Studio Outline
The dissertation studio frames the interior as a predominantly subjective category with fluid boundaries.
The interior in this case is the experiential landscape we carry within ourselves as discrete beings simultaneously becoming other to and belonging within the world. The studio is biased towards the experienced world and human agency over received knowledge.
The interior is intimately tied to the personal. We will re- look the most intimate of ideas, that of the Home.
We will discuss its relation to themes such as the body, the i and Non-i ,the workings of power,the other, memory,practise, displacement, representation and technology.
The aim is to deliver a theoretical framework to the students such that they can articulate subjective positions and construct credible and critical arguments on their chosen subject matter. There will be 2 lectures on History and Identity and a visit to 2-houses that typify the secularisation of the home in the 19h century.
We will also connect with the Huguenot project and explore their inhabitation of Spitalfields.
First seven weeks of study
Week 1: Introductory Lecture and Seminar
On course structure, ideas, readings, dissertation- writing, researching etc.
Week 2: Subjectivity as encounter
The seminar will look at the fluidity of experience and the body's association with events in the formation of subjective thought.
Week 3: Inside culture
The seminar will engage with the idea of culture as a constantly evolving and heterogeneous experience… a product of simultaneous change which can never really be captured.
Week 4: Home
We will visit the John Soane museum and the Old operating theatre to see how the idea of home is transformed.
Week 5: The displacement of the subject (home) and agency
What happens when we loose the home or we have to leave 'home'? We will look at the idea loss of home. A loss which cannot be recouped either due to 'growing up', a change in circumstances, forced removal or loss of opportunity or the possibility of better opportunities.
Week 6: The representation of the interior
The seminar will look at the ways in which the interior as a physical manifestation is presented and understood as an object of study and the histories that are born out of them.
Week 7: The impermeable interior
We will look at the effects that technology on the idea of inside and transformation of the inhabited.
Reading List
- Brascha Ettinger, The matrixial boderspace (University Of Minnesota Press: 2006).
- Adrian Mc Kenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (Athlone: 2001).
- Lois Weinthal ed., An anthology of interior design theory (Princeton Architectural Press 2011).
- Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and publicity (MIT Press: 1996).
- Michel de Certau: Heterologies (Univ Of Minnesota Press: 2006).
- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe (Princeton: 2008).
- Paul Ricouer, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Memory, History, Forgetting (The University of Chicago Press:2004).
