Dis/assembled. Unmaking interiors as an adaptive reuse approach to disciplinary identity

In interior discourse, the past decades have seen the parallel rise of adaptive reuse and the ‘coming of age’ of interior architecture/interior design as a discipline with a distinct body of knowledge and an increased level of research and academization as a discipline. In light of this parallel development, this paper analyses the intersections of these two developments, firstly in the term interior architecture, and secondly in the notion of interior reuse. In the context of adaptive reuse, the paper searches for an interior-specific approach, and relates it a form of interior history education that embraces reuse and bridges the history-studio divide. The paper discusses parallels in architecture's historic turn in the late 20th century, addresses history’s 'ambichronous' role in education (Engel 2016), and extracts historiographic concerns from interior discourse. It proposes a practice of dis/assemblage—of the creative un/making of visual representations of interiors—as a first step towards a disciplinary-specific concept of interior historiography, which is able to address a key characteristic of the interior: its unique status as a spatial assemblage in time – inhabitable, used, ephemeral, and full of things. Keywords: Adaptive reuse; disciplinary identity; historiography; interior education; dis/assemblage.