Looking-beyond-Seeing: Imagining the Interior Designs of Oliver Hill

Focussing on the interior designs of the architect Oliver Hill, this talk explores how interiors which are no longer available to us in any physical form can be assessed with validity through their representations in the contemporary press.

During the interwar period in Britain, a variety of journals and magazines – such as The Architectural Review, Ideal Home, Country Life, Vogue and The Studio – rapidly increased the dissemination of well-photographed, seductive images of newly-built architecture and newly-designed interiors. These mediated images remain largely undervalued in the study of the modern interior.

Using an analysis of interactions between the interior-as-space and the interior-as-staged, as observed in the published image, the method of Looking-beyond-Seeing seeks to expand our understanding of the way in which the interior was consumed during the 1920s and 1930s. This approach seeks to offer us an extended view of what contemporary audiences saw, and how they were invited to see and experience those interiors.