Inside/Outside

A thought-provoking post at the FJ on interiors, featuring hysterical quotes and pictures from a Terence Conran guide to interior design, published in the late 70s. This reminded me of something I noticed when visiting the Zaha Hadid exhibition at the Design Museum last year. I loved the paintings and the models, but when I got upstairs to the furniture it all seemed so...silly, so tacky and naff by comparison with the buildings, which by contrast seemed (via their representation) muscular, hard, uncompromising etc etc. Thinking about it, I realise this impulse is rather dubious. Why is it that a flight of fancy, where form outstrips function - if ostensibly ornament-free - like Hadid's buildings seems acceptable as houses, museums, train stations, but seems ludicrous to sit on? Obviously this is an entirely contradictory (and silly) thing to think. And of course all the exhibits were interior design of a sort.



Although my taste in exteriors (give or take, a liking for Victorian Gothic in its red-brick, seedy mode, a few other styles and moments, but it seldom moves me in the way 20th century architecture will) is almost entirely for the unornamented, the space I actually live in is a wilfully chaotic mess of books, videos, postcards, posters, clashing chairs found in markets or left by the landlord, and miscellaneous bits of tat - well, one might even call some of them ornaments. Minimal interiors always seem rather more obsessive and anal (in a bad way, that is) than buildings themselves, and whenever I briefly entertain the idea of (given infinite capital) moving to say, the minimumwohnung at Lawn Road, I realise that I would have to leave most of my library behind. I'm also reminded with this stuff that most design isn't aimed at me, or anyone on my income. I have lived and may live again in architect-designed council flats, but unless something drastic happens, I will never be able to afford a bespoke Hadid interior.



Maybe this is a slightly peculiar version of the Lord Burlington/Augustan ethos of the cool, stark exterior and the lush interior - the cool, stark exterior and the messy, dusty interior. So I was a bit nonplussed when I once heard the mighty Rodney Gordon at a symposium talking about his LCC days, recalling his worry at how the tenants at the Alton estate always chose decor totally out of kilter with the flats' design. Surely both could be accommodated? In fact, net curtains tend to look marvellous when seen in the windows of Brutalist slab blocks, adding a layer of intrigue and weirdness, in a dissimilar but analogous way to the (interestingly common) view of a full bookcase through the windows of Balfron or the Brunswick. There's also something frankly lame about designers, urbanists and merchant bankers moving into listed, architect-designed ex-council flats, proceeding to scrupulously redesign the rooms to be in keeping, getting in the glass coffee tables and the Barcelona chairs. But for all that, I'm perhaps too afflicted by Modernist good taste to ever be converted to adding lacy exteriors to council flats. It seems more interesting and contradictory when both are happening at once.



Addenda: the Robin Hood Gardens flat I visited for Open House a couple of years ago, rented by an elderly Geordie woman since the place opened, was an absolutely awe-inspiring conglomeration of 70s tat preserved in aspic, from the green Oriental lady displayed in non-ironic situ to various framed pictures of cowboys & indians. I was having flashbacks to visits to my alcoholic uncle's gaff in my tender years, a council house like a nicotine-stained lung, all brown fittings, thick glass ashtrays and a pervasive musk of sweat, fags and varnish. And it should be noted that one of the cut-out figures walking the streets-in-the-sky in a Smithsons montage is the young Terence Conran himself...

(Photo of the Ferrier Estate courtesy of Joel Anderson)