ABSTRACT
This essay compares public interiority as a framework for interior design with the French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte’s concept of interior urban design. Public interiority refers to discipline-wide explorations of interiors-oriented design practices unconstrained by architectural distinctions between inside and outside, while Wilmotte’s concept identifies a set of attitudes adopted by his professional practice for designing exterior public spaces. The comparison between the two is based on considering public interiority as framed by the eponymous academic symposium at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 2023 and Wilmotte’s 1999 monograph Architecture intérieure des villes—Interior Urban Design. The aim is to connect contemporary scholarship on public interiors with professional precedent in order to identify insightful, productive as well as problematic intersections between already actualized and potential future models of interiors-oriented practices in contemporary cities.
