Ave Atque Vale

Despite his occasional concerns for interior design’s intellectual foundation, Knobel’s final editorial in June 1987, ‘Ave Atque Vale’ (hail and farewell), was generally positive. He noted that rapid growth and radical change in the ‘design business’ was attracting the attention of the Stock Exchange.²⁴ While he worried that excitement about share values would devalue ‘understanding of what design is about’, he also saw a healthy population of designers with ‘higher goals’.²⁵

He disagreed with the Design Council’s perception of design as the saviour of British industry, which pitched office design as an ‘organisational cure-all’ and retail design as the ‘recipe for commercial success’. He saw it instead as the way to improve daily experiences in all areas of life and urged designers to remember that users were more important than clients and to, ‘Recognise that this ordering of priorities will ultimately serve everyone’s best interests’.²⁶ The happy worker was an enthusiastic worker and the happy shopper a spending shopper.

Knobel confessed that, during his time as editor, he had found ‘design, particularly interior design’ to have been ‘an inspiring, enjoyable and, at times, amusing world to observe and write about’. He concluded that, despite his ‘jeremiads’, the quality of British design had ‘increased precipitously’.²⁷

He was succeeded by Alastair Best, also recruited from the Architectural Review, where he had contributed some of the least anodyne critiques of interiors. His editorials tended to comment on specific developments and more space was devoted to practical matters. Typical of his pragmatism was the January 1988 editorial in which he regretted the expense of insurance premiums for interior designers and praised the Chartered Society of Designers’ business group, which had educated underwriters on the particular nature of design practice and negotiated favourable premiums.

In April 1989, Best revealed that Britain was ‘seriously under-shopped’ compared to the US, which had seven times as much retail floor space per head of population.²⁸ Given that retail seemed to be comprehensively colonising British high streets, this would have been surprising news. The text was tentatively optimistic that out-of-town ‘retail parks’, if they were ‘properly landscaped, imaginatively detailed’, would improve on the expedient industrial sheds that tended to house edge-of-town retail outlets.²⁹ He also complained of an ‘overdose of design’³⁰ on the high streets (he appeared to think that ‘design’ could be a pejorative noun).

In the Comment section of July/August 1989, he proposed that interior designers and decorators should bury their hatchets, observing that, at an Interior Design International exhibition, each side was so determined not to be confused with the other that they had become ‘caricatures of their true selves’.³¹ He suggested there was little to gain from ‘pretending they have nothing in common’.³²

If Best continued the magazine’s pragmatism he, like Knobel, also made space for pertinent perceptions under the guise of frivolity. In January 1989, he included an article by Adrian Dannatt titled ‘Heroes, Villains and Victims’ and subtitled, ‘The designer in fiction, once a figure of derision and ridicule, has become an acceptable member of society’.³³ It was intended to amuse but also to provide discreet reassurance for practitioners still troubled by their lack of status and confusion about their identity. Dannatt claimed that in literature, film, and television the designer was no longer a ‘source of ridicule’ but a hero, ‘A sophisticated, responsible and even essential figure rather than an inherently dubious member of a shadow world’.³⁴ He suggested that the designer’s work was now recognised as ‘necessary and as honest as any other toil’.³⁵ He looked back at the old interior designer stereotypes – the preternaturally camp males with atrocious taste; the predatory heterosexual males, again with atrocious taste, who used the job to lull husbands into a false sense of security; the ‘shrieking’ and ‘bitchy’ control freak women, portrayed as having excellent taste due to their gender, intent on manoeuvring their way to social inclusion. In the 1987 film Wall Street the designer girlfriend, Dannatt said, was the ultimate status accessory.

Design had come to be seen, he said, as ‘a hard-nosed sensible profession’, a kind of ‘post-industrial alchemy, producing real profits’³⁶ – ‘That most macho of substances, hard money, out of the most effeminate of skills; an eye for colour, texture and shape’.³⁷ Whether or not this would settle the nerves of heterosexual young men in the profession, the job had undoubtedly become glamorous and its practitioners enjoyed their rewards and perhaps their notoriety, sipping champagne and snorting drugs. They were extravagant consumers.

Dannatt finished by observing that, ‘Real-life designers are now regularly feted in the media’ – although he did concede that in some cases that truth was polished in the service of intoxicating copy.³⁸ He also feared that what he called ‘the vogue for designer designers’ would make the discipline and its practitioners as ‘ludicrous a symbol of commercial exploitation…as they once were of rococo malice’.³⁹ Certainly ‘designer’, with its implications of superficiality, was becoming a term of abuse, and many practitioners still worry that their role is misunderstood and their status undervalued. Architects, on the other hand, have continued to value themselves and to have their role valued.

In September 1989, Designers’ Journal announced its 50th issue with an epitaph for the decade, reflecting on the ‘enormous changes’ since its launch in November 1983.⁴⁰ As befitted a birthday celebration of sorts, its tone was positive and more closely resembled the mood of the profession as it surfed late 1980s prosperity.

While acknowledging that reliable returns were difficult to collate in a multidisciplinary profession, Best reported that the interior design business was worth two billion pounds and, with annual growth averaging 30% since the inauguration of the magazine, was of particular interest to stock market analysts. He interpreted the propensities of designers to ‘move, expand, split and reform into new groups’ as indicating a ‘dynamicism, fuelled by energy and plenty of young blood’.⁴¹

He praised the quality of the work being produced and dismissed ‘cynical talk about the sameness of design today’, arguing that standards and expectations of quality had risen: ‘The things we now take for granted would have been regarded as exceptional at the beginning of the decade’.⁴² He singled out David Davies Associates, Peter Leonard Associates, and Din Associates for their transformation of the high street.

He said that British interior design was ‘becoming more international’ and the industry ‘bigger, more streamlined’ than any of its competitors.⁴³ In contrast to the Journal’s consistent criticism of education and educators, he conceded that the British industry was ‘fed by a much larger art and design education system’.⁴⁴ (‘Larger’ was perhaps damning with comparatively faint praise.)

He claimed that since designers’ work was rolled out in streets and malls, they were more influential than architects in forming popular taste: ‘For better or for worse, our present retail revolution is a great exercise in visual education.’ With hindsight, comparing the interiors of the 1980s to those of the present makes it clear that designers have not only shaped public taste; they have done so while continually refining their output and educating themselves and their public about the potential of their discipline. (One might wonder if greater public tolerance of new architecture has been nurtured by pleasurable experiences in shops and cafes.) Best ended by announcing that, ‘We are in good shape for the 1990s. We should seize the challenge.’⁴⁵

In January 1990, Best announced that he was leaving and offered another overview, this time of his two and a half years at the Journal.⁴⁶ He compared designers to journalists, in that both worked to tight deadlines: ‘The ideas, forms and images of interior design circulate at high speed and enjoy a brief shelf life.’⁴⁷ Perhaps he saw architects as novelists, albeit with a majority turning out potboilers. He rightly credited magazines with, ‘Helping to broaden the currency of interior design, but also, it must be said, by sharpening our sense of dissatisfaction’.⁴⁸ He should have felt entitled to single out Designers’ Journal by name, since it was the one publication that treated interior design as a distinct and serious activity.

He remembered how what he called ‘contract interior design’ had been a respectable but decidedly prosaic activity at the start of the 1980s and then listed a number of designers who had brought about a ‘transformation’: David Davies, Rasshied Din, David Chipperfield, and Eva Jiřičná (it is reassuring that he singled out those most involved in the high street).⁴⁹ He said that, when assessing projects for Designers’ Journal awards, ‘examples of exciting work’ had been found in the ‘commercial as well as the more specialised end of the spectrum’.⁵⁰

He observed that, ‘We are constantly hearing complaints about the clichéd forms and limited aesthetic vocabulary of British design’, and countered those complaints by suggesting that, ‘Certain standards, once achieved, are easily taken for granted.’ He could also have pointed out that what passed for extraordinary in the early 1980s was then judged against a paucity of other projects. This did not devalue the importance of those seminal projects but recognised that creative pebbles were no longer being dropped into stagnant waters, and that innovation would now necessarily be less sensational. He suggested that there was nothing ‘very monotonous about a contemporary design idiom which encompasses the refined minimalism of a John Pawson and the hedonistic baroque of a Nigel Coates’.⁵¹

Innovation was now in the details. A steadily expanding body of designers were refining concept and execution; the speed of interior construction and the precipitous obsolescence of commercial projects accelerated that evolution. The high street was a laboratory where sales figures, generated by customers’ willingness to vote with their cash, determined the success of experiments. For practitioners it was an unsentimental but heady experience to redefine a creative activity and, with it, to shape the economic and social environments of everyday life.

Best wondered if, ‘in a world of global communications and multi-national corporations’, a British design identity could be sustained (or was worth sustaining). Rather prosaically, he concluded that one of the British design community’s strengths might be a ‘professional ability to manage projects outside Britain’, providing fee sources to supplement the ‘slight decline in demand at home’.⁵² That professionalism might also bring success in Europe, which was a seen as a place of both opportunity and threat as changes were anticipated to the trading structure of the European Union.

While they might find little to do in the picturesque old streets of European cities, British designers were expert at working in the featureless urban-scapes of the post-war planning and architectural cultures that had swept away the small and scenic from Britain’s town centres. The same skills honed in shopping precincts were also those needed to bring life, perhaps even meaning, to the cities of the near, middle, and far east as they became the prosperous centres of production that would undermine Britain’s manufacturing base.

Ave Atque Vale… and This Time It’s Final

Best’s successor was Aidan Walker, an Oxford history graduate who had designed and made furniture and been editor of Woodworker magazine. While this was not an immediately convincing back story, he turned out to be energetic and provocative. His first editorial, ‘Style and Content’, was not ingratiating.⁵³ He accused interior designers of appropriating ‘a sense of seriousness, even portentousness, through the catch-all epithet “environmental”’.⁵⁴ The word was, he argued, being used as a subliminal assurance of good and responsible work. He suggested that there was ‘a heady mix of millennial optimism and desperate pessimism’ in the air with predictions that the 1990s would be like the 1960s, ‘Characterised by hopes and fears, music and flowers: power and passion of protest’.⁵⁵ There were rumours but as yet no confirmation, of a recession. Walker thought that ‘inherent worth – rather than added value’ might become crucial in retail and regretted that the ‘folly’ of gratuitous design gestures had helped bring retail design to what he perceived to be a fragile position.⁵⁶

If Walker’s introductory address differed from the optimistic valedictions of Knobel and Best, he was perhaps sensing a lack of confidence creeping into the profession. Design studios that had expanded too fast were beginning to founder and the perennial accusation that interior design was the pliant agent of capitalism had begun to find some traction. As a new broom, Walker may also have felt an obligation to sweep clean with stern words.

He claimed that ‘once fashionable now embattled’ designers were being held responsible for the downturn in retailing, accused of adding only a superficial gloss to products and services. He switched responsibility to management, who had, he suggested, used design to distract from a fundamental lack of vision. Neither managers nor designers had tried to create ‘better environments’, and he hoped that design in the 1990s could ‘bubble up from a little deeper inside British culture’.⁵⁷ He urged designers to embrace ‘full environmental responsibility’: ‘Getting a grip on every aspect of the task – economic, cultural, even spiritual, as well as commercial – is crucial to the task itself. Not holy, just holistic.’⁵⁸ It was a little ‘alternative’, perhaps to be expected from a woodworking history graduate, and it presumed that consumers were dupes.

The imminent recession might have distracted designers from considering moral imperatives, but it also gave them reasons to think less extravagantly, to simplify making processes and select cheaper, generally more sustainable, renewable materials. Designers’ Journal suggested that, while retail briefs were few, interior designers seemed unsure of their worth. As a solution it advocated ‘undesign’⁵⁹: the stern creation of necessities, the building of a brave new ‘anti-consumerist future’,⁶⁰ urging designers to become a ‘socially and politically mature profession’⁶¹ and to improve their communication skills. In the end it sounded like the sloganeering of 1960s and 1970s radicals, but it also reflected a growing impulse among designers to ‘do good’ – to use skills learnt and proven on the high street to enrich the experience of those using public sector interiors. Designers might have been willing but clients were few and cautious.

Environmental anxieties increased admonitions across the specialist and non-specialist media. MDF, the cheap and ubiquitous sheet material, was pronounced a health hazard in its manufacture, application, and use. Codes of practice won it a reprieve until designers, keen to avoid stylistic cliché, curtailed its ubiquity.

However idealistic their intentions, there were few sustainable tactics interior designers could adopt other than avoiding materials known to be dangerous or in danger. Occasionally opportunities might exist for insulating ceilings and external walls, but improving buildings’ energy performance generally lay with the architects of new structures. The limited options were illustrated by the idealistic DEGW’s ‘green office’ policy. They recycled paper when possible and collected waste, monitored and managed energy sources, and logged incidences of sick building syndrome and hazardous materials. Organic and biodegradable materials were used where possible and tropical hardwoods were avoided. CFCs were banned and staff were encouraged to use bicycles or cars with catalytic converters. Simon Hodgkinson, who had formulated the policy, admitted conflicting interests: clients liked big windows and natural ventilation.

The Journal perceived support for its social and environmental agenda in its annual review of work by graduating students; many, it claimed, were ‘rejecting the values responsible for the worst excesses of 1980s retail design’ and delivering a significant number of ‘socially enhancing briefs’: schools, libraries, eco-information and natural health centres.⁶² Aware that readers who had graduated in the 1960s and early 1970s were prone to romanticise their own radicalism compared to the compliant commercialism of the 1980s generation, it pointed out that, ‘[The] environmental and social problems of today are significantly more mordant than those of 20 years ago.’⁶³

The January 1991 editorial tried to be optimistic, despite growing evidence of recession: ‘Though 1990 was a very bad year for the design industry, some very good seeds were sown. Fruitful debate over the nature and role of interior design now enlivens the barren atmosphere of cutbacks.’⁶⁴

It declared the interior of Bradford City Technology College ‘outstanding’ because of the involvement of interior designers, calling it good ‘without being radical in style or lavish in expenditure’. Beyond aesthetics, however, it objected to the building being ‘for a few’, commissioned with an intention to create a managerial class through ‘social engineering’. The ‘unique talents of designers’ should not be ‘so employed’, it said. This might have sounded like a nascent call to man the barricades but the conclusion put things back in perspective:

It offered some hope to the commercially minded: ‘As commercial and retail opportunities fade designers are left with a higher proportion of commissions in the public realm’. It suggested that they should, ‘Articulate their social role ever more clearly and thus, necessarily, reassess their own education.’⁶⁶ It promised to explore opportunities in, and attitudes to, working in the public realm in future issues.

In February 1991 Jonathan Strickland, head of the postgraduate course at Middlesex University, introduced the theme of the public realm and education when he talked of refocusing teaching on social values.⁶⁷ He suggested that the social responsibility that was part of architectural teaching was missing in interior design education; he addressed this with a public housing project, about which he claimed students were enthusiastic. Whether architecture’s ideals of social responsibility were objectively applied or had added to social wellbeing was open to debate. The commercial imperatives of interior design, which obliged it to lead popular taste respectfully, might have better styled the output of commercial house builders, in the spirit of the nostalgic new town of Seaside in Florida or the vernacular of Poundbury in the UK.

Strickland’s announcement and the January editorial were attacked in the April letters page by a gang of four from Cardiff. They saw it as the commercial sector hypocritically muscling in on alternative sources of work as commissions declined. They also attacked on other fronts:

Strickland was an architect. Two out of the four authors were male.

Leaving aside strategic overviews, paucity of commissions was the profession’s primary concern. In January 1991, Jeremy Myerson contributed ‘Another Country’, an article about British interior designers looking for work abroad.⁶⁹ Despite the single European market scheduled for the following year, he warned about different cultures within that apparent entity, offering Castile and Catalonia as examples of fragmentation within one country. John Banham, director general of the CBI, forecast that big companies operating across European boundaries in retail, financial services, and leisure would commission big design companies, but that they were few in number.

Myerson, perhaps thinking of DEGW’s model, advocated collaboration and consultation with local design companies who would become clients and local enablers. This was more feasible for bigger practices. He gave examples: Minale Tattersfield had taken over Design Strategy in Paris, and when Landor were acquired by Young & Rubicam, they effectively became part of the latter’s French subsidiary, Beautiful Design.

In April 1989 Designers’ Journal had reported that, following an increase in interest rates, rental values had fallen from 16.45% in the first half of 1988 to 9.6% in the second half, which was impressive but retrogressive.⁷⁰ Mass redundancies in the City of London’s financial sector pegged growth there to only 2.48% in what was normally the most buoyant area; a knock-on effect reduced the increase in the West End to 5%. The commercial property consultants who had compiled the figures predicted that the market would recover by 1990. They were too optimistic.

Economic downturn destroyed the 1980s idyll and decimated the number and size of practices. Those that survived were forced to become brutally competitive. Fees were cut and employees’ noses were pressed to grindstones. In January 1990 the Journal pronounced that ‘mid-1988 saw the beginning of the end of the consumer spending boom’ and Jonathan Reynolds of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management predicted ‘a gloomy future for the retail sector’.⁷¹

For interior design practices that were already absorbed into diverse conglomerates, like Fitch & Co., survival was largely taken out of their hands. Others were obliged to find, if they could, shelter within more fortunate rivals. Crighton had grown to employ 84 people but went under after three years. It was easier for the independent and better established. Dalziel & Pow decided to ‘cut deep’ but only once, in the hope of ending uncertainty and pessimism among employees, and sacked about 10% of staff. For them, the single deep cut was enough.

Their strategy broadly matched Reynolds’s recipe for the survival of threatened retailers: he had recommended cutting back expenditure to survive an anticipated 18 months of hard times. They could then, he predicted, emerge ‘leaner and fitter’ to face the 1990s with optimism.

The economic collapse led to reconfiguration as practitioners regrouped, leaving room for new, leaner practices to emerge. These operated modestly. With reduced staffing and overheads, they could afford to charge paltry fees and they had no compunctions about working hard and long. The most successful of them tended to be young, not long out of college, and with an aspiration to do something special. For bigger companies, the rise of the computer facilitated staffing cutbacks.

Neither a Bang Nor a Whimper

The October 1992 issue was Designers’ Journal’s last. There was no announcement of an impending end; presumably the decision was swiftly made at management level. The magazine was probably a victim of the recession, and falling subscriptions and shrinking advertising income. Its mother company, the Architectural Press, had been sold on to less sympathetic publishing interests and, like so many of the interior practices acquired by speculators, the newcomer was jettisoned for the good of the whole.

It disappeared inopportunely, at a time when the profession had lost some confidence in its worth and its ability to survive. The environmental concerns that Walker had added to its agenda were also to become increasingly pertinent for designers, their clients, and the users of their buildings, but in the Journal’s absence there was no medium to evolve and articulate the profession’s response.

Interior design lost a cohesive element that might have pulled it together and encouraged its fragmented and buccaneering members to consider their commonalities and find themselves a voice. The Journal had set a monthly agenda; its editorials either synthesised concerns or presented ideas for collective consideration. Its monthly injections of practical advice were informative for those engaged in, or contemplating, independent practice. Even if subscribers did no more than look at the photographs and skim captions, they were part of a nationwide community. They had role models and model projects. They were thinking about the same things. If they read as far as the critiques, there were things to learn and things with which to disagree, both prompting thought. Now websites pour out more images of new projects than a single magazine could ever do, but they offer no critical perspective, no means to promote pragmatic solidarity.

And from Portland Place…

As other organs of the architectural press drifted towards greater coverage of interiors in the 1980s, the RIBA Journal produced a supplement aimed at architects involved in, or curious about, interiors. Jose Manser, in her May 1986 editorial, regretted that architects were ‘not a united body’ and too willing to criticise each other in public. She advocated ‘mutual support and trumpet blowing’, particularly for those specialising in interiors.⁷² Architects must rally, or else they ‘deserve to be swept aside’.⁷³ She suggested that the particular skill of architects producing successful interiors, such as Jiřičná, Wickham, and Farrell, was their ‘understanding of space and proportion’.⁷⁴ While mastery of these abstractions may not have counted for much among commissioners of commercial interiors, the accolade flattered her subscribers. But it is doubtful whether her fears were shared widely by the readership of the architectural establishment’s house magazine. They tended to see interiors as inconsequentialities on the road to ‘proper’ architectural commissions, and interior designers would continue to resent the architecture graduates, bolstered by the confidence that they were bound for higher things, who could effortlessly knock out an interior with a panache that the tentative graduates of art schools found hard to muster.

In the supplement of September 1986, Manser observed that small interior practices tended to produce better work, and expressed the hope that, ‘Young practitioners with high ideals and a good track record…will not be seduced by the prospect of a great empire. In their field, I maintain, small is still beautiful’. The view was echoed in the January 1990 Designers’ Journal, in which the editorial on the results of its award competition regretted the mergers and takeovers that were becoming common. It suggested that standards would decline as practices got bigger and principals became accountable to parent companies and their shareholders:

Manser moved on after the May 1987 edition. Her valedictory editorial reflected that when the supplement had first launched seven years earlier, then appearing only twice yearly, it had not enjoyed anything like the ‘prominence and patronage’ it had subsequently achieved. At that time, big architectural practices were uninterested in interiors and many significant interior design practices were fledglings or not yet born. But that was about to change:

Manser suggested that, while interior design projects did not have architecture’s longevity, the activity was ‘as important’. She warned that those who hesitated to ‘get embroiled’ would be ‘swept aside in the stampede of interior designers’ and the arrival of ‘big brash’ American firms. But architects found their niche. They remained the go-to for publicly financed projects and those requiring serious structural manipulation. Apart from the arrival of Gensler and a few others, the American threat did not materialise; when it came to interior design, they weren’t much good at anything more than bland office fit-outs.

Manser was succeeded by Richard Wilcock. In his second editorial of September 1987, he expressed familiar fears that, by delving too enthusiastically into interiors, architecture could become increasingly superficial, like the world of fashion, ‘with styles lightly worn and soon discarded’.⁷⁷ He worried that focusing on the shortcomings of Modernism would lead to the rejection of its ‘sound theories’, which he identified as, ‘Truth to materials, form follows function, respect for the vernacular’. He was concerned about the seduction of innocent consumers and the imposition of unsuitable working environments. He urged architects to remember their social responsibilities and ended by reminding them that they, too, were prone to trends and consumerism:

Readers would have recognised his references as the clichés of a late-1980s architect’s or designer’s lifestyle. The recession would delay the enriching and easing of people’s lives that he longed for.

And from the Higher Ground…

The Architectural Review did not entirely ignore interiors following the arrival of Designers’ Journal, although it still showed no particular interest in commercial sectors.

In January 1989 its editor Peter Davey considered the nature of the separation between interior design and architecture.⁷⁹ He suggested that interiors and exteriors had ‘never been more divorced’ and that the interior was increasingly being treated as an autonomous project. He attributed this to the proliferation of empty shells of office blocks, flats, and shopping centres, and the increasing influence of conservation legislation that insisted on the preservation of external skins.⁸⁰

He wondered if there was a place for ‘architectural disciplines’ in this trough of commissions, or whether autonomous interior installations were ‘a branch of theatre and public relations’.⁸¹ He answered: ‘Plainly so, for, in the last few years, enormous amounts of money, a whole profession [interior design] and innumerable careers have been based on the proposition’.⁸² This implied a triumph of profit over integrity. He thought interiors had ‘a fictive quality’, that they told a story about those who inhabited them and about ‘humanity’ in general.⁸³ Why he chose the word ‘fictive’ is not clear: to succeed, interiors had to respond to and complement the changes that shaped their time.

His suggestion of ‘story telling’ was not quite the same as Casson’s ‘mood’, but the two share the idea of transformation. His reservation was that, ‘In the past the telling of these stories has had some resonance with the building of which they were a part…not simple assemblages of symbols which had no more than narrative relationship to each other as they often are in the work of interior decorators and designers.’⁸⁴ In contrast, he thought that Gothic and Rococo interiors shared a ‘tectonic integrity’ with the exterior and that their symbolic iconography modulated space.

He explained that the interiors included in that month’s special interior feature illustrated, ‘The concept of tectonic integrity and of relationship of the owner’s narrative to the shell’.⁸⁵ He saw a ‘tectonic imagination at work’ in the lavish expressionism of Nigel Coates’s interior for Katharine Hamnett, described in its accompanying text as ‘over-ripe’, while Eva Jiřičná’s Joseph shop told ‘powerful stories without having to resort to ostensible figuration’. He concluded that, in both, ‘Architectural imagination gives new perspectives on the nature of contemporary life.’⁸⁶

Which prompts the question: how do these two shops, which are fuelled by generous budgets and which share no tectonic integrity with their exterior shells, differ from the more modest (but equally inventive) interiors of the high street chains? It is debatable whether an interior should attempt to match architecture’s force majeure; its role is not to overwhelm but to cosset.

When Designers’ Journal folded, interiors coverage returned to the Architectural Review, and Davey decided that interior designers needed a pep talk. In December 1993, his essay ‘Internal Affairs’ again pondered the demarcation between architecture and interior design: ‘If there is such a thing as interior architecture it is likely to be found in the work of people trained in the [architectural] profession.’⁸⁷

He expressed concern about the shallowness of interior design, explaining that, ‘During most of this century the design of interiors has been rather looked down on’⁸⁸. He worried that it had developed no independent body of theory, lacked a nucleus of convincing models, and was either an ‘offshoot of the fashion industry’⁸⁹ or the application of discredited ideas of operational functionalism. (Like those before him, he did not explain why an association with fashion was so disgraceful.)

He identified a problem in Modernism’s ‘interpenetration’ of exterior and interior space, and the idea of architecture as ‘no more than the provision of serviced shelter’.⁹⁰ Modernists’ obsession with expression of structure and construction had elbowed out decoration – few architects bothered to think beyond primary colours. The 20th century interiors by Wright, Le Corbusier, Aalto, and Kahn that Davey chose to salute as ‘marvellous’ and on a par with those from previous centuries, were, he acknowledged, ‘essential elements of whole buildings’.⁹¹ He expressed surprise that autonomous interiors had not matched these. He regretted that the blank spaces of speculative office blocks had not been heroically transformed (although he did concede that the mean ceiling heights and hunks of centralised service provisions made noble gestures difficult).

Market forces have prompted developers to become more competitively adventurous, and the spaces, briefs, and budgets presented to interior designers are marginally more promising. But clients still tend to prefer the shells of redundant industrial buildings or lofty 19th century edifices that bring their own veneer of romance.

Davey acknowledged that intimate sensory engagement between user and interior is not indigenous to the speculative office block. He eulogised the many-layered degrees of public and private spaces of his own traditional terraced house and proposed that the same hierarchies characterised the best modern equivalents. He saw those qualities in the wide open spaces of Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat house and listed the virtues of light, colour, materials, and craftsmanship in the making of successful interiors. One could argue the opposite: that Tugendhat might have had light, but its limited Miesian palette of materials, colour, and mechanistic crafting might not be the most effective way to touch a human heart. With excruciating predictability, Adolf Loos’s, Kärtner Bar was paraded as the quintessence of the successful public interior: ‘Public, yet intimate; convivial yet individual’. Its devices – the mirror above eye level that reflects the coffered ceiling to infinity, the curtain at the door, the dark wooden panelling, the black and white chequered tile floor, the brass and glass fittings – were credited with creating a ‘huge amount of meaning, possibility and spatial wonder’. Davey then reminded readers that Loos took his inspiration from well-crafted brogues, well-tooled luggage, and the well-tailored suit, before lamenting the disappearance of such craftsmen. He concluded by paraphrasing Loos:

Apparently Davis had not noticed that he was living in a more democratic era, where well-made but affordable facsimiles of the apparel and accessories that inspired Loos could be found ready-made on the high street.

It is worth putting this praise for Loos into context. Like Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s art school in Glascow, the Kärtner Bar is one of those period pieces that does not conform to Modernist tenets but which, for some reason, architects have allowed themselves to collectively admire. It is elegant but it belongs to the socially exclusive Vienna of 1908. And Loos was an architect who operated on the periphery, a theorist who built radical buildings that did not quite put into practice what he preached in his droll essays. For his entry for the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition, he dreamt up a ludicrous hybrid of an inhabited Doric column perched on top of a structure evolved from a design for his own tomb.

Davey’s last two sentences were snappy: ‘It is time for interior design to grow up, stop being a branch of consumerism or graphics and acquire a respectable body of theory. Adolf Loos showed the way.’⁹³ Whether interior design should, or could, evolve a body of theory to match that of architecture is debatable. It has existed for too short a time as a distinct entity and, while its built canon has proliferated, there is no extended context in which to assess it, other than that of architectural theory and interior theory must encompass its own priorities. One could suggest that the current prevalence of digital technologies in daily life must edge interiors further from architecture. Unburdened by theory and its accompanying introspection, interior designers might be better positioned to operate in what some may see as shallower waters.