Audrey Michelle Mast

The book’s first chapter, “Some Assembly Required,” addresses the Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y.) phenomenon, which manifests itself pop-culturally in everything from Home Depot to backyard compost heaps to Martha Stewart Living magazine. Ferrara and Smith posit that the common thread among D.I.Y.-ers is “the driving need for individual self-expression and an intense dislike of waste” (and often a necessary thriftiness impossible to reconcile with glossy decor rags.)

Profiles include the interior of Fort Thunder, a now-demolished RISD student colony and center of the Providence indie rock scene in the late nineties; a promotional space decorated by IKEA, bastion of all that is clean, cheap Euro chic; still-functioning sod houses on the American Great Plains; a cozy house in a depressed area outside of Cape Town, South Africa, its makeshift tin walls plastered with magazine advertisements; and a moveable shelter of plastic Coca-Cola crates (with a billboard roof) self-made by Peter, who lives on the street in New York’s Harlem. In the second chapter, “Go with the Flow,” designers and architects are inspired by the versatility of the structures built by nomadic cultures. Swiss artists Urs Hartmann and Markus Wetzel configure a Zurich loft with flexible sculptural blobs that function as rooms but can be moved around the space. While they were constructing the pieces, collectively called “Wildbrook” (2000), they invited spectators to watch them work in an adjacent tree house/studio while they also filmed a movie in which their pursuits were part of the narrative.

Artist-imagined interiors are mostly the domain of the next section, “Moving Pictures,” in which the very idea of space is reordered by technology—computers and photography. In South Korean artist Seoungwon Won’s “Wunscghzimmer” (Wish Room), he transforms a digitally enhanced photomontage series of typical modern domiciles into surreal zoo-like habitats where woods, water and rocks mingle with bookcases and beds. In another topsy-turvy room—this one a “real” installation—Berlin artist Marion Eichmann knitted a black and white zigzag pattern onto walls, furniture, and an outfit for herself, creating a warm op-art effect in which the parameters of the space dissolve.

Perhaps the most provocative section of the book is the final one, “Contents Under Pressure,” in which the notions of intimacy and privacy, so vital to an interior environment, are challenged. Here we see projects “united by discipline,” according to the authors: an arrestingly beautiful (if unsurprisingly minimalist) isolation room in a mental hospital, painted in soothing colors; the hypermodern Netherlands house used in the original Big Brother television show; and the multimillion-dollar “safe home” (complete with an arsenal of weapons) built by a Los Angeles security expert. Also featured are progressive prisons, like a prototype designed by students at Chicago’s Archeworks, an alternative design school. Their plan, Entropias (from “entropy” and “utopia”) proposes containment within a sort of geodesic dome where inmates would farm, raise animals, and collect rainwater.

Ferrara and Smith (who co-authored the book’s predecessor, Xtreme Houses, also by Prestel Publishing) are both art historians with a bent toward probing the boundaries between art and design—or maybe just art and life. Part of the genius of Xtreme Interiors is that its photographs tend to treat each space with the similar photo aesthetics: decorating magazine, promotional advertising and/or art installation via white-cube gallery documentation, all of which can be quite clinical. And here, that’s good. Peter’s plastic street domicile; Berkline Inc. leather armchairs, marketed as part of a posh home theater room; NASA’s Transhab, a prototype vacuum-chamber dwelling for astronauts—they all exist on the same stylish photo-aesthetic plane alongside the authors’ thoughtful, elegant descriptive commentary. What makes many of the interiors themselves fascinating is their inherent politics, intentional or not.

Whether or not they’re meant to be lived in, or whether one can imagine feeling comfortable in them or not, they are arguably chosen to illustrate our culture’s slow, arduous refusal of the still-predominant suburban ideal. (In their introduction, Smith and Ferrara even include a small photograph of a Levittown house with its built-in television.) The designers and dwellers of Xtreme Interiors have chosen to challenge the traditional domestic configuration because they need more than its prepackaged propriety can offer. This book is evidence of the transformative power of changing one’s surroundings, extending maxim of the “personal as political” into the sphere of interior architecture and art history, and subverting the notion of domesticity as a purely private enterprise.

See this article at the F News archives.