The second annual Pratt Interior Provocations symposium, Interiors without Architecture, seeks papers addressing the broad cultural, historical, and theoretical implications of interiors beyond their conventionally defined architectural boundaries, and not limited by interior design’s traditional associations with decoration, taste, and social status. This conference encourages provocative and boundary-expanding proposals from design practitioners, historians, and theorists addressing, for example, the implications of interior design expertise applied to prefabricated, reused enclosures not originally intended for human occupation; interiors composed by natural geography; interior environments created for literature, film, stage and virtual reality; interiors constructed within external urban surroundings; mobile interiors, inhabitable art; infrastructural interiors; interior landscapes; adaptive reuse and interiors; and interiors on and for display, including period rooms, model rooms, dioramas, and store display windows.

This symposium celebrates the publication of Interiors Beyond Architecture (Routledge 2018), co-edited by Deborah Schneiderman (Pratt Institute) and Amy Campos (California College of the Arts) as well as of Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail (Routledge 2018), co-edited by Anca I. Lasc (Pratt Institute), Patricia Lara-Betancourt (The Modern Interiors Research Centre, Kingston University, London, UK), and Margaret Maile Petty (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia).

Keynote Speaker: Penny Sparke, Acting Dean and Professor of Design History; Director, Modern Interiors Research Centre, Kingston University, London, UK

Moderator: Alice Friedman, Grace Slack McNeil Professor of American Art; Professor of Art, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a 2-page cv to interiorprovocations[at]gmail.com