The research and teaching of the Chair of Architectural Design/Interiors is concerned with the way that Interiors, buildings and cities are made, used and situated within culture. As an Architectural Design Chair we offer medium scale public buildings as our design tasks, but our approach to design is rooted in the practice of Interiors. This has traditionally been less confined by design ideologies than architecture and more nakedly in contact with its clients, physically, emotionally and financially. A skilled Interior designer will understand how someone wants to enter and be seated in a restaurant, look out of the window in the place where they work, or find privacy in a public place. To do this the designer relies on a sense of the micro-culture in which she or he is working and skills in making the fabric of the building speak. These things are not mysterious, but just a very focused form of the abilities that everyone uses to empathise and to communicate with each other using words, body language and objects. But this approach does not only occur in Interior design, it also can be seen in Architecture. MVRDV exploit the iconography of waterside location and loft living that has been created by films, videos, and lifestyle magazines, to make their Silodam apartments in Amsterdam appeal to a particular range of Dutch consumers. OMA drives a rough public way through the heart of the Kunsthal, a cultural building, to achieve a transgressive quality that is appropriate to style of Rotterdam. But despite the designers intentions, when the building is finished, people will make their own sense of what it means, because they will use their own fantasies, personal possessions and bodily occupation of it to make it their own. And this is true for cities such as Amsterdam Noord and Rotterdam where our Masters design tasks are located. Both are places with existing communities and cultures. In both we look for patterns in the existing fabric and community with which to work, because for us Interiors, buildings and cities, are not made by heroic designs but by anonymous, transactional, cultural activity, in ways that are more evolutionary than revolutionary.
www.interiors-buildings-cities.nl/