In our earliest experience of architecture in fiction, we can’t forget the image of the house that looks like a shoe – the Shoe House where the Old Woman whipped the many children she had before putting them to bed. Or the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, as a delicious facade that secrets dark evil. We can easily recognise Sleeping Beauty’s fantastic castle with turrets and drawbridges even before meeting a version of it in Disneyland. Later in life, we imagine the ship cabins fraud with adventure in Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer’s wooden house with a front porch a temporary launch-pad for more outdoor mischief. We imagine Hemmingway’s Paris where love and jealousy pass and meet in outdoor cafes and cobbled streets even before our first trip there.

Robert Harbison once wrote that architecture as conceived in novels or fiction is an “easier kind of building”, which shows “architecture in a more perfect use than can be met in actuality, imagining just the right life to go with it.” The author tailors the architecture to suit the purpose: a gothic castle has dark spaces filled with the unknown; Murakami’s Dolphin Hotel is depicted as an unremarkable hotel where the protagonist meets a mysterious woman. 

The purpose of the architecture is perfectly matched with how it looks or how its spaces are. They are designed settings for pre-determined characters that would respond emotionally or experience things in a pre-defined way; there would be no deviation from what is intended of them, how they should think or act.

The interiors created by Takanori Aiba and his design company Graphics & Designing Inc. are known for their disney-like recreation of recognisable themes and styles, whether fictional or real. Their Ninja Akasaka restaurant in Tokyo is a recreation of a fictional ninja village down to squeeking timber floorboards and aged beams. Anybody who visits the restaurant will be taken by its rigorously executed theme. They take many photos; they become voyeurs of a completed scene, a mis-en-scene. They are mere audience.

Further down the same line, we can place the themed and highly-styled interiors of yankee designers such as Glamorous, WonderWall, or Philippe Starck. The themes are not so obvious, not so clear, but nevertheless we subconsciously recognise them and their sub-themes, whether in the cleverly reworked chandelier, or enlarged mirror, or stylised modern chrome. The users of such spaces participate in the themes subconsciously, as voyeurs to a well-finished space. They do nothing to the space.

Even further down, we have interiors which mimic other established recognisable interior styles and themes. An apartment is designed to look like a New York loft; an office lobby is designed like a KPF office lobby; all resort hotels must look like your typical Amandari. Real specific spaces become common fiction and we become mere readers. 

Now in contrast, we have the relatively new kind of interior designs (incidentally not by interior designers) by architects such as Ryuiji Nakamura and Nendo. These are interiors where there is no style or theme that we can recognise, subconsciously or not, but rely on formal manipulations — repeating an element or motif — that most importantly require a full-blooded user to participate in the space, to be part of the space, in order for the interior to be enriched.

If there is a difference between interiors by yankee designers and interiors by herbivorous architects, this may be one.