ABSTRACT
The designer can easily offer particularity when working for a known client with known needs and tastes. The design process will always be conscious of the client. Only in magazine illustrations are designs uninhabited, a practice that has been much criticized. Yet an unpeopled photograph is not the same as an unpeopled room; in the former, the absence of people, opaque as they inevitably are, lets us see the designer's work more clearly. Further, the illustrated room's emptiness is an invitation, allowing one as voyeurs an easier projection of themselves into the space. But it is a perilous situation if ever for a moment a room is empty in its designer's imagination. Like the sound of the tree falling unheard in the forest, the quality of the uninhabited interior is of no consequence. Interior design, being within architecture, is necessarily less big than architecture, but not necessarily less deep.
