Shaping Spatial Culture: An interior perspective

As spatial cultures materialize, the interior is increasingly placed as the mediator and negotiator of human experience. This paper sets out to confront the normal perception of located experience and develop a theoretical position for an interior culture, helping to form new understanding of space and place. It fuses the core principles of design practice (Grove, Piotrowski), anthropology (Clarke, Hunt) and the perceptions of the interior narrative (Brooker, Gosling) that translates human and social values extending the spatial nexus. This enables the enrichment of cultural transmission and engenders a new social geography whilst improving the characteristics of the built environment.

Space and place (Abercrombie, Low) are used to help locate specific cultural reference. This stretches the act of dwelling and experiencing the interior. Space is used to describe a permeable internal volume encouraging movement and roaming as the interior story unfolds. Place, whilst more static, anchors the senses to a location. It tests the conditions allowing spatial considerations like memory, reflection and mindfulness.

By focusing on the interior experience, the case studies seek to identify how space assembles interior experience, creating narratological strands from the external environment through into the inside. These form a set of cultural principles that are used in interior space. They set out a new Interior oeuvre creating a specific spatial lens which magnifies cultural detail and dislocates the existing spatial codes. This redirects the architectural hegemony towards a redefined perspective of the interior, reshaping spatial culture and empowering the interior experience.