Interior architecture

Interior architecture is the design of a building or shelter from inside out, or the design of a new interior for a type of home that can be fixed. It can refer to the initial design and plan used for a building's interior, to that interior's later redesign made to accommodate a changed purpose, or to the significant revision of an original design for the adaptive reuse of the shell of the building concerned. The latter is often part of sustainable architecture practices, whereby resources are conserved by "recycling" a structure through adaptive redesign.

Generally referred to as the spatial art of environmental design, interior architecture also refers to the process by which the interiors of buildings are designed to address all aspects of the human use of their structural spaces. Put simply, interior architecture is the design of an interior in architectural terms.

Interior architecture may refer to:

Although the original spatial hierarchy of a building is always established by its first architect, subsequent iterations of the interior may not be, and for obvious reasons, older structures are often modified by designers of a different generation according to society’s changing needs as our cities evolve. This process often re-semanticizes the building as a consequence, and is predicated on the notion that buildings can never really be complete and unalterable.

An altered building may look the same on the exterior, but its interior may be completely different spatially. The interior architect must therefore be sensitive not only to the place of the building in its physical and socio-political context, but to the temporal requirements of changing owners and users. In this sense, if the building has “good bones” the original architectural idea is therefore the first iteration of an internal spatial hierarchy for that structure, after which others are bound to follow

Cities are now dense with such buildings, perhaps originally built as banks that are now restaurants, perhaps industrial mills that are now loft apartments, or even railway stations that have become art galleries. In each case the collective memory of the shape and character of the city is generally held to be more desirable than the possibility of a new building on the same site, although clearly economic forces apply. It is also possible to speculate that there might well be further new interiors for these structures in future years, but for each alteration the technical and technological expertise of the era will determine the extent to which the building is modified in its building life cycle.

Certain structure's interiors remain unaltered over time due to historic preservation, unchanged use, or financial limitations. Nevertheless, most buildings have only three possible long-range internal futures: First, designated significantly important to maintain visually unchanged, only accommodating unseen modern utilities, access, and structural stabilization, and restoration needs. Second, demolished to make way for a new building on the same site, or abandoned, becoming ruins. Finally, redesigned and altered to accommodate new uses.

There are many different degrees of alteration – a minor one to enable the building to conform to new legal codes is likely to prolong the first (or indeed later) iteration of interior space, but a major alteration, such as the retention of only the facade, is to all intents and purposes a new building. All possibilities within and between the two extremes are the domain of the interior architect.