Interior design, as a relatively young discipline within the academic world of design, has historically been interpreted as an extension of other fine arts. Narratives exist, but they all too often treat interior design as a function of architecture or display rather than experience. An independent interior design theory is virtually nonexistent. Professor Lois Weinthal envisions a future where interior design is treated with parity to architecture and industrial design, a future with a new interior. A reader for architects and interior designers, Weinthal has carefully curated a collection of forty-eight essays that will form the foundation of interior design theory and shape future interior space. Her introductory essays illuminate each source, prefacing and directing discussion of the material as it relates to interior design theory. Alluding to Le Corbusier s classic text, she has organized this material into a framework that inspires conversation, marking a break with the past and forming a new vocabulary for the discourse. Contributions to the book s eight sections include essays by David Batchelor, Aaron Betsky, Petra Blaisse, Andrew Blauvelt, Beatriz Colomina, Le Corbusier, Robin Evans, Adolf Loos, Ellen Lupton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Michel Serres, Henry Urbach, Wim Wenders, and Mark Wigley.

Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans--such as "the house is a machine for living in"--and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations.

A major proposal for a minor architecture, and for the making of spaces out of the already built. Architecture can no longer limit itself to the art of making buildings; it must also invent the politics of taking them apart. This is Jill Stoner's premise for a minor architecture. Her architect's eye tracks differently from most, drawn not to the lauded and iconic but to what she calls “the landscape of our constructed mistakes”—metropolitan hinterlands rife with failed and foreclosed developments, undersubscribed office parks, chain hotels, and abandoned malls. These graveyards of capital, Stoner asserts, may be stripped of their excess and become sites of strategic spatial operations. But first we must dissect and dismantle prevalent architectural mythologies that brought them into being—western obsessions with interiority, with the autonomy of the building-object, with the architect's mantle of celebrity, and with the idea of nature as that which is “other” than the built metropolis. These four myths form the warp of the book. Drawing on the literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Stoner suggests that minor architectures, like minor literatures, emerge from the bottoms of power structures and within the language of those structures. Yet they too are the result of powerful and instrumental forces. Provoked by collective desires, directed by the instability of time, and celebrating contingency, minor architectures may be mobilized within buildings that are oversaturated, underutilized, or perceived as obsolete. Stoner's provocative challenge to current discourse veers away from design, through a diverse landscape of cultural theory, contemporary fiction, and environmental ethics. Hers is an optimistic and inclusive approach to a more politicized practice of architecture.

Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind, Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects, including Anderson Anderson, Philip Beesley, Diller + Scofidio, John Hejduk, Dan Hoffman, and Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context. There is no doubt that installations will continue to play a critical role in the practice of architecture. Installations by Architects aims to contribute to the role of installations in sharpening our understanding of the built environment.

Taking a radical position counter to many previous histories and theories of the interior, domesticity and the home, The Emergence of the Interior considers how the concept and experience of the domestic interior have been formed from the beginning of the nineteenth century. It considers the interior's emergence in relation to the thinking of Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, and, through case studies, in architecture's trajectories toward modernism. The book argues that the interior emerged with a sense of 'doubleness', being understood and experienced as both a spatial and an image-based condition. Incorporating perspectives from architecture, critical history and theory, and psychoanalysis, The Emergence of the Interior will be of interest to academics and students of the history and theory of architecture and design, social history, and cultural studies.

Walter Benjamin observed in his writings on the interior that 'to live means to leave traces.' This interior design theory reader focuses on just how such traces might manifest themselves. In order to explore interior design's links to other disciplines, the selected texts reflect a wide range of interests extending beyond the traditional confines of design and architecture. It is conceived as a matrix, which intersects social, political, psychological, philosophical, technological and gender discourse, with practice issues, such as materials, lighting, colour, furnishing, and the body. The anthology presents a complex and sometimes conflicting terrain, while also creating a distinct body of knowledge particular to the interior. Locating theory on the interior through these multifarious sources, it encourages future discourse in an area often marginalised but now emerging in its own right. Within the reader individual excerpts are referenced to their place in the matrix and sequenced alphabetically. This organising strategy resists both a chronological and themed structure in order to provoke associations and inferences between excerpts. In this way the book offers the possibility of examining the interior from multiple vantage points: a disciplinary focus, the spatial and physical attributes of interiors, historical sequence, and topical issue based. Excerpts from Thomas Hope, Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton and Charles Eastlake provide contemporary nineteenth century accounts as the profession emerges, whereas Barbara Penner, Penny Sparke, Charles Rice, Georges Teyssot and Rebecca Houze offer re-interpretations of this period. The complexities of the twentieth-century interior are revealed by Robyn Longhurst, Kevin Melchionne, George Wagner, John Macgregor Wise, Joel Sanders and many others.