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The Interior Designer versus The Architect

This month I attended a design debate run by a new organisation called the Interiors Forum. The event was the first in a series of debates on subjects dear to the hearts of practitioners of design in the commercial world. What made this event irresistible to me was its title: "This house believes the Architect understands the internal space better than the Interior Designer." Talk about a red flag to a bull!

The venue was the monolithic Tate Modern Gallery on the south bank of the Thames, the acclaimed recently-opened London venue for modern art. The lecture theatre into which we where herded was a very trendy bright red from top to bottom. The effect was to make us all look like victims of severe sunburn. There was some energetic comment as to whether it was an Architect or Interior Designer who had committed this particular atrocity. The evening was off to an intense and vocal start.

Four speakers were presented, two for the motion and two against, all of them armed with slides. The first speaker, dressed predictably in black from head to toe, was presenting in favour of the Architect. His basic premise was that a space should be memorable and avoid at all costs being forgettable. "If a space is forgettable, then it is probably dull and unimaginative." He also opined that "the undesigned space is best", a statement which didn’t find too many supporters amongst an audience relying on design as its livelihood! One slide showed an Architect sitting in the angular cathedral that was his living room; he occupied the only chair in the room. In fact the chair was the only feature in the room except for the Architect. Everything else was...well, space. I wondered whether the man was genuinely friendless or whether his friends just preferred to stand. "The Interior Designer," we heard "simply seeks to fill the space with things". Uh-huh.

The second speaker, a gruff Brummie (resident of Birmingham) was against the motion. He used words like "soul" and "tactile" and included a slide of a room that was as angular as our solitary Architect’s living space, yet breathed because it was filled with furniture that had texture, colour and vitality. He argued that many modern spaces suffer from "people denial"; that the Interior Designer is better at viewing the proposed space through the eyes of the people who are meant to use the space, whereas the Architect is concerned first and foremost with the space itself. But there was an area in which he agreed with Speaker No. 1 - that space needs to be uplifting, engaging, and enjoyable (i.e. memorable). But the difference is that he also made that the vital point that the space must be useable.

Speaker No. 3 was a tall, laconic Scot speaking in favour of the motion. I could feel the soft Scottish tones lulling me into a sense of trust with his calmly stated point that "The first branded internal space in the British Isles was, of course, the Medieval church". Mmmm, tell me more. "And so," he purred, "onto my first slide."

Then the spell was broken. Projected in front of us was a picture of a building that appeared to be constructed of sheets of glass running vertically, sheet after sheet through the horizontal layers of concrete floors. "Here we have the layering of transparent facades that produces a building with no facade at all." The next slide was of a Japanese building (again in concrete) that had dispensed with one wall entirely. "Where does the building end and the garden begin?" An interesting point but where do you put the thermostat? Then the glimmer of true madness began to shine through: "The ultimate aim of the Architect is to break down the barrier between the inner envelope and the exterior until there is no border at all; the perfect vision for the Architect is the building where the outside and the inside become one."

Ummm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that a parking lot?

The fourth speaker reiterated the case for Interior Designers, but, to my mind the case had been resolved already. Perhaps the Architect understands the internal space not in a better way than the Interior Designer, but in a different way. Perhaps the Architect can be compared to the abstract artist, and the Interior Designer to the figurative painter. Who’s to say that one is better than the other? They simply have different "ways of seeing". But this, for me, was not the valid conclusion to the debate at hand. To me this whole episode pointed to the Interior Designer’s better understanding of the needs and desires of the people that are required to populate the interior space. And until we all live in parking lots I’m proud to make this my art.

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