this article, which originally appeared on BD, Nicholas de Klerk (a London-based Associate Architect at Aukett Swanke) reviews The Public Interior as Idea and Project – a new publication by the Netherlands-based Canadian artist, architectural historian and educator Mark Pimlott.

Mark Pimlott’s new book, The Public Interior as Idea and Project (2016), expands on prior publications, notably Without and Within (2007). In this earlier book, Pimlott explored the concept of a ‘continuous interior’—examining repetitive spaces which share characteristics—for example, shopping malls and airports, and which, collectively, set about the urbanisation of the American territory.

+ 6

Public Interior is no less ambitious. It looks closely at the development of a series of themes—the garden, the palace, the ruin, the shed, the machine and the network—all of which formed the subject of a series of lectures given to Masters Students in Architecture at the Delft University of Technology. Through these themes, Pimlott examines different types of interior spaces, which are considered public, not necessarily in terms of ownership, but in terms of their capacity to be taken as ‘public, even though they may be privately owned and operated’.

Pimlott first introduces the concept of interiority which emerges from early settlement patterns, and is iterated at every scale – whether “a dwelling, a temple, a settlement, a city or a continental territory.” The idea of the interior as relational is one that runs throughout the book, and one of architecture’s fundamental roles is to “situate and bind” its sheltered interior to the world. The book performs much the same function, taking each of the public interiors identified in the book and relating them to a wider historical, geographical and social context. This, then, is the project: It shows a city’s public interiors as a collection of spaces that reveal something about the city itself and the people who live in it, and how vital these are to civic life and, indeed, survival. The corollary to the relational process of creating an interiority is the ideological process of othering, which is often none too subtly reinforced by cities and their planning, architecture and its interiors. This introduces a thread of political thought to the book which underpins much of the work, emerging clearly again at its conclusion.