Interior Design MA ARCHIVE

Tutors: Dusan Decermic (course leader), Lara Rettondini, Richard Difford, Filip Visnjic, Debby Kuypers, Joe King,Claire Richmond

Dusan Decermic (course leader – MA Interior Design) is an architect who engages with both theoretical and design practices in architecture and interior design. He set up his own practice, arclab, in 1999 and in his professional career he has worked with numerous clients, large and small, including the Royal National Theatre and fashion designer Issey Miyake.

Embracing the material and intellectual complexities and contradictions magnified by the psychological agency inherent in the subject of interiority, our students, like wayfarers, are encouraged to trace their own paths through this ever changing palimpsest-like topography, unearthing traces of history over and through which they weave in active, contemporary practices. Site visits to abandoned buildings and places, devoid of any tangible use or potential future, are seen with fresh eyes and for us become environments full of new promise.

Interiors are elusive by nature, conspiratorial and inviting, dark, brooding, but also strangely alluring. This new territory, for too long ignored by more established disciplines, is rightfully taking it’s place of engagement with serious academic study and investigation. Academically young at heart but seasoned in practice, the MA Interior Design programme is poised to deliver new and exciting avenues of creative engagement. As a reflective example bearing these complexities, The Interior modules Retail and Decoding are set up in this context and seen as both antagonists and attractors, offering professional, vocational action, and active intellectual reaction.

Our thesis projects are exemplars of these manifold concerns, embracing ambitious conceptual strategies but also striving for delicate, intricate material renderings. As the static, indulgent ‘expert’ gaze is being augmented and supplanted by the contemporary democratic idiom of the omnipresent cinematic ‘measuring’ of time and space, the course is pedagogically engaged through film and animation components of the Case Study and Introduction to Design Computing modules. A matrix of diverse modules is aimed to challenge students to strive for a rich, mature synthesis of these components, a process aimed for successful navigation through the complex, globalised world.