This chapter presents a genealogy of the new ‘Age of Aesthetics’ proclaimed by American writer Virginia Postrel in The Substance of Style. It does so from the standpoint of the sociology of consumption to begin with, and then follows up with an anthropologically inspired critique of certain current trends in design thinking that purport to be grounded in the science of sensory evaluation, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Next, this chapter entertains the style counsel of the LA-based interior decorator Catherine Bailly Dunne, with a particular focus on their practice as grounded in a ‘science of the concrete’. It concludes by offering an alternative model for design practice centring on the figure of the interior designer as sensory ethnographer.
In the nineteenth century, the stereoscope was celebrated as a new way of seeing space that provided access into a simulated haptic realm, complicating the relationship between the senses, the mind and the world. This chapter examines the representation of the nineteenth-century dressing room as a sensorium that merges the visual and tactile in virtual space. This private room in the domestic interior becomes a sensory apparatus that is both medium and subject in the exposure and reproduction of the human body, mediated through the ‘dark chambers’ of the human eye. Dressing scenes in the domestic boudoir became a popular subject in nineteenth-century stereoviews offering sentimental, erotic and humorous narratives for popular consumption. These staged tableaux ranged from lone figures languidly disrobing for a disembodied viewer to crowded bedroom scenes with multiple players energetically engaged in physical acts of dress and discovery. The architectural interior plays an active role in the uncovering of the body as it is reflected and amplified in the objects, furnishings and surfaces of the space. The space of the nineteenth-century dressing room materializes as a sensorium that acts as an ‘unfaithful mirror’, highlighting the deceptive play between vision and touch, and between the mind and the world.
In demonstrating a lack of previous scholarly attention and the pace of associated Victorian social and culture change, the introduction outlines how this book will offer a new, interconnected analysis of the way in which technology – both diagnostic and assistive – shaped medical practice, spectacle dispensing and attitudes to spectacle use and partial sight. Three key contexts frame this discussion: medicalisation and medical capitalism; the design model of disability and the role of assistive technology in the classification of functional norms; and the use of the everyday object in material culture. It argues that visual aids and vision testing offer new ways to explore the limits of medicalisation, the value of the ‘everyday’ and the way in which technology influences our understanding of sensory and disability history.
Numerous authors have explored the connections between architecture and the senses, but scholarship addressing sensoriality in the history and practice of interior design remains significantly more limited. Yet sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing are instrumental to both the design of the interior and its experience by users. Interiors are designed with at least one, if not all, of the senses in mind, and it is through the senses that the human body responds, consciously or not, to its surrounding environment. Emphasizing the importance of this volume as an essential reference on the subject, the introduction provides the reader with an overview of the current state of research, before discussing theoretical notions that are key to examining the relationships between interior design and the senses. It concludes with a presentation of the fourteen chapters in the volume, highlighting their specific contributions and drawing interconnections between them in a way that foregrounds the crucial role that senses play in the experiences and expressions of interior design. Accordingly, and because a fair distribution of scholarship between sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing has yet to be achieved, the chapters presented are grouped thematically rather than by any one particular sense.
This chapter shines light on how mass production of spectacles expanded the spectacle market outside medical control. It analyses the tensions and shared concerns that emerged between opticians and medical men concerning professional jurisdiction over an increasingly lucrative market. It draws upon material culture and a broad and extensive range of archival and digital sources: advertisements, medical texts, medical journals, The Optician, opticians’ texts, newspapers and periodicals. It argues that the 1890s were an intense period of inter- and intra-professional debate between ophthalmologists and opticians. In exploring popular responses to sight loss, it demonstrates that, while opticians were effective in maintaining their position as experts, both opticians’ and medical practitioners’ authority as experts was challenged by the increasing availability of spectacles amongst miscellaneous high street retailers and conflicting popular advice. Spectacles were a uniquely common and ubiquitous assistive device and popular beliefs that the dispenser did not need to possess professional expertise continued to circulate. Opticians and ophthalmologists increasingly collaborated to regulate dispensing practices against a backlash and popular demand for cheap or high-end stylish frames on the high street that paid little consideration to their efficacy or functionality.
This chapter tracks a decisive change in the attitudes towards spectacle use within medical practice from the 1850s. It demonstrates how medical practitioners’ utilisation and adaptation of diagnostic technology – namely the ophthalmoscope invented in 1851 – recategorised the meaning and understanding of blindness and medical involvement in spectacle dispensing. This chapter is fundamental to the book’s argument. Drawing upon medical texts, medical journals and medical trade catalogues, it explores how medical practitioners attempted to define both the theory related to vision enhancement and the methods of spectacle dispensing. It argues that technology and the definition of the ‘normal’ eye were decisive in transforming medical opinion on the overall utility of spectacles. Practitioners could observe the refractive condition of a person’s eye for the first time and therefore apply the principles of optics to use spectacles as a viable treatment option. Ophthalmologists increasingly argued that objective methods must be used in dispensing spectacles and that these should be conducted only by the medically qualified. By cultivating this discrete body of expertise, medical practitioners attempted to leverage the importance of vision and created new sites of vision testing and spectacle dispensing to help justify their increasing intervention in, for example, schools and workplaces.
This chapter attempts a decolonization of the senses and interior design through the exploration of the bourgeois art deco interior and the objects in its landscape. What Rosalind Krauss terms ‘Black Deco’ refers to the work of Pierre Legrain and others, specifically the decorative effect of transforming African sources into ‘smoothed out’ objects suitable for bourgeois tastes. The luxurious affect of these objects and various techniques elicited a symbiotic sensory connection between vision and the haptic. African or tribal-inspired designs and objects were the site of a cultural contest and were emblematic of either disease and contagion or as a liberation that renewed modern Western culture. Moreover, the fraught and tense relationship between modernism and art deco has conjured a series of mostly artificial oppositional binaries: avant-garde/bourgeois, exterior/interior, structural/decorative, industrial/handmade, mass/elite and male/female at which point the supposedly excessive nature of the decorative, the sensory and the primitive reside. These tensions, contests and issues are at the centre of the chapter’s investigation of the use of so-called ‘Black Deco’ within the interwar bourgeois interior.
The physical world is experienced and understood through the five senses. This is especially true of the interior where decorators and designers, both professional and amateur, have long experimented with, embraced and harnessed new materials, objects and technologies to enhance or heighten sensory awareness and wellbeing. Yet a discussion of sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste is too often overlooked in the histories and historiography of interior design and design history. Interiors do not solely exist in abstract or inchoate form: it is through the senses that the body navigates and negotiates the experiences that interior design offers. Drawing from fields including design history, design studies and sensory studies, The senses in interior design charts the somewhat fragmentary histories of how the senses have been mobilized within various forms of interior. Grouped into three thematic clusters exploring sensory politics, aesthetic entanglements and sensual economies respectively, the contributions brought together in this volume shed light on sensory expressions and experiences of interior design throughout history. Examining domestic and public interiors from the late sixteenth century to today, the authors give back to the body its central role in the practices, understanding and uses of interiors. In so doing, they explore fundamental considerations about identities, social structures and politics that reveal the significance of the senses in all aspects of interior design and decoration.
Before becoming a famous socialite, Count Robert de Montesquiou (1855–1921) lived a confidential life in the attic of his parents’ hôtel particulier. Situated in the aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain, this apartment was responsible for the count’s notoriety and his reputation as a decadent and sensitive aristocrat. This chapter examines the ways de Montesquiou transformed the interiors of his apartment into a work of art through the solicitation of the senses, and how this in turn came to be used against him by his detractors. De Montesquiou’s queer sensoria is explored through the critiques that it generated in relation to hyperaesthesia, effeminophobia and pathologization. De Montesquiou developed an original idea of the interior as artistic, aristocratic and therapeutic. As a strategy of legitimation, he would emphasize the artistic aspect of his enterprise with claims that his décor was a form of literary and musical writing. At the same time, he would invoke his illustrious ancestors and their glorious civilized past as part of that strategy. De Montesquiou countered accusations of sickness by claiming the therapeutic and calming virtue of his interior designs in his poetry. This chapter offers an alternative genealogy of modernity, one that is ornamental, queer and extravagant. More significantly, this chapter enables a better understanding of the role the senses played in the condemnation of queer style as well as offering a recognition of queer agency and strategies of affirmation.
In 1974 the UK-based furniture designer, retailer and restaurateur Terence Conran published The House Book. Since then, over two and a half million copies of the book have been sold. Because of the photographic basis of the volume the primary sensual register is visual, but this visuality is itself multisensual, stressing textures and other haptic qualities and often including the presence of food, flowers and musical instruments. The aim of this chapter is twofold. Initially the task is to suggest that a historical sense of what an interior ‘feels’ like – whether it feels ‘homely’, ‘fabulous’, ‘convivial’, ‘sacred’ and so on – is dependent on a synaesthetic mix of sensorial materials, and that these are perceived through orchestrations of the visual, haptic, auditory and olfactory. The second task is to suggest an approach that tries to grasp the synaesthetic effect and affect of space through a vocabulary that is capacious enough to register multisensory affects. Through the term ‘atmosphere’ the chapter suggests a way of grasping the gestalt of the sensory scene of the interior. But sensing is an interactive affair, and while atmospheres are active agents in interiors so too are the subjects that congregate there: ‘attunement’ names the symbiotic assemblage of attuning environment and attuned and attune-able subject. To give material form to these approaches, the chapter uses the case study of Conran’s The House Book and the domestic aesthetics that Conran and the shop Habitat developed from 1964.