This article reviews The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit? Published in 2018, Closed Worlds is an aggregation of written and visual material covering over four years of research by its author, Lydia Kallipoliti, on the subject of closed worlds. Through combining studies in the fields of spatial design, biology and technology, Kallipoliti establishes closed worlds as a new typology of interior space that internalises architecture and the environment in a technologically dependent, synthetic naturalism.  Based on an extended review of Kallipoliti’s multiple works on the subject, this essay unpacks the key contributions of Closed Worlds to our knowledge of sustainable design: from establishing the origin of closed worlds in the NASA space program of the 1960s; to demonstrating their adaptation to an idealised architecture of environmental resistance in the 1970s; to their contribution to absurd environmental policy in the 1980s. Using writing and drawings to demonstrate the flaws of closed worlds in the built environment, Kallipoliti establishes a platform for critical reflection on sustainability and rejects the idealisation of green thinking in design. By addressing the concept of loss in closed worlds, in the form of shit, Kallipoliti argues that uncertainty rather than sustainability has the phenomenal potential to instigate change. Rather than rejecting the concept of, or the need for, environmentally conscious design, Closed Worlds problematises the field of existing ideas to assess the credibility of ethical claims. By using factual examples of real projects, Closed Worlds questions principles that have been institutionalised in an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of well-intentioned but ultimately misguided ideals. In the face of mounting environmental catastrophe, this book is poignant, as it advocates for the need to address complexity, rather than efficiency, by looking directly at the uncertainty of the natural environment and asking hard questions about real problems of survival.

Jun’ichirô Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (1933) describes a theory of aesthetics based on shadows. He suggests that contrary to Western ideas of highly visible space, ambiguity and darkness are distinct characteristics of Japanese interiors. Kazuo Nakajima describes this condition as the blending of social practices and interior elements in indeterminate spaces of the vernacular Japanese home, and suggests the decline of such interiors has threatened the psychological stability of Japan since Western engagement, from the Meiji restoration of 1868. Almost as affirmation of Nakajima’s fears, the same year Tanizaki’s essay was originally published in Japan, the Art Deco Residence of Prince Akaka was completed in Minato-ku, Tokyo. Now a house museum, this assemblage of interiors is credited room-by-room to either the French interior designer Henri Rapin or the Japanese Construction Bureau of the Imperial Household, confirming for Nakajima a division between Western and Japanese concepts of space. This paper questions Nakajima’s dualist reading of the Residence’s interiors by unpacking the complexities of Western engagement in the Japanese interior since the Meiji restoration until the 1930s. Additionally, this paper examines parallel concepts of interior space that directly influenced the Residences conception, from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris and the 1920s Culture Life movement in Japan. From these historic and contextual examinations, this paper demonstrates a fundamental shift from the concept of space in the Japanese interior described by Tanizaki and Nakajima. It suggests that Western engagement displaced how value was attributed in the interior, from things that were unseen to things that were seen.

No abstract

This essay argues that historical parallels exist between Australian colonial image production and early-19th-century prison design in England. It compares similarities in the compositional arrangement of a panoramic perspective from the Van Diemen’s Land colonial frontier in 1835, by minor artist John Richardson Glover, and Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 plan for the Panopticon prison. Richardson Glover’s predilection for censoring the unknown environment in his drawings with rational explanations is associated with the cultivation of spectatorship since 1793 in the popular visual media of the Panorama Rotunda at Leicester Square. The influence of spectatorship is argued to parallel the instrumentality of inspection in the Panopticon plan and together reflect a social rationale that equated biblical references to universal rationalism and anoints visibility as a secular, Enlightenment mode of moral reformation. Spectatorship and inspection in panoramic perspective and the Panopticon plan are shown to operate as corrective forces to govern British imperial interests at home and abroad.

It seems fitting to explore an alternative form of introduction to an issue that promises other interior worlds. It also seems fitting to take up the opportunity to experiment with digital interfaces, word processing software and audio-visual media to exploit the static state of the page in favour of the spatial, the temporal and the audible. “introducing, inducing” is a product of fabulation, and evidence of the journal’s commitment to push the boundaries of the multiple practices it reflects and the modes of making creative practice research public. The cover image created by Sophie Forsythe forms the first layer — a doorway, a threshold — that articulates a stretched, warped, morphed and fragmented world of many dimensions, unfettered by the tired binary of inside and outside. Its textures, surfaces and ethereal colours wrap space akin to spring pea tendrils, reaching towards luminosity with heliotropic determinism, and pushing through the flat page like new potatoes. References to each article contained in this journal issue lurk amongst this visual dissonance, slipping in between its layers, like English Numbers Stations, giving themselves up to forces other than gravity and voices other than human.