Interior Provocations : History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors

Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors addresses the broad cultural, historical, and theoretical implications of interiors beyond their conventionally defined architectural boundaries. With provocative contributions from leading and emerging historians, theorists, and design practitioners, the book is rooted in new scholarship that expands traditional relationships between architecture and interiors and that reflects the latest theoretical developments in the fields of interior design history and practice.

This collection contains diverse case studies from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century including Alexander Pope’s Memorial Garden, Design Indaba, and Robin Evans. It is an essential read for researchers, practitioners, and students of interior design at all levels.

Anca I. Lasc is Associate Professor of Design History in the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute. Her published work includes Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession (2018), Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, co-edited with Patricia Lara-Betancourt and Margaret Maile Petty (Routledge, 2018), Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse (Routledge, 2016), and Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, co-edited with Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor (2015).

Deborah Schneiderman is Professor of Interior Design at Pratt Institute and principal/founder of deSc: architecture/design/research. Her praxis explores the emerging fabricated interior environment and its materiality. Schneiderman’s published research includes the books Inside Prefab: The Ready-Made Interior (2012), The Prefab Bathroom (2014), Textile, Technology and Design: From Interior Space to Outer Space (2016), and Interiors Beyond Architecture (2018).

Keena Suh is an Associate Professor in the Interior Design Department at Pratt Institute with over twenty years of active practice in architecture and interior design. Her interest is in developing pedagogical frameworks to foster cross-disciplinary collaborations and learning.

Karin Tehve is Associate Professor of Interior Design at Pratt Institute, where she coordinates the theory and undergraduate thesis curriculum. Her research and writing concentrates on taste, media, and identity and their intersection with the public realm. This includes teaching (and learning from) undergraduate studios examining the relationship between aesthetics and inclusivity in New York City’s INT POPS, projects exploring social media and public realm, and an in-progress book about the history of taste. Her recent publications include "Interiors for and on Display" in Interiors Beyond Architecture (editors Deborah Schneiderman and Amy Campos, Routledge, 2018), as well as "POPS: Access, Appearance and Identity," published Spring 2020 in International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design 6, parallel territories.

Alexa Griffith Winton is a design historian and educator in New York City, where she is Manager of Content+Curriculum at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Her research addresses issues of craft in the industrial and computer ages, the role of technology in modern domestic design, and the theorization of the domestic interior. Winton’s work has been published in numerous scholarly and popular publications, including the Journal of Design History, Dwell, Journal of the Archives of American Art, and the Journal of Modern Craft. She edited Textile Technology and Design: From Interior Space to Outer Space with Deborah Schneiderman (2016).

Karyn Zieve is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century French images of the Middle East and Northern Africa, particularly those by Eugène Delacroix, and questions of Orientalism, museum history, and historiography.