Appropriated Interiors

Appropriated Interiors uncovers the ways interiors participate explicitly and implicitly in embedded cultural and societal values and explores timely emergent scholarship in the fields of interior design history, theory, and practice.

What is "appropriate" and "inappropriate" now? These are terms with particular interest to the study of the interior. Featuring thirteen original curated essays, Appropriated Interiors explores the tensions between normative interiors that express the dominant cultural values of a society and interiors that express new, changing, and even transgressive values. With case studies from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, these historians, theorists, and design practitioners investigate the implications of interior design as it relates to politics, gender, identity, spatial abstraction, cultural expression, racial expression, technology, and much more.

An informative read for students and scholars of design history and theory, this collection considers the standards, assumptions, codes, and/or conventions that need to be dismantled and how we can expand our understanding of the history, theory, and practice of interior design to challenge the status quo.

Deborah Schneiderman, RA, LEED AP, is Professor of Interior Design at Pratt Institute and principal/founder of deSc: architecture/design/research. Her praxis explores the emerging fabricated interior environment and its materiality. Schneiderman’s published research includes the books Inside Prefab: The Ready-Made Interior, The Prefab Bathroom, Textile, Technology and Design: From Interior Space to Outer Space (with Alexa Griffith Winton), Interiors Beyond Architecture (with Amy Campos), and Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors (with Anca I. Lasc et al.). She has exhibited work and lectured internationally, including at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Center for Architecture, and the Van Alen Institute. Schneiderman earned her BS in design and environmental analysis from Cornell University and her MArch from SCI-Arc.

Anca I. Lasc is Associate Professor of Design History in the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute. Her publications include Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession and the edited volumes Revisiting the Past in Museums and at Historic Sites (with Andrew McClellan and Änne Söll), Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors (with Deborah Schneiderman et al.), Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail (with Patricia Lara-Betancourt and Margaret Maile Petty), and Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse and Designing the French Interior: Modern Home and Mass Media (with Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor). She has lectured internationally, including at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, the Kunstgeschichtliches Institut, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the Hagley Center, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her PhD in art history from the University of Southern California.

Karin Tehve is Associate Professor at Pratt Institute in New York, where she coordinates the theory and undergraduate thesis curriculum in interior design. She earned her Master of Architecture degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her own research and writing concentrates on taste, media and identity, and their intersection with the public realm. Karin founded her practice, KT3Dllc, in 2001, pursuing projects in architecture, interiors, and site-specific art. Conference presentations include IDEC, ACSA, and Common Ground. She has published in the Journal of Design History, the Journal of Interior Design, the International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design; contributed to Interiors Beyond Architecture; and is co-editor and contributor for Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors.