Pivotal Interiors: Intricacy Not Size

While interior design as a taught subject may focus on details at a small scale – like materials, the human body, the way light beams pass through a window and across a space –, Cridge and Ungerer argue that interiors as a discipline need not, and should not, be limited to certain scales or small projects. Instead, its insights into, and attention to, the immediate tactile and individual spatial experience can be applied to large spaces as much as on the inside/outside threshold. Using the ‘hinge’ as a metaphorical and physical device, the authors discuss five examples by OMA, Steven Holl and Vito Acconci, Gary Chang, Michael Hansmeyer and in the work of Zaha Hadid – the famous woman architect who originally had trained as an interior designer – to show that interior design is not about the size of projects but about their intricacy.