interior cities

RMIT UNIVERSITY, INTERIOR DESIGN PROGRAM

Beyond the physicality of the grid, beyond the streets and office towers, beyond the institutional, the formal and the planned, lies the city as experience, as memory, as imagination, as spatial body and spirit.

By engaging with the physical, phenomenological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical and technological definitions that shape the city the brief for interior designers becomes complex and fascinating. The Interior City becomes liquid, evolving and transforming continuously, suggesting traces, moments, events and lives.

Interior Cities chronicled the theoretical concerns and design practices of the community of architects, designers, artists, teachers and students involved in the Interior Design Program within the School of Architecture and Design at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in the 1990’s. The publication lay the foundations of a mature attitude to the profession of Interior Design by providing a scholarly analysis of the skills, perceptions, concerns and context of emerging Interior Design practice.

The book was divided into eight areas of concern in which featured critical essays, design studio descriptions and major project thesis works. The chapter headings included Spatial Perception, Sensing Space, Elemental Space, Space of the Imagination, Cross-cultural Space, Contextual Space, Incisions into the Metropolis and Towards Virtual Space.