This special theme issue focuses on the role of interiors in architectural experiments, while also exploring how experimentation advances interiors as a distinct field of theoretical and applied knowledge.

In his 1970 book Experimental Architecture, Peter Cook engaged the question of experimentation by bringing together a range of then-emerging international architectural practices that sought to challenge the profession’s status quo. Situating their work both historically and in relation to possible future trajectories, the aim was to identify various modes of resistance to “the broad and horrific mainstream of recent architecture.”1 As alternatives to full-scale building construction as the field’s overemphasized form of output, such practices often made use of graphic content like drawings, images, text, and other media suitable for circulation through printed publications and exhibitions. Much experimentation also occurred through material, spatial, and temporal means, resulting in prototypes, installations, and performances, from Haus-Rucker-Co’s wearable balloons to Friedrich St. Florian’s light-based “Imaginary Space” interventions. Whether exploring the occupational potential of novel envelopes or speculating upon the effects that technologies have on bodies in space, such architectural experiments regularly engaged various aspects of interiors as a space and interiority as a matter of subjectivity.

As a theme, “Interior Experiments” is an invitation to reflect on how the interior—as site, space, context, environment, framework, or body of knowledge—instigates, supports, engages, or is produced by experimental architecture. How is the interior conceptualized and instrumentalized as a laboratory or a controlled environment, not unlike a Petri dish, within which architectural experiments take place?

In parallel, contributors are invited to probe the potential for appropriating the term Experimental Architecture for the disciplinary benefit of interiors as a creative field and body of knowledge. In her 2019 book Experimental Architecture: Designing the Unknown, Rachel Armstrong states, “Experimental architecture is introduced as a research practice capable of developing alternative architectural paradigms by redefining the materials, tools and limits of the field.”2 What if, for the purposes of advancing the journal’s thematic interest, architecture/architectural were replaced by interior? What are the contours of experimental interiors as a field, an emergent set of alternative approaches to both research and design as they are conventionally practiced in both the profession and in academia? Furthermore, what is an interior experiment in terms of objectives, methodologies, and outcomes? What is the value of experimentation in the field of interiors and how may the relevance of this work also be oriented outward?

More than fifty years since the publication of Cook’s Experimental Architecture—a part of a series that at the time also included books on experimental painting, cinema, and theater—what might be the content of a follow-up volume titled Experimental Interiors?

• 1. Peter Cook, Experimental Architecture (New York: Universe Books, 1970), 7.
• 2. Rachel Armstrong, Experimental Architecture: Designing the Unknown (London: Routledge, 2019), 39.