stable in its social, political, and economic organisation. On the other, it is defined by an agenda of radical change to achieve this improved state by melting and destroying old concepts and traditions. The main difference between the first 'solid' phase and the contemporary 'liquid' phase of modernity is in the nature of change itself. Early modernity is predicated on the idea of a final destination, 'solidity which one could trust and rely upon and which would make the world predictable and therefore manageable',¹¹ whereas liquid modernity makes of change and transiency its perpetual state. Later in his career he paralleled this liquid state with what he called
*the tourist syndrome* to refer to ‘the looseness of ties with a place—physical, geographical, social.’<fnref n="12" />

This dichotomous nature is directly related to the evolution of architecture in the last century. In the early 20th century, architectural modernity was significantly associated with the systematisation of order, urban planning, and the territorial expansion of cities, a process that has left its mark on contemporary cities and societies. Parallel to the institutionalisation of modern interiors by means of international exhibitions, new department stores, and mass media, it was urban planning, associated with ideas of order and functionalism, that dominated the agenda of architectural discourse. Today, especially in the West, most buildings and urban environments have already been developed and often have a heritage listing. Hence, the laboratory for architectural experimentation has shifted towards the transformation of interior spaces, both permanent and ephemeral. Whether it is in the exploration of new domesticities, creative industries, or cultural premises, all transformations in contemporary societies are linked to constantly changing interior spaces, while the façades of the buildings remain the same.

In recent decades, the increase in mobility, displacement, and physical instability has coexisted with the rise in heritage preservation, which

<footnote n="11">11 *Ibid*. p.3</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Franklin, 2003, p.207</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>
has significantly affected architectural tectonics, mainly load-bearing structures and façades, a process which has turned the interior into a domain of freedom and experimentation for new architectural agendas. Contemporary interiors are flexible, ephemeral, transient, and easily updated, or ‘liquid’ to use Bauman’s term, whereas exteriors/façades are increasingly regulated, protected, ‘solid’.

This has produced a schism that is articulating, for the first time in the history of the discipline, first the emancipation and subsequently the autonomy of the realm of interior architecture. The schism between inside and outside has established interiors as flexible and deregulated domains, changing much more rapidly according to mutations in contemporary societies. Transformations are associated with constantly changing interiors, such as transient domestic spaces, public spaces in derelict buildings, non-places in transport or commercial facilities, and experimental programs in existing structures. Today, interior architecture is, by definition, a laboratory of late modernity; it is the real place of production of contemporaneity. In these territories, interior architects build contemporary societies through interior spaces: the articulation of scenarios of equality, the reduction of energy consumption, the integration of social minorities, or the respect for sexual, political, and religious diversity are social constructs linked
to the techniques, materials, and iconographies of contemporary interiors.

This schism is also mediated. In ‘The Archaeology of Section’,¹³ Jacques Guillerme and Hélène Vérin trace the origins of the architectural section back to the observation and drawing of ruins in the 16th century, particularly of Roman ruins. As the illustrations of Bramante or Sangallo show, the ruin is the sole architectural type before modernism that allows a simultaneous view of section profile and inside elevation. The capacity to visualise interiors with a certain degree of graphic autonomy might have produced an operative independence in the relationship to their exterior counterparts. No wonder that *façadism*, a practice by which architectural elevations are detached from their corresponding interiors, flourished in the same period, as exemplified by the Palazzo della Ragione in Vicenza, which in 1549 was refronted by Andrea Palladio, who erected a classical façade in front of an earlier medieval market hall.¹⁴

The practice was common across different historical periods and locations, as illustrated by examples as diverse as the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral (a temple with a baroque façade superimposed on a Romanic portico) or the Town Hall of Utrecht (an ensemble of medieval constructions whose façades evolved autonomously from the Renaissance to the 20th century). By the 18th century the autonomy of the façade was commonplace in major urban operations in Europe. This was clear for architect John Wood the Younger,
who designed the Royal Crescent in Bath between
1767 and 1775 as a 150-metre-long façade with free
interiors. The façade was built as a self-standing
masonry wall whose interiors were subsequently
customised by users and inhabitants. Here the el-
vation was the infrastructure to which autono-
mous spaces could be attached, an intellectual
operation that precedes 20th-century architec-
tural utopias such as Megastructures, Japanese
Metabolism, and the urban postulates of post-
war Europe.<fnref n="15" />

It is interesting to note that John Wood be-
longed to a time whose architectural ethos was
largely shaped by the Grand Tour, originally
a trip undertaken by upper-class Englishmen
across Central Europe and Italy whose record
was shaped through drawing and sketching. The
‘image’ of architecture at that time was there-
fore shaped by classic treatises and published
accounts of travellers’ visits to classical monu-
ments and ruins, along with individual sketches
and notebooks that could circulate informally.
Treatises were formal, consistent, and canoni-
cal, whereas private drawings were fragmentary
and dispersed. And yet they institutionalised the
schism of their time, in which each generation of
travelers observed the same ruins but produced
different drawings.

<footnote n="13">13 Guillerme and Vérin, 1989</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Richards, 1994, p.24</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Sánchez García, 2016, p.197-212</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>
How then did interiors become autonomous or
'liquid' to use Bauman's term? This might argua-
bly be related to drawing. In 'The Developed Sur-
face', Robin Evans analyses the graphic method
of representing rooms with the walls folded out as
adjacent surfaces in mid-18th-century Britain. Fa-
vored by Robert Adam—a Grand Tour traveller—
in his commissions, the technique 'became a way
of turning architecture inside-out, so that inter-
nal rather than external elevations were shown.'<fnref n="16" />
The practice became popular in other countries
and some architects even used the drawing as
an intermediate model, such as Pierre-François-
Léonard Fontaine, who added tabs to fasten the
paper pieces and form up dollhouse-like objects.<fnref n="17" />

Panelling, carpets, drapes, built-in furniture,
mobile furniture—these drawings and models
produced a total disengagement of domestic in-
teriors from architectural tectonics, namely the
load-bearing structures, and masonry walls. No
wonder that, in their very autonomy, interiors

became decontextualised and mobile.
The 19th century saw the simultaneous
development of a market for salvaged
domestic interiors and the emergence
of Period Rooms,<fnref n="18" /> a form of museum
display in which works of art of various

<footnote n="16">16 Evans, 1997, p.203</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Moon, 2019</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 For a critical inquiry into the relationship
between Period Rooms and the market for
salvaged architecture interiors in 19th century
Britain and America, see: Harris, 2007.</footnote>
genres, handicrafts, and furniture were exhibit-
ed in domestic-like rooms appointed with origi-
nal finishings, showing an ideal overall picture of
an era. The museography of the room, different to
the room per se, became a medium in itself.

The more interiors were decontextualised,
documented, and preserved in museums, the
more foreign they became to their original do-
main, i.e., architecture. And again, a major medi-
um disruption became critical to the further in-
stitutionalisation of this process. The centrality
of photography, a 19th-century invention, in the
preservation of façades and the schism between
inside and outside remains a critical endeavour in
architectural theory. Façades were exterior, pub-
lic, and photographed, whereas private interiors
remained for decades—before the internet—un-
circulated, unregistered, and *unimaged*. The po-
tential of this tension between private spaces and
visualised interiors was explored by avant-garde
artists and designers long before the digital era.

In 1913 Pablo Picasso sequentially photo-
graphed the work *Construction with Guitar Player*
in his Paris studio in an active process mixing
painting, collage, spatial composition, and pho-
tography in different iterations. In the first image,
a partially painted canvas is combined with a real
guitar in a visual composition that includes the
space of the room, indicating that painting and
collage have been assembled in a larger photo-
graphic representation. In the second and third
images, Picasso cuts the photograph and pastes it
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>[Fig. 6] Pablo Picasso. *Composition with 'Construction with Guitar Player'*. 1913</figcaption></figure>
[Fig. 7] Pablo Picasso. Photographic Composition with 'Construction with Guitar Player'. 1913

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>
onto a white canvas. The profiles of the cropped
fragments produce their own autonomous figure,
which integrates the pictorial (canvas), the photo-
graphic (table and bottle), the collage (guitar),
and finally the space of the room in the same cut
to form a new composition.<fnref n="19" />

The sequence of images favours an oscilla-
tion of perception between the real space of the
room and the virtual domain of the pictorial.
Picasso was one of the first artists to envision ar-
tistic practice as the intersection of a number of
systems of representation such as painting, col-
lage, photography, and spatial design in succes-
sive iterations and manipulations. He not only re-
shaped traditional formats (painting), embraced
contemporary ones (photography), and created
new ones (collage), but more importantly artic-
ulated them in a relational way that anticipated
contemporaneity.

In that sense, Le Corbusier can arguably
be considered the architectural counterpart of
Picasso, as the first modern architect to clearly
understand that architecture had shifted from
being just a physical construct to becoming insep-
arable from its construction as media, as explained
by Beatriz Colomina in *Privacy and Publicity*, one
of the most influential books on architectural
theory since its publication in 1994. Through the
constant editing of photography (elimination of
context, emphasis on architecture as autonomous
object), the inclusion of publicity mechanisms in

<footnote n="19">19 Rojo, 2015, p.278-370</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>
architectural theory (slogans, visual reading of juxtaposed images), and a cinematographic sense of space (ramps and promenades that articulate ‘montaged’ spaces), Le Corbusier used media not to neutrally represent reality, but to fabricate new forms—and formats—of architectural reality. As Colomina argues, ‘In Paris, more precisely with the experience of *L’Esprit nouveau*, he came to understand the press, the printed media, not only as a medium for the cultural diffusion of something previously existing but also as a context of production with its own autonomy.’<fnref n="20" />

This is a radical shift from the pre-modernist format of architectural theory and practice. From Vitruvius in classical antiquity to J.-N.-L. Durand in Neoclassicism, one could argue that architectural theory had focused for centuries on the production—as idea and project—of physical spaces. Not for Le Corbusier. Despite his considerable built oeuvre, he was an architect of images as much as tectonics; probably the first who succeeded in uniting these two categories, using reality to produce images and vice versa. He belonged to a time and ethos where technical innovations were as important as the fabrication of new realities that were performed in the space of representation. Architecture could not thereafter be understood merely as a collection of physical events, it was also to be recognised as a collection of mediated realities.

<footnote n="20">20 Colomina, 1994, p.104</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the progressive institutionalisation of the modern interior was promoted through exhibitions, advertising, and other media, rarely existing in an absolute form. As Penny Sparke explains in the 2008 book, *The Modern Interior*, the transition from Victorian to Modern style led by Le Corbusier and similar protagonists of the Modern Movement (Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charlotte Perriand, Josef Frank, Marcel Breuer, Lilly Reich, Mies van der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames) was only made possible by the implementation of a whole apparatus of complementary means of production and mass media, able to construct an entirely new *lifestyle*, a word scarcely used in the 'official' history of modern architecture, yet critical to understanding it.<fnref n="21" /> Not only were exhibitions, international trade fairs, and commercial catalogues incorporated into the conception of novel spaces, so was cinema. Hollywood films such as *The Kiss* (1929) and *Grand Hotel* (1932), both starring Greta Garbo, wooed mass audiences and designers through their use of stylish, streamlined modern interiors. As Sparke explains, 'Film interiors were hugely influential. A bedroom set in *The Kiss* reap-

<footnote n="21">21 'Model domestic interiors were presented as static images and spaces, complete with puffed-up cushions. Real lives, in that context, were replaced by the modern, mass media-dependent notion of "lifestyles", the idealised versions, that is, of the lives that people actually lead.' Sparke, 2008, p.57</footnote>
peared, for instance, in a bedroom design creat-
ed by John Wellborn Root which was shown at the
*Architect and the Industrial Arts* exhibition held in
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in the
same year the film was released.'<fnref n="22" />

Even though new aesthetics could easily be
imagined in cinematography, both visual and
non-visual aspects such as comfort, energy, and
air conditioning were equally conveyed through
film interiors. This affected not only the aesthetic
construction of the modern interior but also its in-
habitation and comfort through the space of the
screen, in the creation of new lifestyles, as can be
seen in Billy Wilder's *The Seven Year Itch* (1955),
starring Marilyn Monroe as a single tenant who,
in the torrid New York summer, strikes up a friend-
ship with her downstairs neighbor through her in-
terest in his air-conditioned apartment. Widely
recognised as one of the most influential films of
post-war sexual liberation, it was also one of the
first to integrate air conditioning as an object of
desire, both atmospheric and physical, always dis-
displayed at the centre of the living room. The film
epitomises the paradigm shift regarding comfort
in the metropolis, where the centrality of the fire-
place in the domestic interior (winter paradigm:
warm chimney, opaque back wall) is replaced with
that of air conditioning (summer paradigm: cool-
ing equipment, transparent window).

In the first half of the 20th century, cinema
became the domain for the construction not only

<footnote n="22">22 *Ibid*., p.72</footnote>
[Fig. 10] Piet Mondrian.
Compositie in kleur A. 1917

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>
of new lifestyles but also of utopian and dystopian fictions of social realities through the audio-visual. The assembly of space, time, and representation was explored in manifold directions, from the early technical and montage experiments of the Russian pioneers (Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein) to the expressionist scenography of German films (Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene). Probably the most radical examples were those of political propaganda, where the boundaries between reality and fiction were challenged, using fiction to fabricate new realities. A case in point is Nazi Germany's use of detailed architectural scale models that were publicised not only via print media but also via film, blurring distinctions between built reality and dystopian future. Models were used notably in the 1939 Ufa newsreel *Das Wort aus Stein*, being inserted and montaged within real urban scenes in documentary style so that the spectator could not differentiate between the buildings' present and future state; between the reality of power and its representation through media.<fnref n="23" />

For interiors, these experiments implied three simultaneous revolutions:

1. The public/private dichotomy was replaced by that of mediated/non-mediated.

2. Spaces, in their idea, agency, and performance, gradually became hubs articulating physical and virtual domains.

<footnote n="23">23 Brejzek and Wallen, *op. cit.*, p.113</footnote>
3. Fiction, reality, and representation began to mutually inform one another, rendering their borders ambiguous.

The implications of this paradigm shift not only affected the aesthetics of interiors but addressed profound structural and topological transformations beyond the visual and iconographic convergence described by Colomina and Sparke. In this sense, the transfers between the art of the avant-garde and the structure of modern space, especially as codified in the plans of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, are remarkable.

The influence of the Dutch artistic avant-
garde, namely *de Stijl*, in Mies' floor plans has been
cited since the first monographic exhibition of his
work at MoMA in 1947. Curated by Philip Johnson,
who had previously introduced modern archi-
tecture to America through the 1932 exhibition
*The International Style*, the catalogue discussed
the cross-fertilisation between abstract picto-
rial surfaces and tectonic structures: 'Never in
history had architecture been so influenced by
painting. [...] Unlike Expressionism, which per-
tered out in the 1920s, both *de Stijl* and Construc-
tivism were to be assimilated by what has since
become known as "modern architecture".'<fnref n="24" /> For
Mies, this was particularly recognisable in the
period between 1919 and 1925, when he was in-
volved in complementary activities such as archi-
tectural design, exhibition organisation, and the-

<footnote n="24">24 Johnson, 1947, p.21</footnote>
[Fig. 12] Enric Miralles, Eva Prats. 'How to Lay Out a Croissant. Horizontal Equilibrium'. *El Croquis* N. 49/50, 1991, p.240-241

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>
ory writing in the magazine G, which had a strong *de Stijl* influence. Those were experimental years for the architect, when he conceived the visionary schemes that would set the basis of his spatial grammar through projects such as the brick country house, whose built counterpart would be the Barcelona Pavilion, erected in 1929 for the World Expo. In both projects, the break-up of the architectural box and the centripetal distribution of separate walls alludes to the geometric influence of the work of Mondrian, Van Doesburg, and other *de Stijl* members, which permeates the architectural floor plan.

As for Le Corbusier, the structural revolutions introduced by his conceptualisation of the free plan, namely the dissociation of the load-bearing column grid from the plasticity of the partition walls, cannot be separated from his artistic practice, mainly purist painting. Purism was a form of art developed by the architect with artist Amédée Ozenfant in the 1920s, which advocated the use of recurrent voluptuously shaped *object types* (bottles, string instruments, plates), arranged in an orderly fashion in elementary compositions devoid of any detail within the rectangular frame of the canvas. Floating curve against rectangle, figure against background, the identification of these geometric objects with curvilinear room types, mainly to address toilets and ancillary spaces, indicates a direct transfer from painting to architecture,

[Fig. 13] Rem Koolhaas/OMA.
Y2K House. 1998
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>
the evolution of which extends through the archi-
tect's career. When, after breaking from Ozenfant
in 1925, Le Corbusier evolved away from Purism
in favor of other topics such as the *mariage de
contours* (in which a single line draws two profiles
belonging to different figures that overlap and in-
tersect), curves were progressively extended to
structure the entire plan of projects such as the
Ronchamp Chapel or the Carpenter Center.

The potential of incorporating pictorial pat-
terns into architecture was therefore heavily ex-
plored in the early decades of the 20th century by
modern architects, asserting that anything drawn
with geometric precision could structure the plan
and, consequently, space. In a more recent exam-
ple, one can see the evolution of Enric Miralles'
architecture through the same principles. In 1991,
Miralles published with then-collaborator Eva
Prats a seminal article, 'How to Lay out a Crois-
sant', where they explained the mechanisms by
which to draw with exactitude a croissant's irreg-
ular figure in what unexpectedly became a

geometric manifesto.<fnref n="25" /> Many projects designed by Miralles with partner Benedetta Tagliabue in the 1990s can be read as the incorporation of extrinsic geometries into the architectural plan, such as the Parc in Mollet del Vallès, where the geometry of gardens and pavements was literally imported from David Hockney paintings, or the Smart showroom project, in which the ultrasounds

<footnote n="25">25 Miralles and Prats, 1991</footnote>
of Miralles/Tagliabue’s first daughter were used
to formalise the outline of the plan.<fnref n="26" />

A similar reading in volumetric terms can be
recognised in Rem Koolhaas’ project for the con-
cert hall Casa da Musica in Porto, a literal blow-up
of a smaller project by OMA that was never built,
the Y2K house. In 1999, Koolhaas explained the
project in a lecture explicitly called *Transforma-
tions*, referring to the cynicism but also efficiency
of the transfer from one model to another in terms
that, to a certain extent, epitomise the architec-
ture of the end of the 1990s in its operative capac-
ity to disengage form from function, geometry
from volume, and scale from matter: ‘The more
we thought about it and the more we looked—be-
cause at this point the visual becomes the domin-
ant force—the more appealing it became to sim-
ply shift scales and use all the earlier research as
a form of immediacy.’<fnref n="27" />

This does not mean a reductionism of archi-
tectural elements, nor an inverted postmodernism
of symbols applied to the floor plan or the volume,
but rather a scalelessness and relational thinking
in space design that defines contemporaneity.
Similar displacements can be seen historically in
the Greek temple—whose typological origin is a
literal scale-up of small timber-frame structures
to monumentalised stone construction—or in the
inhabited ruin, i.e., the Diocletian Palace, one of
the most significant historic examples of how in-

<footnote n="26">26 Contreras, 2020, p.60-69</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 Koolhaas, 2000, p.112</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>[Fig. 15] Ernest Hébrard. Diocletian Palace in Split, 4th century AD. Reconstruction of original plan. 1912</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>[Fig. 16] Ernest Hébrard. Diocletian Palace in Split, Remains 1912. 1912</figcaption></figure>
teriors become the city. Processes of topological
deformations constructed over centuries from
the scale of the public building into domestic inte-
riors were codified by Aldo Rossi in his influential
book *The Architecture of the City*, first published in
1966. Elaborating on examples of infrastructure
converted into assemblages of history and archi-
tecture, Rossi coins the concept of 'urban arte-
facts' as primary elements whose existence guides
the morphological and cultural evolution of the
city.²⁸ In the case of the Diocletian Palace (origi-
nally a 4th-century Roman fortress), today it
forms the city centre of the old town of Split, in a
long-term, evolutionary displacement from pal-
ace to city, from public interior to urban fabric.
Before the 20th century, these displacements
could be grasped considering architectural tec-
tonics as medium themselves. Architecture, to put
it simply, *always had the form of architecture*.
3
THINKING IN
THE EXPANDED MEDIA

'For, within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium—sculpture—but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium—photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself—might be used.'²⁹

Rosalind Krauss
In the late 1970s, art critic Rosalind Krauss explored in her seminal article, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field,’ the epistemology of sculpture at a time when its very existence seemed to assemble, for the first time in history, a large number of disparate mediums and disciplines, redefining the boundaries of architecture and landscape.<fnref n="30" /> After briefly describing the successive emancipation of sculpture from the podium, its progressive sitelessness, ubiquity, and the diversity of practices of artists such as Mary Miss or Robert Smithson, Krauss rapidly enters into a discourse of affirmation by absences, her interest shifting to the terms *not-landscape* and *not-architecture*. For Krauss, at that time, landscape and architecture were sources of disciplinary stability.

## Not-landscape, not-architecture > sculpture

The article was written before the fields of architecture and landscape had undergone the epistemic transformation of recent decades, themselves becoming as elastic as sculpture itself. Without entering the complexities of the scheme that defines the boundaries between the three

<footnote n="30">30 The impact of such redefinition was explored in 2014 in a series of round-table discussions involving intellectuals and critics in the three disciplines, such as Stan Allen, George Baker, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Beatriz Colomina, Anthony Vidler, and Mary Miss, among others. See: Papapetros and Rose, 2014.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 Krauss, *op.cit.*, p.42</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 Colomina, *op. cit.*, p.14</footnote>
disciplines (the third step of its iteration being arguably the most discussed diagram in the history of art theory), what the article describes is an expanded field that Krauss characterises as belonging to the postmodern ethos.

It is interesting to note that Krauss uses the word medium in the singular and plural—never media—throughout her essay and that she critically associates this with a radical difference from the modern period, which she identifies as ‘the modernist demand for the purity and separateness of the various mediums.’³¹ Her position contrasts with that of Colomina, who in *Privacy and Publicity* literally argues ‘that modern architecture only becomes modern with its engagement with the media.’³² This contrast becomes more relevant if one considers that Colomina writes within the architectural field, a discipline whose very idea has been for centuries embedded into its physical existence, which she contests. Meanwhile, Krauss writes within the arts field during the very process of its disentanglement from the idea of medium.

As a leading intellectual figure, Krauss witnessed—and constructed—the transition in the 1980s from art as a medium-specific domain to the post-medium era, where the relationship between the technical (or material) support of art genres and the cultural conventions within which they operate started to be explored in manifold directions, a shift she associated with postmodernism. Whether our inhabitation of contempo-
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /></figure>
raneity is postmodern, or whether it belongs to
a late state of modernity—‘liquid’ according to
Zygmunt Bauman and other philosophers—is a
debate in itself.<fnref n="33" /> What is clear is that the trans-
versal use of different mediums and media previ-
ously explained in Picasso and Le Corbusier show
expanded fields of operation and practice in art
and architecture that extend through the 20th
century into contemporaneity.

The tension arising from the repetitive use
of the terms ‘medium/s’ by Krauss and ‘media’
by Colomina is the very tension of the episteme
of contemporary architecture. Even though rep-
resentation in its most varied textual and graphic
forms has never been neutral, the multiplicity of
formats and media incorporated in the architec-
tural medium in recent decades represents one
of the most radical epistemological transforma-
tions the discipline of space design has ever seen.
It has fundamentally created a new way of rela-
tional thinking, where spaces are hubs articulat-

ing larger physical and virtual domains.
What we witness is an expansion of the
mechanisms triggered in the beginning
of the last century with the progressive
addition of new systems of representa-
tion that endlessly pollute each other in
infinite combinations. This is radically
important to understanding the condi-
tion of contemporary interiors.

<footnote n="33">33 Bauman, *op. cit.*</footnote>
In the eyes of the bed-holder

New York City, effect of Airbnb host and apartment characteristics on rental price, %

<figure><img src="image_21.png" /></figure>

Source: "The effects of facial attractiveness and trustworthiness in online peer-to-peer markets" by Bastian Jaeger et al., *Journal of Economic Psychology*, 2019

*Assessed by algorithm
†Assessed by Mechanical Turk recruits
It is a new scenario where the discussion about tectonics, material finishes, conditioning, energy consumption, furniture design, colour codes, and aesthetics go hand in hand with information, slo-gans, and dystopias such as:

* 'Airbnb users pay more to stay with an attractive host.'<fnref n="34" />

* '98% of the people depicted in the IKEA catalogue are young. 92% of them are blond.'<fnref n="35" />

Where the first sentence comes from a 2019 news item in *The Economist*, the second is from a 2011 project by architect Andrés Jaque, *IKEA Disobedients*. What this represents is a radical shift in the way societies are being constructed, where human beings become actors who cannot disengage their inhabitation from their performance in space. In the case of IKEA, the research carried out by Jaque refers to fabricated forms of domesticity where fiction is presented as reality. Its catalogue is not a transparent, neutral representation of how to use furniture, but rather an edulcorated construction of society through interiors. As the author claims, 'IKEA delivers societies,' to subsequently add, 'Not all of us are healthy. Not all of us are young. Not all of us are into having children.'<fnref n="36" /> As for

<footnote n="34">34 'Airbnb users pay more to stay with attractive hosts,' *The Economist*, December 30, 2019</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 *IKEA Disobedients* (Madrid 2011; MoMA New York 2012), Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, https://vimeo.com/67141899</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36 *Ibid*.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /></figure>

Where you
make memories
Airbnb, not only must spaces be functional, clean, and likeable, so too must their users. This implies that peer-to-peer marketplaces are spatialised as beauty contests unfolding through interiors. In the survey, conducted in New York City, aspects such as age or gender prove not to be statistically significant, whereas black race or ‘smile intensity’ have, respectively, a negative and positive effect on rental price as a form of digital discrimination.

It is interesting to note that both quotes are dystopian, yet one comes from reality, the other from fiction. This is creating a world of exponential flatness where the images shared and circulated through millions of screens are assembled in a perpetual lack of context, depth, and specificity. The institutionalisation of social media in recent years has exacerbated this flatness. In the book *Instagram and Contemporary Image*, published in 2017, Lev Manovich analyses 16 million Instagram photographs shared in seventeen global cities between 2012 and 2016. After claiming that Instagram is a medium of its own, the author categorises three types of photographs shared by users: *casual, professional, and designed*. Whereas the lines between professional and designed types are sometimes blurry, as both appertain to ‘competitive photography’—competing for likes, shares, and impact—the first type belongs to ordinary users, constructed in an infinite bottom-up process.³⁷

37 Manovich, 2015-2017
<table><thead><tr><th>city</th><th>Body and people</th><th>food and drinks</th><th>clothing and accessories</th><th>nature</th><th>architecture</th><th>furniture</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Tokyo</td><td>19.0</td><td>49.6</td><td>12.7</td><td>18.0</td><td>15.5</td><td>28.9</td></tr><tr><td>São Paulo</td><td>25.8</td><td>11.9</td><td>21.8</td><td>16.5</td><td>12.9</td><td>14.8</td></tr><tr><td>Moscow</td><td>22.0</td><td>8.4</td><td>15.2</td><td>25.0</td><td>21.1</td><td>19.5</td></tr><tr><td>Berlin</td><td>15.3</td><td>12.4</td><td>9.9</td><td>28.4</td><td>39.7</td><td>24.2</td></tr><tr><td>Bangkok</td><td>18</td><td>17.7</td><td>40.3</td><td>12.2</td><td>10.8</td><td>12.6</td></tr></tbody></table>
[Fig. 20] Lev Manovich and Miriam Redi. Computational analysis of subjects of 20,000 Instagram photos shared in Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, São Paulo, and Tokyo from December 5 to 11, 2013

It would be expected that in casual photographs asymmetries arise among different geographies, cultures, and identities, yet in macro figures these asymmetries are percentage- not topic-based. As explained in the chapter, 'The Subjects of Casual Photos,' categories such as 'body and people', 'food and drinks', 'clothing and accessories', 'nature', 'architecture', and 'furniture' repeat across different locations and temporalities. Whereas Tokyo takes up 49.6% of the 'food and drinks' category, in Berlin the largest percentage goes to 'architecture'.<fnref n="38" /> And yet the same categories remain: visually speaking, space is being consumed as food. What this announces is a world with a simultaneous eagerness to explore local specificities and a recurrent inability to grasp them. It is very telling that this condition belongs to what experts call the 'home mode', a term coined by Richard Chalfen in 1987 to refer to a way of communication by which users typically share content—photographs, video footage—of traditional subjects such as birthdays or holidays and 'know the people in the images'.<fnref n="39" />

The Covid crisis has forcefully put into circulation the largest quantity of domestic interiors ever seen. As opposed to theatre sets, cinema decors, or YouTube domestic-like scenes, these are interiors that were never envisioned as fictions. Through their

<footnote n="38">38 *Ibid*, p.64-67</footnote>

<footnote n="39">39 *Ibid*, p.30-40</footnote>
instant reshaping as remote offices, ubiquitous
gyms, assembled party rooms, or ready-made
restaurants, they propose a city of interiors, an end-
less accumulation of rooms that are connected in
the way they are successively performed, switched
on and switched off. This is an understanding of
the urban condition where the dominance of the
plan through navigation tools, the objectualisation
of buildings from bird's-eye views or the exterior-
ity of façades are no longer sufficient to visualise
what we understand by 'city'.

At the start of this essay, Magritte’s quote re-
fers to the capacity of painting to articulate the
relationship between objects and words, things
and thinking, through representation. We inhab-
it a pictorial moment, understanding the pictori-
al as not medium-specific, in the way the surface
of representation, with its endless capacity to
assemble fiction and reality, is fundamentally
reshaping the episteme of space design. Archi-
tecture has a long tradition of obliterating human
presence in its representation. People are not nor-
mally represented in plans or sections, and their
recurrent role in models is to give scale. Examples
of this absence in architectural photography are
countless. History books rarely refer to human be-
havior, not to mention emotions, when describing
interior spaces. But in media that are not specif-
ically architectural, from cinema to commercial
magazines, painting to literature, human beings
are in most cases right at the centre of the image,
the narrative, or the frame. Objects and spaces
surround them, they do not displace them. *Thinking in the Expanded Media*, in this sense, means a capacity to develop a holistic understanding of interiors in all its mediated versions.

This is not a teleology of media as an end in itself, nor a substitution of space's physicality with the non-physical, but rather a new logic of articulation; an expanded playground where disciplinary challenges are addressed. This means understanding that contemporary interiors simultaneously belong to different places and temporalities, whether physical or virtual, close or distant. And envisioning a new reality that bypasses traditional distinctions such as public/private, past/present, tangible/mediated, or autonomous/iterated, legitimising the agency of space beyond physicality and reasserting the role of interior architecture in the construction of contemporaneity.

*Manifest of Interiors* should not be seen as a closed statement but rather as an open hypothesis from which to move forward. The examples discussed are operative platforms for developing new glossaries that will be circulated as samples, fragments, and tools for the discipline of interiors. Since the end of the 19th century and remarkably into the 21st century, we have seen a hyperbolic acceleration in the amount and diversity of media, with the economic and societal implications this has had in terms of externalisation of privacy and mediatisation of all aspects of life, which have significantly disrupted the domain of interiors as episteme and practice. What we are witnessing
today is not just an array of space types, it is an
endless hybridisation of typologies through vari-
ous media. There is a continuous increase in the
number of design practices dealing with the pro-
duction of space, and the absence of clear bound-
aries between them turns interior architecture
into a relational and multidimensional practice by
definition. The future is interiors.
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /></figure>
## Manifest of Interiors

Brejzek, Thea, and Wallen, Lawrence, *The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture* (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018)

*David Hockney: Secret Knowledge*, directed by Randall Wright (BBC Production, 2001)

Evans, Robin, *The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries* (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995)

Foucault, Michel, *This is not a Pipe* [1973] (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983)

Gitelman, Lisa, *Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture* (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006)

Hockney, David, *Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters* [2001] (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006)

McLuhan, Marshall, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964)

## Laboratories of Modernity

Bauman, Zygmunt, *Liquid Modernity* (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000)

Colomina, Beatriz, *Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media* (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994)

Contreras, Javier F., *The Miralles Projection: Thinking and Representation in the Architecture of Enric Miralles* (New York: Applied Research + Design Publishing, 2020)

Evans, Robin, 'The Developed Surface' in *Translations from Drawing to Building* (London: Architectural Association Publications, 1997), p.195-232

Franklin, Adrian. *The tourist syndrome: An interview with Zygmunt Bauman. Tourist studies* vol. 3.2 (2003), p.205-217

Guillerme, Jacques, and Vérin, Hélène, 'The Archaeology of Section' in *Perspecta* Vol.25 (1989), p.226-257

Harris, John. *Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)

Johnson, Philip C., *Mies van der Rohe* (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1947)

Koolhaas, Rem, 'Transformations' in *A+U OMA Special Issue*, May 2000, p.106-115

Miralles, Enric, and Prats, Eva, 'How to Lay Out a
Croissant. Horizontal
Equilibrium' in *El Croquis*,
nº. 49/50 (Summer 1991),
p.240-241

Moon, Iris, 'Hide-and-seek' in *Drawing Matter*, November 2019, [https://www.drawing-matter.org/sets/drawing-week/hide-and-seek/]

Richards, Jonathan, *Facadism* (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)

Rojo, Luis, 'La realidad en fragmentos [conflictos y palimpsestos]' in *Le Corbusier y el surrealismo: Paris 1920-1930* (Buenos Aires: Diseño, 2015), p.278-370

Rossi, Aldo, *The Architecture of the City* [1966] (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002)

Sánchez García, José María, *El caso Bath* (PhD dissertation, ETSAM, 2016), http://oa.upm.es/43854/1/JOSE_MARIA_SANCHEZ_GARCIA_1.pdf

Sparke, Penny, *The Modern Interior* (London: Reaktion Books, 2008)

Thinking in the Expanded Media

'Airbnb users pay more to stay with attractive hosts' in *The Economist*, December 30, 2019, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/

12/30/airbnb-users-pay-more-to-stay-with-attractive-hosts

*IKEA Disobedients* (Madrid 2011; MoMA New York 2012), Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, https://vimeo.com/67141899

Krauss, Rosalind, 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' in *October*, Vol.8. (Spring 1979), p.30-44

Manovich, Lev, *Instagram and Contemporary Image* (self-pub., 2015-2017) [http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image]

Papapetros, Spyros, and Rose, Julian, (eds.), *Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture* (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014)
HEAD – Publishing, 2021

Texts published under free
license CC BY-SA

Title: *Manifest of Interiors:*
*Thinking in the Expanded*
*Media*

Author: Javier Fernández
Contreras

Manifestes collection edited
by Julie Enckell Julliard and
Anthony Masure

Editorial coordinator:
Sylvain Menétrey

Proofreading: Stephanie O'Dea

Manifestes collection designed
by Dimitri Broquard

Fonts: ABC Whyte (Dinamo,
2019), Lyon Text (Commercial
Type, 2009)

Printed by Artgraphic Cavin SA

ISBN: 978-2-940510-45-0

Legal deposit: March 2021

—HEAD■
Publishing
[Fig. 1]: The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Open
Access. Accession Number:
41.100.126-(2.19)

[Fig. 2]: Photo: Lawrence
Wallen, 2015

[Fig. 3]: M Leuven, www.artinflanders.be, photo Hugo Maertens

[Fig. 4]: Attributed to Bramante, from 'The Archaeology of Section' by Jacques Guillerme, Hélène Vérin, and Stephen Sartarelli, in Perspecta, Vol. 25 (1989), p. 226-257, reprinted courtesy of The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta

[Fig. 5]: Courtesy of
Drawing Matter

[Fig. 6]: © Succession Picasso / 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich pour les œuvres de PICASSO PABLO

[Fig. 7]: © Succession Picasso / 2020, ProLitteris, Zurich pour les œuvres de PICASSO PABLO

[Fig. 8]: *The Seven Year Itch*, Fair Use

[Fig. 9]: Interfoto / Alamy
Stock Photo,
Image ID: BR62MH

[Fig. 10]: Collection Kröller-
Müller Museum, Otterlo,
The Netherlands

[Fig. 11]: Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect. Catalogue number MMA1811. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2020. Digital image Mies van der Rohe/Gift of the Arch./MoMA/Scala

[Fig. 12]: Fundació Enric Miralles, Barcelona

[Fig. 13]: Image courtesy OMA

[Fig. 14]: Image courtesy OMA

[Fig. 15]: Public Domain

[Fig. 16]: Public Domain

[Fig. 17]: Krauss, Rosalind E., *The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths*, figure, p.283, © 1985 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press

[Fig. 18]: © The Economist Group Limited, London (Dec 30, 2019)

[Fig. 19]: Inter IKEA Systems BV

[Fig. 20]: Lev Manovich.
Creative Commons
<figure><img src="image_24.png" /></figure>
**Javier Fernández Contreras** (Dipl. ETSAM 2006, PhD 2013) is an architect, critic and the dean of the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève. His work explores the relationship between architecture, representation and media, with a specific focus on the role of interiors in the construction of contemporaneity. He is the author of the books *Fragmentos de Planta y Espacio* (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2018) and *The Miralles Projection* (Applied Research and Design, 2020). His critical essays have been published in different specialised books and journals, including *Massilia Annuaire des Études Corbuséennes*, Marie-José Van Hee Architecten, *Perspectives in Metropolitan Research*, 306090, *Drawing Matter*, *RA Revista de Arquitectura*.
<figure><img src="image_25.png" /></figure>
The Manifestes Collection

A manifesto is a written, public declaration by means of which a person or group sets out a programme of action or a position.

HEAD – Publishing’s Manifestes collection showcases opinions, thoughts and actions developed by figures from the worlds of art and design in response to contemporary issues.

HEAD – Publishing is an editorial structure set up in 2020 by Dimitri Broquard, Julie Enckell Julliard and Anthony Masure, and is attached to the Haute école d'art et de design de Genève (HEAD – Genève).
Interior Architecture today operates at the intersection between physical and mediated spaces, such as those of mass communications, digital platforms or visual arts. Considering any form of representation as potentially architectural, from writing to photography, drawing to cinema, Javier Fernández Contreras traces the origins of this process of hybridisation between space and media back to the Renaissance and addresses the role of interiors as an experimental laboratory of late modernity. Combining historic scholarship with bold hypotheses, his essay explores contemporary interiors as platforms of ‘expanded media,’ examining their belonging to different places and temporalities, whether physical or virtual, close or distant, ultimately reasserting the role of interior architecture in the construction of contemporaneity.

This book is also available in a range of open-access digital formats at www head-geneve ch