Looking-beyond-Seeing: Assessing the interwar interior as mediated

In his article for the magazine Country Life on the houses of the designer Oliver Hill (1887-1968) the architectural historian John Cornforth suggested that it was only through the experience of Hill’s domestic settings that it would be possible to get an understanding of his approach to interior design. Cornforth emphasised that photography can never convey its strong imaginative quality, the combination of stylishness and spirituality, or the eccentricity and wit. Although the primacy of the immediate experience cannot be ignored it should not be seen as the only truthful way to gain a valid understanding of the experience of the interior, as this paper will show.

Taking the Interwar interior as mediated through photography, this paper seeks to move beyond the image of the interior that is understood as a two-dimensional representation and move towards Charles Rice’s conception of the doubled interior, which treats the interior as both an image and a spatial condition. Examining images of interiors (such as those by Hill), as presented through the interwar press, this paper seeks to approach the photograph as both performative and representational, allowing the image to be treated as a valve between the interior and the exterior and facilitating an active engagement with the depicted interiors.

Indeed, through the paradigm of Looking-beyond-Seeing, as will be argued, we can get a closer understanding of designers’ multi-sensory design approach when the embodied presence of a user is no longer possible. Through Looking-beyond-Seeing this article further proposes to foreground the experience of the researcher when encountering the photographed interior as a valid supplement to the reading and study of the early twentieth century interior.