Cultivating home: drawing interiors

Interiors are the spaces that we inhabit daily, where we move and connect with our material existence. They structure the social fabric of our lives; where and how we eat, sleep, work, and meet with others. Interiors are multiple: they may be domestic, spaces of recreation, institutions, workspaces, or the circulation routes that we walk through within a city. They anchor our bodies in architectural space through proprioceptive, kinaesthetic and subjective engagement with the surrounding environment. They impact on how we live and how we all live well together – and yet they are conceived and produced through a confined set of tools, materials, movements and drawing practices.

Feminist philosopher Karen Barad argues that, “representationalism ... separates the world into the ontologically disjunct domains of words and things…” Architectural representation and its production processes are sedimented with binary thinking such as male/female, inside/outside, subject/object. Architectural drawing practices perform through a particular set of actions that are sedimented with abstract thinking. They engage with representationalism through distance and separation.

New Materialist thinking, new technologies and software offer the potential to refigure drawing practices within the discipline of interior architecture. Currently new technologies are being used but drawing habits that can be traced back to the Renaissance period and perspectival thinking remain sedimented within the discipline. I argue that refiguring architectural drawing through feminist philosophy opens out new forms of drawing practice that are inclusive of all bodies – human and more than human, everyday actions, feelings, affects and the intra-activity of all material matters. And that new digital technologies create a space to liberate architectural and interior drawing methods and design strategies.

I use Wymering Manor, a sixteenth century house in Cosham, UK, as a case study. The house is a state of semi-ruination and currently being cared for by a community of trustees and local volunteers who work to remake the house for its many possible futures. The Manor is continually arranged and rearranged for events including heritage open days, quiz nights, plays, and paranormal activities. For these activities the community clean, make tea, cakes, and perform as characters who once lived in the house. Through these actions the volunteers create new material relations and intermeshing experiences. They show how the community care about the house and care about it as a place for living well.

In this paper I ask, how does thinking about home as an improvisational space – a space of daily movement, change how interiors are made? How do new technologies such as LiDAR scans refigure the architectural drawing practices through which homes are produced?