International Journal of Interior Architecture and Spatial Design

Material Vocabularies seeks historical, theoretical, speculative, and built work that promotes an awareness of materials as primary shapers and makers of space. This issue endeavors to reveal hybridized agencies, methodologies, and pedagogies in design education, scholarship, research, and practice revealing a global paradigm shift in the role of materials in the design process. ii invites trans-disciplinary research and collaborations that include, but are not limited to, architecture, interiors, industrial design, fashion, furniture, film performance, sociology, cultural studies, and the arts.

Gregory Marinic + Meg Jackson _ editors

Contemporary architects and designers manipulate materials into increasingly complex spatial conditions engaging their inherent behaviors, performative capacities, cultural identities, and modular constraints as generative opportunities. Central to this emerging dialogue, a tendency to resist formal biases acknowledges the agency of materials as central to the conceptual design process. Smooth, rough, porous, or impermeable, materials expand the parameters of what we understand as surface in the production of interior architecture, spatial installations, furniture, fashion, and media.

Agency is a notion that cuts across a wide range of territory in the humanities, social sciences, technology, art, and design, yet it is invariably considered discretely within disciplines. In particular regard to interiority, agency has been characterized as an inherently humanistic response to incorporating social and contextual responses into theoretical discourse. More recently, a rising awareness of ecological and material agencies has carved out an interstitial space between the formal and human expectations of spatial design. Expanding our conventional desires for design, a relational approach to material agency–addressing both sensorial and performative aspects–offers transfomative ramifications for interior architecture, spatial design, and our broader material culture.

Reflecting upon the convergence of social, ecological, and material forces, the fourth issue of ii, Material Vocabularies, seeks provocative work that engages speculation upon the future of materiality in spatial design. For this issue, we seek a broad range of investigations leveraging the expanded potential for materials in the conceptualization and production of interiors, spatial design, and light-mobile-architectures.