Writing in Fabrications about design historiography in Australia, the historian of interiors, Catriona Quinn, recently noted that “it is a challenge to name a professional interior designer — Marion Hall Best aside — who has attracted significant scholarship.” This despite the distinguished record of innovative interior design pedagogy and theory in Australia and the now decades long critical and theoretical effort to decentre the heroic, masculine form giver in art and architecture. One might have expected these twin forces to reshape historical scholarship.  But as Quinn’s observation makes clear the mere recognition that space-making practices traditionally gendered as ‘feminine’ – especially the design and decoration of interior spaces - had been disparaged and ignored, did not lead automatically to a boom in historical scholarship focused on the interior, to the role of women, queer men, and non-professionals in making the built environment, or to the critical and professional mechanisms by which this encoding of the interior as feminine has persisted. Prior to the recent special issue of Fabrications, Looking Inside Design (32:1), which was a festschrift honouring the career of Prof. Harriet Edquist, it is difficult to identify a concerted effort to highlight the architectural interior in historical scholarship in Australasia.

Wider shifts in architectural culture and thinking in the past 25 years might well have brought the interior more forcefully into view even without the cogent feminist critique that pointed to its historical devaluation. These shifts include Rem Koolhaas’ provocation about the programmatic centrality of the interior to bigness, and Charles Rice and Suzie Attiwill’s related elaboration of ideas about interior urbanism; Penny Sparke and Alice Friedman’s centring of issues of taste and consumption in the creation of architecture and interiors; and the ethical invocation to reuse existing buildings and its corollary focus on remaking buildings from the inside out. More radically, others have sought to deconstruct Western assumptions about the nature of spatial relationships which historically divide architecture and interiors into separate disciplines. These diverse scholarly approaches all put the question of how interior space is conceptualised and designed at the centre of architectural discourse.

With this themed issue, the editors of Fabrications seek papers that help construct a new critical history of interiors in Australasia. Drawing on a broad range of precedents, the issue aims to reveal how the design and fabrication of interior environments has accommodated place and culture-specific activities. To do so we invite papers that address problems and practices in Australia and New Zealand but also in the Asia Pacific region and around the world. This new history should include approaches to scholarship that attend to the work of individual designers,  but also consider clients, finance and the whole life cycle of interior spaces.