Binding Interiority

Abstract

Architectural space is usually documented in the form of orthographic projections, that is, plan, section and elevation drawings, with perspective and three-dimensional models. These render the space in a particular way and hence have limitations and specificity. The artist’s book – that is, a book made as an original work of art, with an artist or architect as author – offers a different mode of presenting documentation and reading representation. ‘Binding Interiority’ argues that the qualities and characteristics of the artist’s book, coupled with the content of architectural documentation, coalesce to form a mode of three-dimensional representation conducive to particular and different readings of drawings, representation and the interior. Through Charles Rice’s writing on interiority, and ‘interior’s doubleness’, this paper explores the book’s interiority. Works by the author, and others employing volumetric devices, such as pop-up and ‘peepshow’ books, demonstrate aspects of this interiority. In particular, the cut and fold ‘origami architecture’ of Masahiro Chatani and the spatiality of the Japanese technique of okoshi-ezu, or ‘folded drawings’, are examined.These drawings which have a three-dimensionality to them, and employ a book-like folding structure, relate to the notion of the book as a folded model.This paper examines the way in which interiority can be present within the representation of interior architecture, that is, representation itself that has interiority, in the form of the book.As will be demonstrated, this interiority shifts the perception of space and the objecthood of the representation, and introduces a temporal reading of representation.