Interior Interruptions: Rehabilitating the Old to Design the New

Interior Interruptions examines the role of the ‘palimpsest’ and its relationship to narrative, sustainability, renovation and adaptive reuse. By exploring storytelling, palimpsestic characteristics and techniques, the book argues that these devices play a central role in the consideration of the designed interior.

Narrative has a burgeoning relationship with the palimpsest and this approach embraces an aesthetic of incompleteness and imperfection as a site rich response. It recognises the ongoing ‘biography’ or heritage of a building as a form of transient architectural narrative that encourages reuse through the continual process of writing, rewriting, overwriting and unwriting. This process has sustainable, societal, archaeological and textual connotations that can be interpreted as a process of ‘layering’ whereby the architectural shell is viewed as a container; a rich repository that is ‘overlain’ by surface changes, documents architectural and spatial modifications, and is populated by interior fixtures and fittings that all unite to create an ever-changing interior story.

Exploring case studies from the UK, Netherlands, Palestine, Belgium, Singapore, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Brazil, Japan, USA and China and beautifully illustrated in full colour, this book proposes that the act of interior renovation can be viewed as a perpetual form of revisionary storytelling re-imagined as a series of temporal interior ‘interruptions’. It is essential reading for students and professionals interested in the built environment, including, but not limited to, interior design, interior decoration, interior architecture and architecture.