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From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Smoke-Free Environments: a history of New Zealand domestic architecture and smoke
Christine McCarthy, School of Design,
Victoria University of Wellington
Her publicist has just informed the chain-smoking [Lynn] Barber that
being photographed smoking in public in New Zealand ranks right up
there socially with people declaring themselves as paedophiles. "Really?"
she says, and whips out a pack of John Player Kingsize with the air
of someone suddenly producing a howitzer in a crowded room.
The introduction of The Smoke-free Environments Act (NZ) in 1990 marked
a change in the status of the New Zealand public interior, as the legislation
imagines a visually and alfactorially pure interior space. Smoke was
an insect repellant and essential to the interior of the colonial Maori
whare. Its inclusion enabled the description of the whare as a "dismal
edifice teemed with suffocating vapour, and formed with the wretched
inmates, a complete picture of cheerless barbarism."
This paper will examine New Zealand interiors as defined by smoke.
It will explore the nature of architectural boundary post smoke-free
legislation which has created a new consciousness about threshold conditions,
as rows of cigarette butts now line the thresholds of New Zealand workplaces,
and as the smoker realises the boundaries between conditions of interiority
and the exterior are defined by the action of lighting up or extinguishing
cigarettes, effecting a performative and ephemeral boundary.
Seeing the In-between: an interpretation of a third spatial type
Tracey Woods, Department of Architecture
University of Queensland
At what point does the interior become the exterior? To exist side
by side there must be a connection whether seamless or disjunctive.
Do we, as subjects, perceive this change from inside to out, or is it
an elusive quality that has the ability to change and stay one step
ahead of our movement, not unlike the ‘image’ ahead of our
‘motion’ as described by Henri Bergson? Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari discuss space in terms of the ‘smooth’ or
the ‘striated’, hinting at an in-between space connecting
the two. Ecological theory suggests that such a borderland space must
exhibit unique spatial qualities, as a synthesis of the opposing spatial
types of which it is uniting. Just as ‘Utopia’ is the wonderful
place that is ‘no place’, it is possible that this in-between
space may not hold tangible qualities. Within this paper I endeavour
to realise a possible elusive ‘third’ space, determine if
it may be assigned properties of its own and, if so, how such proposed
properties may affect today’s architectural representation. Such
space may be viewed as the fold, the border, the end or the beginning.
However, for the duration of this paper I shall refer to this space
as a ‘third space’.
Spatial Pleasure
Patricia Pringle, School of Architecture
& Design, RMIT University
In this paper I speculate about possible spatial sensations and insights
induced by interplays between attention, body and spatial experience,
through suggesting their role in the success of three popular entertainments
from the decades between the 1890s and the 1920s. These are the dance
performances of Loie Fuller, a routine from a stage magician involving
magical expansion, and the Tanagra Theatre (a popular sideshow that
created living miniatures). These three have in common that they shifted
and extended the boundaries of the body, not only in the apparent bodies
of the performers but also in ways which worked within the bodies of
their audiences. The paper links 19th and 20th century sensibilities
of the corporeal and the visceral with trends in entertainment, performance,
in popular interpretations of contemporary science and philosophy and
in the interest in the experience of space as a region co-extensive
with the self whose active and shifting boundaries mimic the sensibilities
of the subjective self. In doing so I hope to contribute to the historiography
of interior design, a discipline of spatial experience which, like the
entertainments, both embraces psychological and perceptual phenomena
and recognizes the audience as part of the work.
Thinking and Inhabiting The Doubled Interior
Charles Rice, Faculty of the Built
Environment, University of New South Wales
The paper examines the way in which the bourgeois domestic interior
emerged within a complex structure of doubleness from the beginning
of the nineteenth century. This interior emerged to mean both a spatial
condition and a representation of a spatial condition; its inhabitation
involved a set of material practices and a sense that one could imagine
an elsewhere from its material reality; and it became a figure for articulating
the interrelations between the conscious and the unconscious mind. In
relation to these layers of doubleness, the paper will focus on the
way in which the bourgeois domestic interior becomes conceptualised
in writings by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in interwar Europe,
at the time when the experience of domesticity bound up with this interior
became, in their eyes, a cultural impossibility. Via the theme of media
and mediation, the paper will suggest that the notion of a doubled interior
offered a conceptual logic within which an architectural avant-garde
project could be understood at this time, and through which avant-garde
moments in relation to domesticity can still be understood.
There has been a theme in recent cultural theory about the dissolution
of the domestic realm in the face of the ubiquity of the image. For
Paul Virilio, the domestic interior is the site of a “general
arrival of images, of information that henceforth stands for our constant
change of location.” For Jean Baudrillard, there is a state of
ultimate symmetry reached between the domestic space of viewing and
the televisual experience of Big Brother, where we witness the “banality
of consuming our own banality.” And in Margaret Morse’s
work, revolutions in technology, cyberspace and cyber culture come to
figure immersive environments in terms of the house-machine as an interactive
subject in a mixture of virtual and material space.
These accounts of contemporary domesticity would have it that there
is something new in this ‘mediated’ condition, an image-based
experience that comes to refigure conventional notions of domesticity.
Borrowing on some of the sorts of theoretical armature that are utilised
in this context, critical-historical work in architecture and art has
re-examined the idea of modern domesticity in relation to the experience
of the modern metropolis. In Beatriz Colomina’s re-readings of
architectural modernism for example, modern space itself is said to
function as a mass medium, the locus of a mediated experience of new
inside/outside and private/public relations. And Christopher Reed has
described the way in which avant-garde practices in architecture and
art repress and resist the domestic in articulating their supposedly
emancipatory programs. As Reed puts it, the domestic in modernism is
“a crucial site of anxiety and subversion.”
Far from being a contemporary problem, then, it can be argued that
the renegotiation of the boundaries of the domestic has a history in
modernist practices that suppress the domestic, even as they site their
operations there. But what is the ‘conventionality’ in domesticity
that avant-garde practices, and critical thought that is attuned to
new developments in media, seek to reconstrue, or to resist? I want
to suggest that it is a conventional domesticity which can be termed
bourgeois, but one that is itself formed in relation to ideas of the
image and of mediation. I want to test the idea that it is in a thorough
conceptualisation of a conventional, bourgeois domesticity, rather than
in its strict disavowal or repression, that the case for the necessity
of modern culture to engage with an avant-garde modality of change can
be made, and further, that what may be repressed by the avant-gardes
is a structuring of thought made possible in the bourgeois domestic
interior.
In order to expand on this idea, I shall show that several thinkers,
key among them Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, enable us to see
that an idea of the bourgeois domestic interior emerges in the nineteenth
century as the crucial site for the articulation of domesticity. This
interior emerges in a complex doubled sense, between the spatial and
representational, the material and the immaterial, and the conscious
and unconscious.
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