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Graeme Brooker, "The Story of the Interior: How We Have Shaped Rooms and How They Shape Us" (Thames & Hudson, 2025)
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Marshall Po
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Graham Brucker about his book titled the Story of the how we have Shaped Rooms and How They Shape Us, published by Thames and Hudson in 2025. Now, this book is, as the title suggests, doing a whole bunch of things, fascinating things, visual things. This is perhaps one where being a podcast audio medium does take away some of the gorgeous visuals of the book, but still leaves us with plenty to talk about. Because we're going to be looking at really small spaces, temporary spaces, all the way up to, like, massive, monumental spaces, some of which we live in some of which we shop in, work in, have fun in. There's all sorts of places all around the world really to examine, to think about, questions around rooms and how they've changed over time, or not changed over time and what the sort of impact we've had on them and they've had on us, clearly. I'm quite excited because there's a lot to discuss here. So, Graeme, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Professor Graham Brucker
Thank you very much for inviting me. What a pleasure and what a great introduction. Thank you.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, speaking of introductions, could you keep us on that theme by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us what you why you decided to write this book?
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Professor Graham Brucker
Yeah, sure. Well, as you've mentioned, I'm a professor of interior design and I'm. I'm an interior designer. I've trained as an interior designer and I'm currently the head of the program of interior design at the Royal College of Art in London and have been for 10 years. So I'm somebody who is steeped in the world of inside spaces and always have been really. I decided to write this book for a number of reasons, really. One was a general dissatisfaction, I suppose, if I can put it politely, about the kind of general literature about the current books on the history of the subject. I felt that they did the subject a disservice. They didn't really talk about the nuances or the distinctiveness of the subject. So I thought to myself, I need to address that and I'd like to write something about that. And the other reason was that it's a well known fact that. And often cited actually, that we spend between. And this is hard to believe I think really, but Trust me, between 90 to 98% of our lives are spelt are spent in indoor environments. And I think that's an incredible piece of data. And I also feel that therefore we really need to know about this space, we really need to understand it because we're spending so much time in it. So I wanted to set out to write a book which really was distinct about the subject, but also helped us to really understand what these inside spaces might be like.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm surprised that you're surprised by that statistic. As someone who definitely sits inside and reads books all the time, I'm shocked if there's any percent of my life that's not in an inside room, but definitely takes the point that these are spaces very much worthy of investigation. But it is a really big topic, right. Especially given that kind of statistic. So how did you Approach the topic of the interior and how it shaped us. Like, the book is pretty large and gorgeous for it, but like, I imagine it could be like a human height sized book. How did you figure out a way of focusing or narrowing down to something comprehensible?
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Professor Graham Brucker
Well, I started by, you know, I mean, it was incredible, really. I think I bought every book that you can imagine with the word interior history within it. And, you know, at one point, through my front door, there was kind of like books flying through the rattling the envelope box all of the time, the letterbox. It was unbelievable. And so I really started to understand the field first and foremost, which was really, really important. My approach is really that I feel very strongly that the interior is a. Is a. Is a space which is really built to accommodate a rich diversity of occupation. And what I mean by that is, you know, we all are in interiors. We're always using interiors, no matter who we are, what shape, size, diversity, heritage, whatever it is that we are. So it was very important that my approach kind of represented that. And therefore, geographically, spatially, it needed to kind of accommodate so many different things. So that was really, really important to me. Secondly, my approach was that in order to kind of make myself feel less, make myself feel satisfied that I was somehow approaching this history in a way which I felt was relevant to the interior. I thought, and still do, that the real fundamental basis of the interior is this space called the room. And that is really key and really particular and germane to this story. The room is a space which can be big, it can be small, as you can say, it might even be book sized. It's a space which is enclosed to a certain degree, doesn't always have to have a ceiling on it. So, you know, quite often gardens or landscapes can be called rooms. But effectively the approach was to start from the idea of the room and to talk about this wonderful space or spaces that we inhabit in a myriad of ways and in which all life takes place. So the room was the key for me. And the approach was, as the title suggests, about, you know, how we shape these rooms and how they shape us. Well, I would argue that, you know, we shape rooms, we design them, we make them, we are asked to make them for people, as designers and so on. But then we shape them ourselves. We knock a wall through, we move some furniture, we repaint a wall, we will work in them in a different way. So they are constantly shaping us as much as we are shaping them as well.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Lots going on there. And I love the kind of thinking and Research that went into this, like, obviously so much thought and care went into figuring out kind of how to tackle this project. And one of them is in sort of how you decided to organize all of these thoughts. I come at this, obviously as a historian, and we don't always approach things chronologically, but that is often the default. You've done something more interesting here. This is not a chronological history book. What have you done instead?
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Professor Graham Brucker
For me, chronology in history is. Is very problematic in relation to the interior. And that's for a number of reasons. One is that one of the key approaches here in this book, and it's. It's something that I talk about a lot in my work, interior, whether it be interior architecture, interior design and interior decoration. In my view, one of its fundamental principles is working with existing buildings. We're always working within environments and sometimes that can be a new build, but quite often it will be the reuse of an existing building. Now, when you think about that, with regards to chronology, there's a very complicated relationship between time. So for instance, if I'm using, let's say, I don't know, a 19th century warehouse building, and I'm going to reuse that to become, let's say, apartments or an art gallery, the notion of chronology then is estranged, I think, because We've got a 19th century building with a 21st century contemporary interior within it. Now, arguably, you could suggest that actually it reinforces chronology because it really defines time. I think it actually sort of dissolves this relationship between time. So the reason I sort of say this is because for me then one of the. One of my disappointments with so many historical books about the interior was that they just follow chronology and they start, you know, let's say, at the cave, and then they go through various styles right the way through to the 21st century. For me, that doesn't make sense for the. For the interior history or the history of the interior, because it is quite clearly a space that exists in and out of time as well with regards to the buildings in which it is placed. So it doesn't make sense to have a straightforward chronology of the history of the subject. So my approach was to talk about the room. It was also to talk about the private interior and the public interior. There was almost like three books within this book. And the idea was that these thematics, as I call them, would allow me to transcend time by going back to something ancient and describe some of the elements that form that ancient space. And I would argue that those elements which form it are as pertinent and relevant to the most contemporary space that you can find. So, for instance, the room, arguably, I suggest, is made up of five key thematics, enclosure, passages, object, atmosphere, and technologies. And these are things that we find in the most ancient of spaces and the most contemporary of spaces as well. So one of the things that I really enjoyed writing about and really wanted to get across was that on every page, I could have, you know, a 19th century palazzo interior against a 21st century art gallery interior against a picture of a Roman piece of furniture against a picture of a cave painting. And it allows me to transcend the idea of straightforward chronologies, which I don't think really work for this subject.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm glad you gave that example of kind of what it's like to flick through the book, because I think that's something that so immediately jumps out is the. What might seem like a juxtaposition. Right. But actually, in reading the text that goes with it, the analysis you've done, you're like, oh, wait, I see how these things go together. But obviously to make that all work, you had to make a lot of choices. And we've been talking about that in terms of structure and themes, but then the choice is kind of within that. So how, for example, in constructing a page like that, did you decide which structures and places to look at within a given theme that you, you know, that section of the book is focused on?
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Professor Graham Brucker
Yeah, that was one of the most challenging aspects this book has been. I've been working on this for about 10 years. This book, it's been a big, long chunk of time, and in its original form, it was actually close to about 220,000 words and numerous more images and so on and so forth. So it's been a huge process of editing down and choice. And I suppose in direct answer to your question, what was happening in that kind of process of editing and choosing is the projects and the images and the ideas that were. That kind of was at the strongest sort of distillations of any of the thematics or any of the key ideas that I wanted to get across were the ones that survived the edit. So every time that I would say, I want to talk about a bed, or I want to talk about, you know, which is a really good example of a bed in a room, which talks about the public nature of a bed in a room, and then something like, you know, Louis XIV's bed in Versailles would come through because it exactly personifies the idea of public bedroom spaces. So it was kind of survival of the fittest, really, throughout the edit. Things that really resonated and really stood up really strong, I suppose, for each of the ideas were the things that survived this kind of huge edit that I undertook throughout this.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is a really quite large edit. So I can only, you know, I can understand why that took so many years to figure out. In determining that, then were there areas that were sort of easier or harder to figure out how to approach? I mean, for example, just reading through it, when I saw the idea of atmosphere, I was like, okay, well, hang on a second. How do you link concrete, physical spaces to something like atmosphere? That one seemed hard to me, but I don't know what were there hard ones?
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Professor Graham Brucker
Yeah, Atmosphere was a good. It's a good example that is very difficult to illustrate because it's easy to talk about, but it's very difficult to capture because it's, you know, literally, by its very nature, it's something which is fleeting, which something might only appear for a short amount of time. And so therefore, the projects and the images that kind of capture that atmosphere, or atmospheres, are few and far between, actually. But I managed to find, I mean, for instance, Olafur Eliasson's project in Tate Modern, the Huge sun was for me, an excellent example of atmosphere, but also alongside that, a smaller project such as Bonpas and Parr's Gin and Tonic Fog. I don't know if you saw that one, but the idea that you walk into a room and it's full of a gin and tonic fog or mist, which sounds rather appealing at this time of the afternoon, afternoon, and you somehow imbibe this atmosphere, to me, is a great example of an idea about atmosphere which I wanted to retain. You know, the notion that it's a solid thing, but it's also very, very ephemeral. Technologies was also very difficult as well to describe because actually, what you realize when you start to explore and understand it is that, you know, technologies such as the television, let's say, or a radio or something like a microwave or in a domestic space, changes the layout of a room emphatically. And that's easy to find good examples of. Less kind of easy were things like, you know, the idea of plumbing or central heating or sometimes lighting, because, you know, as much as you look, it's quite hard to find great examples of where people have documented their innovation in plumbing. You can do it, and I think I managed to do it. But it was quite a challenge to find some of these examples, really, which really got across great examples of plumbing.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That'S a really fascinating process to get an insight into and definitely an interesting piece to explore. Obviously, given the scope and scale of what you've done that we've kind of been talking about that scale, there's no way I can ask you about everything in the book, right? That's one of the reasons we sort of have this overview of how you've approached it. So I've kind of picked out particular areas I thought might be interesting that is obviously using my dictatorial powers as the person asking the questions. So to begin cherry picking our way through this, I wonder if we could talk about kitchens. Those being a really key room that I certainly spend a lot of time in, usually in terms of thinking about food and being hungry. Now that's obviously part of it. But you also talk about the kitchen of a house as being not just a food production, but also maybe even being like a theater, having kind of performative aspects. Is that only in the Instagram era of kitchens being sort of things that rich people, posh people have to show off, or is that something we can think of more broadly?
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Professor Graham Brucker
I've never really thought about it as being the kind of Instagram era, but you, you could well be right. The sort of story of the kitchen is of a space which has kind of really moved around in the domestic realm. In a historical sense, the kitchen would have been in larger, affluent houses, the kitchen would have been something which would have been normally placed in a remote location, quite often in the basement, considered a service area, something that supplies the organism of the house. In less affluent houses, the kitchen would not necessarily have been designated as a space even, but would have been primarily organized around certain technologies, primarily heat, really, and less. It might be prominent in the house, but it would be something which would have quite often have done numerous, numerous things. It would have made food, it might have store food, but it also would have done something like heat the house, etc. So from those kind of beginnings or those kind of earlier ideas around the kitchen, it's shifted. And that was primarily around the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, where, particularly in the late 19th, early 20th century, the kitchen was viewed in most houses, whether they be affluent or non affluent, as something which was needed to be rationalized, which was needed to be made somehow more efficient. So there's very famous examples around kind of home economic scientists, particularly in America actually, but also in Europe, around the Frankfurt kitchen, for example. And people like Christine Beecher were writing about the efficiency of kitchens and how they can become almost like laboratories for the preparation of food. But also they had a kind of role to play with regards to the person operating them. You know, let's face it, quite often the, the female, the, the of the house, the wife, et cetera. So they had a kind of gender role. Now the idea was of making them more efficient, so somehow the woman of the house could be somehow emancipated from these domestic chores, which never really quite happened. Happened anyway. So it's a very complex space. It's a complex space around labour, gender and politics, I would argue as well. Now in the 20th century and beyond, it's shifted. It still has those essences, I would argue, but it's shifted to become a space where we welcome in our guests, we produce and prepare food with our guests. It's partly to do with open plan living as well, where we will eat and prepare food and host and entertain our guests in a much more fluid manner in our domestic interiors. And that will often include the kitchen becoming this kind of idea of theater that we invite our guests in. They may sit in the kitchen with us while we prepare food quite often, and I think this talks a little bit to the role of gender within the kitchen, is that quite often. And without wishing to sound a bit stereotypical, but I think that there's a thing around technologies within the kitchen where people will demonstrate, you know, their new technologies, their new kitchen, their new fridge, their new cooker, their mixers or whatever. And, you know, that might be a kind of more of a male thing, who knows? But I think that the whole idea of the kitchen becoming a kind of piece of theater is much more to do with open plan living and then the kind of the way that we prepare and consume food in a very different way to what we did in the past.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's very interesting to think about those additional aspects of the kitchen in and of itself, but also in comparison to other rooms. So, for example, the comparison that immediately came to my mind based on what you've written in the book was with the bedroom, because those might seem like kind of very opposite rooms, but in some ways they. The bedroom kind of used to have some of these more performative aspects. So has it sort of undergone the opposite change over time, is what you've just told us about for the kitchen?
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Professor Graham Brucker
I would say so, yes. Historically the bedroom, or just the act of sleeping would take place in a much more communal fashion. If we think, for instance, you know, let's take a kind of a village of tents, let's say, let's take a medieval hall where we would do Everything under one roof, whether it would be sleeping, eating, conversing, all kinds of things that just were done together, whether you liked it or not. And it was only the evolution and the separation of certain rooms to do things, which then started the kind of notion of, you know, certain forms of privacy. We wanted to get away from people to eat or sometimes to sleep or to have relations with people and so on. And we wanted to distinguish between who was allowed in this space and. And who was allowed in that space. Now, the bedroom is very indicative, I think, a great example of this shift of private public relations, because historically the bedroom would have been a place to sleep in and that we would have done everything within that space as well. In the kind of mid, let's say 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, it becomes a place which is still very public. So for instance, in the court of, you know, the Sun King or Louis XIV in Versailles, he would host all of his meetings in his bed. And based on how close you got to the bed really kind of indicated the status of anybody who was coming close to the king. Beds also mirrored this kind of attempt to, you know, somehow make privacy. So the four poster bed was an attempt to almost make a room within the room. There's a very famous bed, the bed of wear, which I think is in the VA now. It's a 15th century bed where you would sleep with about 10 people at any one time and you would never know who they were. You'd just turn up and you'd be escorted to the bed. Now, of course, that's all very different to how we treat our bedrooms now. We, you know, tend to use them as a retreat. We tend to only invite very particular people in, you know, often our partners. And it's not necessarily a public space. We would probably be a bit unusual if we were entertaining in our bedrooms in terms of a public entertainment space. So, yes, the bedroom in a way has diametrically gone the opposite way of the kitchen with regards to its private and public relations.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Really interesting to see that comparison. And these questions of kind of what is hidden and what isn't, obviously extends to other rooms too. And some of which is kind of in this more established norm, it looks like over lots of different places at once, the way you've just described with the kitchen and bedroom, and some of which almost seems to be kind of a bit in flux. So if we talk about bathrooms a little bit, you in the book talk about a sort of European norm of bathrooms being like super hidden away. But that that's not the only only way of approaching this room. So can you tell us a little bit about kind of that push and pull? I suppose?
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Professor Graham Brucker
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, culturally, bathing is something which around the world changes in significance, whether it's public, private, whether it's with a group of people. I was just in Japan a few years ago where I was taking public baths with people which, you know, it's a kind of intimate act and at the same time a very public act as well. I mean, in, in the book. One of the things I think that's really clear about the bathroom and has fascinated me for a long time and I really wanted to express in the book was that it's one of the most intimate spaces in many respects and one of the spaces which renders us vulnerable. It's not often in any space that you are either naked or semi clothed. And therefore this is a room which kind of projects some form of vulnerability. It's the same in a public bathroom. You know, we are still vulnerable to a certain extent. And I think that's why there's a lot of contention around the notion of bathrooms and who uses them and so on and so forth. Now that's one aspect of that and something I really wanted to show in the book is one reason that that is used. The bathroom is used so often in filmic representations of vulnerability. You know, one that immediately thinks of something like Psycho. That takes place in a bathroom, that scene in the shower, particularly, because that's a vulnerable space. We are at our most vulnerable. So to heighten that sense of vulnerability is why the bathroom was used. It's the same in the Shining, which when the infamous here's Johnny moment as he comes through the door with the axle, that's actually in a bathroom as well. So the bath and the bathroom is a really complicated space because it's where we're at our most vulnerable. And yet at the same time, it can be a very public act, it can be a very private act. I think there's a project in the book which I'm really very fond of and it's a public toilet which was designed by Monica Bonvinci. And it's very humorous because it's a private bathroom, a toilet which she places in a two way mirrored box and then puts it in a very, very public space. Now, if you've ever been in a two way mirrored box, from the outside all people see is their reflection. But when you are inside the space, you see out, it's transparent. And so at the most kind of private moment, of using a bathroom, you are somehow feeling that you are somehow being exposed in the most public way yet from the outside nobody can see. That I think for me really symbolizes the kind of the sort of complexities of this room really. And it's public private relations and how, you know, in the right hands they can be really manipulated and played with, whether you're a filmmaker, whether you're an installation artist or a designer. You know, I think that it's. If you understand those kind of ideals behind the bathroom, then I think you can have a lot of fun with them.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, there's all sorts of really intriguing innovation all throughout the book. Obviously that's one example of it, but another way it kind of comes up in a lot of different spaces and times and objects is places that were sort of built, interiors that were built for one purpose, they're now being used for something else. I mean, you mentioned that very briefly earlier. But while we're on the topic of innovation, can you tell us about some other examples of this in both public and private interiors?
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Professor Graham Brucker
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the work that I do around the interior is about building reuse and object reuse. And for me it's one of the fundamental principles of what we do in interiors. And I think it's the thing that really sets us apart from so many of our built environment colleagues. We are constantly working with the existing world. It's also a very interesting kind of aspect of our work because it places us at the forefront of, of the challenges that we faced in the 21st century, particularly around climate. Building reuse is a much more carbon friendly way of creating the world around us now. So for me, innovation there is really, really critical because it's where we, I think in the right hands you can take something out of its context, a building or an object or a material. And once it's placed into a completely different context, I think that's when innovation really takes place. But also it can be, it can really resonate with the history, the story, the idea of a space, what it previously was and what it's now become. So, so in the book I talk about this a lot and there are a lot of examples. Some that spring to mind are somebody like Ralph Brogink, where he makes a house in Holland, where he makes a three dimensional, almost like pavilion within this interior and he clads it with standard bog standard radiators which you'd use to heat your house. And he uses that as a cladding to cover this kind of three dimensional pavilion within the house. And the resonance there for me is where you've got this material that you'd usually find, you know, hanging on your wall with hot water coming through it, suddenly becoming this rather beautiful cladding device. There's a great company that I'm very fond of who work in London called Retruvius, who are architectural salvage experts. And they literally, Their model of operating is fascinating, really. They're kind of constantly circulating London in vans and, you know, waiting for a phone call where somebody says, we're stripping out this bit of the British Museum, or we're taking this stuff out of an old factory. And they will go and they will collect and salvage material and clean it up, and then they'll repurpose it into somebody's house quite often. And they do a lot of work for luxury residential housing, which I always find quite incredible because, you know, quite often those. Those guys are looking for material or interiors or ideas which are quite often, you know, quite expensive. And. And this is a way of kind of like bringing value in a very, very different way into people's inside spaces. The other one that springs to mind immediately is. And one of my favorite spaces is. Is an old cement works on the outskirts of Barcelona, which was. Was remade by a designer called Ricardo Buffil, and he turned it into his house and studio. But this space maintains the kind of old inner workings of the old ce. And so there's kind of incredible hoppers and silos and lumps of concrete and huge lumps of steel and all kinds of stuff. And he just accepts them and then just, you know, rearranges the interior spaces around them. And so for me, this idea of reuse, it does so many things. It not only talks to the climate challenge, but it also talks about the resonance and the storytelling of space. You know, being in a house that's in an old cement works, you cannot help but tell stories about, you know, what the relationship was between its past, its present and its future. And that's, you know, a big part of what reuse is very much about.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, very intriguing there. All sorts of stories that can be kind of made and remade and told and retold, especially in those sorts of contexts where you're living in them. Right. You're kind of immediately there. But what about repurposing that might go kind of beyond that? Or is that even possible? Like, is this the kind of main context in which we're talking about repurposing? Or if we go even beyond literally physically bigger than a single cement factory? Like, what about Some of these really massive infrastructure projects, can they be repurposed?
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Professor Graham Brucker
Yes, I think not only can they be, I think they have to be as well. As I mentioned earlier, I'm a really big advocate for how we really now we have to get into the mindset as a creative, as an in creativity, full stop, no matter what you're doing. That the idea of the kind of unfettered new and new build and starting from scratch is just something that's not relevant in the 21st century anymore, in my view. And what we have to do is we have to work with everything that exists already and think about how we repurpose it. And that's the beginning. So that extends to all forms of buildings, of cities, of infrastructure. And some of them are incredibly challenging, as you, as you mentioned, you know, power stations, coal factories, pieces of infrastructure, train stations, airports, all of these things, they're all there to be repurposed and reused. And many of them have been successfully. You know, just in London, for instance, of course, there's the infamous Tate Modern, which was once a power station. Just further down the river. Now there's Battersea Power Station, which is now a very luxurious retail environment and also a lot of housing as well. So, you know, infrastructure such as power stations now become art galleries and retail spaces. And there's very unusual examples in the book of going much further with things like theaters. Becoming a car park in Detroit is one of my favorite projects. The Michigan Theater, which became a car park, was an incredible project. I visited it and the way that it was just, you know, secondhand. Car dealers will talk about a cut and shut car where you've welded two bits of car together. Well, this is a cut and shut interior where a theater has been welded to a car park. Things such as airports. So Tempelhof in Berlin, which is now got a fascinating kind of new community who live there and work there. The High Line in New York, of course, which is an old elevated train track, which has become a public park. There's even things like, you know, cooling towers in South Africa which have become these incredible climbing towers. There's a nuclear power plant in Germany called Wunderland Wunderland Kalkar, which has now become a kind of amusement and sort of of park for rides and so on and so forth. So, you know, it's. It's really difficult to rework some of these things. They're dirty. They've had odious pasts, whether it's producing energy or coal or. And so on. Some of them are steel plants. Etc But I think that, you know, we have to, we have to stop and just say to ourselves, we can't just wipe this slate clean, we've actually got to work with it. And actually, in my view, it's not just a question of that, but it's also then, you know, how this leads to incredible brilliant sort of stories and urban place making, where these things which have existed in these spaces for years and years suddenly kind of just get reworked and they tell new stories for the next generation and for future generations. Because, you know, if we remove everything and start again, we run the risk of it just looking like a generic kind of world, I would argue. But if we hang on to these incredible bits of infrastructure or buildings which have all these stories and previous lives, for me it adds a rich resonance to, you know, how we move forward as inhabitants of the world really. And it has incredible, it has incredible kind of meaning with regards to legacy, heritage and what future generations will, you know, receive from us as we go forward. So there's a lot to talk about in this idea of repurposing and reuse, which I could probably spend another hour with you, but there's a lot to talk about.
- [37:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm so glad that you have given us a sense of kind of how rich this area is and that you mentioned the example of the fun park in Germany. Because I have to admit, turning the page to see that, that, I mean anyone who likes a good visual image, go ahead and have a Google now because that just, I think that one image, you know, picture speaks a thousand words, right? Like that really brings to life all of these things you've just told us about in terms of the need for this, because goodness, leaving that kind of thing just alone would be a problem. But kind of the cool creative possibilities by some of these transformations as well.
- [38:28]
Professor Graham Brucker
So yeah, there's a very nice, a very, very interesting place in Essen in Germany where it's called, it's in Duisburg actually. It's called the Landschafts park. And it's an incredible huge steel works which, you know, has polluted the landscape for years and decades. And there's lots of coal mines in the area. You know, that area, the Rugabit area of Germany was famous for its so kind of industrial landscapes. It's where the Bilchers, I think they were called, used to do those incredible photographs of cooling towers and stuff like that. And of course all of this stuff has been switched off. It's been kind of, you know, it's been made redundant. The Whole notion of heavy industry and so on has become very complicated geographically, etc. And now it's a huge park and it's an incredible experience when you go there. It's an unbelievable thing to clamber around these old blast furnaces and cooling towers. And they use the cooling towers full of water for diving and they have cinema nights, they have festivals and pop concerts with the kind of backdrop of this incredible steelworks. I actually was fortunate enough a few years ago to see Alien 2 on a big screen in this steel works and I was absolutely. It was even more frightening than ever because I was in this kind of incredibly kind of gothic steel works while I was watching this quite frightening movie. So. So it's a, you know, it's. It. The reason I say this is because I think it lends a real resonance and a storytelling, but also it gives us a kind of real connection to place through the retention of these, these kind of infrastructures that we've lived in and around for a long time.
- [40:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, speaking of connection to place, I did say that my questions would cherry pick in a dictatorial manner. So we are of course the new Books network. I am pretty book obsessed.
- [40:32]
Professor Graham Brucker
Yes.
- [40:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So are there any instances of book focused interior spaces you can tell us about?
- [40:38]
Professor Graham Brucker
Yes, there's a. There's quite a few in the. Carrying on with the thematic of kind of reuse, really. There's a very, very beautiful bookshop in Maastricht in Holland by Merten Girod, which is a book shop in an old disused Dominican church. Very beautiful project which essentially is organized around what I can only describe as a huge kind of bookcase, three, four stories, which slides into the middle of the church. It not only displays books, it has staircases running through it and lifts and so on and so forth. But it also has a series of balconies which you can look out across the church in and also has a way of lighting the ceiling of the church, which is rather beautiful and ornate. So thoroughly recommend that one. There's the historical example of La Bruste's reading room in the library in Paris, which is a very beautiful, I think, 19th century library which still exists. And then there's more modern places. There's a micro library which I very recently had the joy to see firsthand in a place called Bandung in Indonesia. And this little library was formed as a kind of raised box which sits above a little plinth where the local children used to gather and play and hang out and stuff. So this library was positioned above this space in order to kind of, you know, show the kids that they could come inside and read and so on. And it's a steel frame, but it's essentially fabricated out of ice cream containers, which it uses as a facade treatment to let light and wind through into the interior. It's very beautiful. There's. There's one project that's not in the book, actually, but which is one of my favorite spaces, which unfortunately didn't survive the edit, which is called the Livaria Lello, which is in porto in Portugal, 1906. An incredible bookshop with this most beautiful staircase in it. So if you're ever in that part of the world, I thoroughly recommend that you go and spend some time browsing the stacks in there as well.
- [42:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Great book spaces there. Thank you for going with my obsession. Well, is there any particular ideas or places or images in the book? Obviously there's loads we haven't mentioned, but is there one or two you want to make sure we include in the discussion?
- [43:14]
Professor Graham Brucker
Yeah, yeah. As you say, there's. There's absolutely tons of stuff. There's so many. So many projects and so on, and so many projects I had to leave out because of the edit. But the one. I mean, there's a couple of things I really wanted to sort of express, I suppose, and one is that it's not just building interiors. I like to use films, I like to use paintings, I like to use installations and stage sets and so on, because for me, the interior is sometimes at its most kind of resonant when it's in these formats, because they really distill ideas about the interior. So we talked about Psycho earlier being one. I also use some of the. I use some of the interiors from the film Parasite, which I thought was a very, very interesting movie in terms of its interior, but paintings, if I. If I was really wanting to highlight something, which I really wanted everybody to make sure they at least look at. There's one painting that I use which I constantly come back to, not just in my teaching, but also my own personal fascination with it. And I've published it in other books that I've written before. And it's a. It's a 16th century painting by a painter called Antonella de Messina, and it's of St. Jerome in his study. And I come back to it repeatedly because it fascinates me and it on so many levels, but it also, for me, is really resonant and really indicative and a great exemplar of so many aspects of the interior. It's got this beautiful Perspective view through the interior, but into a landscape. It's got the St. Jerome positioned on a piece of furniture. St. Jerome is, as we know, the kind of translator. And effectively the painting is a translation of this space, which is an imaginary space. It actually doesn't exist. But the piece of furniture, it takes some of its cues from the interior in terms of its structure. So it's a piece of furniture which is autonomous. That is, it sort of exists on its own, but also looks like it's part of the interior as well. And then in the painting there's lots of little symbols and lots of little things which talk about this kind of interior life of St. Jerome, but also the painter as well. So I would definitely have a look at that and have a focus on it because it's really, it really rewards a long view, you know, an in depth kind of view of, of the, of the painting. I've been looking at it for probably 20 years now, and I still enjoy it every time I come to it.
- [45:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that's a very good recommendation. And I think there's so many aspects of the book that show the time and care that you put into this. But of course it is now done. It's off your desk and out in the world. So if I can ask as a final question, what might you be working on now that it's done?
- [46:09]
Professor Graham Brucker
Yeah, gosh, it's out there in the big wide world. I'm going to have a little rest.
- [46:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that seems well deserved.
- [46:20]
Professor Graham Brucker
I have actually, and this maybe gives you a bit of insight into my kind of wild obsessions about writing. And I'm a sort of person who came to writing very late. I was at school quite unacademic really, and I was actually probably a bit of a hooligan and very annoying at school and left school with very few qualifications actually. And. But what that's done is over the years it's made me become really obsessed about writing and somehow being able to get my thoughts down onto a page. And I did actually, and have actually just produced another book alongside this which will come out just about coming out now actually, and it's called the Super Reuse Manifesto. And the Super Reuse Manifesto is a book which has kind of been bubbling under in my brain for a long time. And it sort of came into focus through some work I was doing with my students where, as I mentioned repeatedly throughout this talk that I've been a really big advocate for the idea of reuse and how we work with existing material and buildings and so on and over the years I've become a little bit disappointed about how the notion of reuse is talked about, but also how it needs to be really doubled down on as something that we really need to shout about this and we really need to be quite polemical about how we can it really tell people this is the only way that we can be creative now is working with everything. So the Super Reuse Manifesto is quite a punchy kind of polemical set of provocations really about ideas around reuse. It talks about things like waste, talks about things like appropriation, it talks about the history of reuse, talks about demolition and all manner of things which are to do with creativity, I think. And I've had that designed by some very good designers up in Sheffield called Field and that will be coming out. It's just actually being released as I speak. So that's out there in the, in the open and it's, it's very different to the story of the interior. It's not a history book, it's not a kind of incredibly lavish illustrated piece of work. It's really text based. It has a number of images in it which are images that I've commissioned by a wonderful collage artist called Patrizio Marinelli, who is a brilliant guy who did some page breaks for me. So, so it's, yeah, it's very different to the story, but equally as enjoyable and hopefully it will be equally as well received as well, I hope. And then, and then I think I'll have a lay down.
- [49:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly seems very well deserved. And while you are doing that, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Story of the Interior. How we have Shaped Rooms and How They Shape Us, published by Thames and Hudson in 2025. Graham, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [49:20]
Professor Graham Brucker
Thanks Miranda. It's been really lovely speaking to you, really appreciate it. Thank. You. Foreign.
- [49:38]
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