Interior Provocations: WEATHER

The symposium Interior Provocations: WEATHER encourages provocative, boundary-expanding proposals from design practitioners, historians, educators, and theorists that challenge traditional definitions of atmosphere within the interior realm of living environments. With WEATHER as a prompt, the aim is to reflect upon the interconnected nature of atmosphere as both a social and environmental condition, and in this way open up questions about the potential of interiors as spaces of design speculation and experimentation in the age of planetary change.

Co-Hosted by the Interior Design Program at The University of Texas at Austin and Pratt Institute, Interior Provocations was founded by Pratt Institute faculty as an annual symposium dedicated to furthering the scholarship of the expanding fields of interior design practice, history, and theory.

Weather is a situated state of atmosphere; an atmospheric event marked by place and time. As a term, atmosphere refers to the gaseous layers that envelop astronomical objects, but more broadly also encompasses mood, vibes, and other similarly spatial and social phenomena. Following such an expanded definition, how might weather similarly stretch beyond meteorology to permeate other facets of living environments, past, present, and future? Furthermore, what can the framing of weather as an unfolding and dynamic yet situationally specific condition reveal about the role that interiors play—or have historically played—in the shaping of both social and ecological atmospheres?

What roles and responsibilities do fields engaged in shaping the atmosphere of interiors assume in the age of extreme weather events unfolding across a heating planet? How do atmospheric patterns, traditions, metaphors, or mishaps from the past inform current interior responses? How do shifting weather patterns signal the urgent need for rethinking interiors and interiority as a composite space that engages multiple forms of life, mixed realities, evolving urbanisms, and emerging material conditions with profound social and environmental consequences? What projections, speculations, and mitigations might be needed in response to impending weather? How do we, in other words, forecast changes in the field’s atmosphere?

Keynote Speaker:

Philippe Rahm | Philippe Rahm Architects | Paris, France