GoKawiilPost date: March 29, 2026
What’s an interior? is a question that’s been nagging me on and off for oh almost 50 years. When I recently enquired at the library of the former Tokyo Institute of Technology, a librarian told me they don’t keep copies of master’s theses. Mine had the clunky title of Research Into Interior Design from the Perspective of the Form and Disposition of Objects (物のフォームと配列からみた室内意匠の研究). It’s no less clunky in Japanese. I’ve gone into details elsewhere on this blog but, I tried to logically deduce the number of types of visual relationship a single object could have with a single space.
For example, a white chair in a white room would be a unifying relationship of Colour. A single table in the middle of a square room would a unifying relationship of Position. A single round table anywhere in a circular room would be a unifying relationship of Shape. Anyway, that number turned out to be 16,777,216 but, in the end, I arrived it not through interiors but through the number of ways a building could relate to its physical context in a similar figure-ground kind of way. I’m confident the framework can describe the types of aesthetic relationship that objects have with the spaces around them (for what difference is there really?) but this time I’d like to approach the interior from a different angle.
Inside vs. Outside
As you know, I’ve never understood the 20th century urgency to blur the distinction between inside and outside, although I suspect the degree of fetishization is proportional to the actual impossibility of ever achieving it. In that sense it’s like those other unachievable qualities such as weightlessness or transparency that serve as indicators of wealth by allowing the display of huge amounts of money spent on creating only slightly more convincing representations. Below are three of my favourite projects that let the indoors be the indoors and the outdoors be the outdoors.
Hankone Prince Hotel, Tōgō Murano House for Mr. G, kurosawa kawara-ten Casa Malaparte, Adalberto Libera
None are interiors. They’re more rightly called exteriors because, however pleasant the outdoors, there’s still an awareness of being outside of something and this awareness is part of the pleasure. I venture that the pleasure of being indoors comes from the awareness of being inside of something. It’s an awareness of enclosure. Spaces such as these are what I had in mind in my previous post when I wrote, Why should the boundary between inside and outside be blurred? Is it even a good thing? Isn’t it better to have two different places to be rather than only one that is fully neither? Since we’re unlikely to ever have air curtains up to the task, we’re left with glazing to do the job of letting us look at things outside while letting us stay enclosed. Cruise liner mentality.
This idea of enclosure is important in garden design in many cultures because the very idea of a garden is to isolate some corner of the world and make it a safe and relaxing place to be. The garden below has three different levels of enclosure but is not an interior.
Japanese people may choose to just lie down on the tatami and take a nap but for serious sleeping they’ll take a mat or futon out of the closet and spread it. A space with nothing in it can’t be used for very much so, given an enclosing space, how objects relate to that space seems a logical place to begin. Books on interior design come in two types. The most common taxonomy is a chronology of historical styles and I’ll call Pile, Drew & Plunkett’s History of Inteior Design as one of these, ranging as it does from Chapter 1: Prehistory to Early Civilizations [“Honey, don’t you think that wall needs a painting? Of animals perhaps?”] to Chapter 23: Computers, Conservation and Moral Concerns. Can’t wait. Another is Anne Massey’s Interior Design Since 1900 takes you from Chapter 1: Reforming Victorian Taste to Chapter 10: Transnational Interiors.
An alternate taxonomy is, as far as I know, a minority of one. Graeme Brooker’s The Story of the Interior is divided into three sections, the first of which has the following chapter headings: The Unified and the Autonomous Interior, Enclosures, Atmospheres, Passages, Objects and Technologies.
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