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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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