Foreword ___room

“There is no such thing as a simple room.”¹

This theme issue of Interiors titled, ____room, explores the complexity of rooms and their typologies. Rooms become distinct with the addition of descriptors such as bedroom, washroom, dining-room, drawing-room, ante-room, laundry-room, powder-room, or in non-domestic spaces such as – boardroom, machine-room and waiting-room. Rooms change when people become roommates, or in a nod to phonetic wordplay, to ruminate. The call for submissions to this theme issue took place at the same time the Covid-19 pandemic was emerging. The collection of submissions received turned the gaze inward as pandemic statistics revealed how quickly social life would change with the need to retreat inside where rooms were being reinvented.

In Species of Spaces and Other Stories, Georges Perec describes rooms as “A bedroom is a room in which there is a bed; a dining-room is a room in which there are a table and chairs, and often a sideboard; a sitting-room is a room in which there are armchairs and a couch…” but when occupied, he offers new descriptors to these typologies that reveal their active state.²

In the novel, In America, Susan Sontag turns the reader inward and blurs the physical and psychological boundary of a room, writing, “But even a long journey must begin somewhere, say, in a room. Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.”³ These excerpts resonate with the context of interiors, where over the past year, passive room types were made active by objects and interlopers, often seen in the background of virtual Zoom calls. Dormant backgrounds became active participants as curation strategies provided daily changes to a room’s identity.

The collection of works in this issue reveals otherworldly visions that reshape and transcend the quotidian. The ‘fill-in-the-blank’ in front of ‘room’ was an invitation to explore interiors through character defining fore-words. The results take the form of practice, writing, research and installations in this double issue that offers insight into ___room.

Notes

1 Mark Wigley, “Inside the Inside,” in The Architectural Unconscious: James Casebere + Glen Seator, ed. Joseph N. Newland (Andover: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 2000), 23.

2 Georges Perec and John Sturrock, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 27.

3 Susan Sontag, In America (London: Vintage, 2001), 27.