Interior Spaces and the Layers of Meaning
Although as an academic discipline interior architecture/design is outside of the humanities, designing a space requires the capacity to think similarly to humanities students who are directed to think in a stimulating way with greater depth to better understand the world they live in. Interior architecture/design has always lacked identity and has had difficulty to position itself and is divided between technologies, science, art and production. Designing spaces are often the product of compromise and limitations (material/budget) and regrettably reducible to something calculable and measurable. As such a physical space is often interpreted as a space disconnected of what occupies it. As a consequence, the visual and sensory quality of a space become so domineering that there is the potential to reduce the design to merely a product of the designer. For design students, space is always seen in relation to the physical fit of humans and its interaction with humans and objects but the abstract nature of design projects and the fact that most designs are virtual creations before they become reality makes thinking about space outside simply the production of space challenging. While arguably space is the core of interior design, not much emphasis is given to understand space on a complex level as explored by thinkers such as Lefebvre, Sloterdijek and Latour. Lefebvre in his work 'the production of space' interprets space on three levels; physical, mental and social space and argues that space is not simply something we inherited from the past or is determined by the rules of special geometry but space is produced and reproduced by humans in which they make their lives. Space is produced by the people who occupy it and influenced by those who design and produce it. Frank Lloyd Wright believed that "the space within that building is the reality of that building". The aim of this paper is to examine how space is conceived and conceptualised by undergraduate students. It further discusses how space is translated from mind to actuality without loosing meaning and characteristics and how to move beyond designing 'designed' spaces by putting space in a more extensive debate.