In 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.

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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.

In the first chapter, Pimlott traces an arc that begins with the idea of landscape and the designed, picturesque garden: “a potent site for contemplation of the world, one’s place in it and the conceit of one’s dominion over it.” The chapter concludes with an exploration of the workplace interior (office landscapes or Bürolandschaft) and internal atria. The office environment is concerned with planning and organisation inasmuch as it describes implicit and explicit power relations. Picturesque landscapes worked in a similar fashion, using vistas and architectural fragments or follies set within pastoral contexts to suggest hierarchies and other forms of control using visual and spatial relationships.

This conception of the designed environment finds one of its greatest forms of expression in the great glass houses, such as Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace built for the 1851 Great Exposition in London’s Hyde Park. These glass enclosures were also replicated in greenhouses, conservatories and smaller vitrines and caskets across the country. The building of structures such as these coincided with the rise of bourgeois culture in Northern Europe which was itself, as Pimlott notes, “driven by colonialism, and the subjugation, exploitation and removal of resources from faraway lands by force.” These structures and spaces created an internal environment that could contain and sustain plants as well as a wide variety of other objects and artefacts. They demonstrated the empire’s reach while also reflecting a mythical, but nonetheless enduring, national self-image of power, influence and beneficence.

Urban parks function in a not dissimilar fashion, as “public interiors within the body of the metropolis” whose carefully crafted, utterly fictional, bucolic landscapes offered a counterpoint to soften and ameliorate their host’s urban project. It did this while also suggesting that the countryside outside of the city could be managed or controlled. Office atria, such as in Roche and Dinkeloo’s 1969 Ford Foundation in New York, embraced “the idea of a contained pre-urban fragment, representative of indigenous hinterlands – much like the fiction of Olmsted’s Central Park.”