Upkeep, Repair, and Maintenance in Adaptive Interiors

This volume explores issues of repair, maintenance, sustenance, and adaptation within the context of interior design and its histories.

The contributions to this volume celebrate critical analysis of past and present work as well as potentials for upkeeping the built environment, sustaining our histories and cultures, and maintaining our shared resources as we face radical shifts in the ways in which we inhabit the various spaces where we work, live, convene, cross, and connect. Chapters recognize the ways in which the interior has defined, reinforced, hidden, and protected servitude and repair. They offer an appreciation of the role of interiors to extend the lives of our architectures and the human interactions they sustain. Expert and emerging contributing authors explore varied topics such as Dalit cleaning as a practice of decolonial interior architecture, responses to pest invasion, cultural attitudes toward age, wear and waste, and creative repair, among many others.

This will be of great interest to all students and academics of interior design, as well as architecture, architectural conservation, visual culture, history of art, and all those interested in the theory and philosophy of the reuse of interiors.

Author Biography

Amy Campos is a Professor at California College of the Arts. She focuses on durability and design, and the impermanent, migratory potentials of the interior. Recent publications include Public Interiority (Routledge, 2024), Interior Design On Edge (Routledge, 2024), Interior Futures (Crucible Press, 2019), Interiors Beyond Architecture (Routledge, 2018), and Interior Architecture Theory Reader (Routledge, 2018). She received a BArch from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and an MSAAD from Columbia University.

Deborah Schneiderman is a Professor at Pratt Institute. Her scholarship and praxis explore the emerging fabricated interior environment. Recent publications include Inside Prefab: The Ready-Made Interior; The Prefab Bathroom; Textile, Technology and Design: From Interior Space to Outer Space; Interiors Beyond Architecture; Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors; Appropriated Interiors, Interiors On Edge, and The Prefabricated Interior.

Keena Suh is a Professor in the Interior Design Department at Pratt Institute, where she teaches and coordinates courses across the programs at undergraduate and graduate levels, with a focus on interdisciplinary learning. She holds an MArch from Columbia University.

Karyn Zieve is Assistant Dean in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art & Design at Pratt Institute. She teaches classes that range from the introductory history of art and design sequence to topics in museum studies and the long nineteenth-century European art, design, and theory with a focus on cross-cultural communication and miscommunication. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, completing her dissertation on Eugene Delacroix, Orientalism, and Historicism.