Interiors Buildings Cities MSc2 Design Project

The Chair of Interiors Buildings Cities focuses on buildings and interiors that accommodate the different scales and gradations of public life within the city, from the street to the public interior. It addresses the ways in which these can be situated in relation to place, time and material culture. Each course in the programme refers to a particular building or interior type, acknowledging its significance in the past and exploring its capacity for adjustment, adaptation or transformation in response to the needs of contemporary society and culture.

The Salon of the MSc2 project refers to the tradition of the large public room, which receives and shapes the society of people that it gathers. A society brought together not through proximity, but rather through discourse, in relation to shared interests.

Originally the salon was both a cultural phenomenon and a specific space within the European aristocratic home during the 17th and 18th centuries. Mostly initiated by women (salonnières), they were social gatherings in which participants engaged in the art of conversation, dedicated to the exchange of ideas and the pursuit of knowledge. This course considers the relevance of such a notion in a contemporary setting. Students will design the structure and fabric of a contemporary space for conversation, in response to an existing building and a specific community and site. The rooms scale and elaborated interior, structure the orders and arrangements of the building in which it is set. It offers opportunities for both intimacy and publicness and, whether through its physical relationship with the outside, or as a consequence of the conversations or events that it hosts, it engages the city.

Through a process of iterative drawing and large-scale physical modelling, supported by lectures, workshops and seminars, students will design the structure and fabric of such an interior, responding to an existing building and including consideration of its furnishing, relevant technical aspects, material finishes and the possibilities for its inhabitation.