The Chair of Architectural Design / Interiors

The focus of this Chair is the architecture of the public interior.

The city is a place of values, expressed in the way the city is made and built, and in the relations between people that it implies or defines in its spaces and interiors. Our Chair is concerned with those interior spaces in the city that people share, and where they are conscious of each other as individuals in public and as a public.

As important as these spaces are, they are all too often made with other considerations in mind; compromised, abused, debased, poorly equipped, or surrendered to the demands of capital, its publicity, and its attendant effects. We believe that it is necessary to understand such places and the people who will use them so that better architecture can be made, an architecture for and of the interior that offers people a kind of freedom. With viewpoints that are informed and generous, architectural proposals can be made that are powerful vehicles for responsible, critical and artistic thought that can be realised.

To this end, the tasks proposed in our studios are set in urban contexts in which the very idea of the city and how people are supposed to act within it are contested, or undergoing change. The public interior is an important arena for the setting out of possibilities or values for the city itself: its values and its idea are reflected in the character and the architecture of its public interiors. In our studio programmes, we employ the medium of architecture to make places in the city, attending to its appearances, spaces, the relations it implies in its organisation and the information it offers, as well as its materialisation. Work in the design studios is complemented and reinforced by carefully designed courses concerning culture, architecture and the interior; the methods and analysis of design; and work that runs in parallel work to the graduation studio in social and anthropological research, and building and environmental technology.

 

 

 

Beginning September 2013, the Chair of Architectural Design / Interiors will offer a new programme: The Architecture of the Interior. This programme provides the opportunity to study the architecture of complex interiors: spaces that are central to the formation of the contemporary public realm, and are representative of our time.

 

 

Architecture and the Interior
Conference
23 May 2013, 9:00–19:00

On 23 May 2013, the Chair will present an international one-day conference on the subject of Architecture and the Interior, considering the work of the Chair over the past decade, and the field and prospects for its work in the future. For more information on this open event, visit www.architecture-and-the-interior.nl.