The Interior Condition: How Space Organises Everyday Life − and Why Design Must Answer for It

Interior design is often judged by what can be seen: composition, material, colour, image and style. Yet the most consequential work of an interior may lie elsewhere − in how it distributes privacy, exposure, access, attention, effort, comfort and choice.

The Interior Condition examines the relationship between spatial decisions and everyday life. It asks what a plan quietly assumes about the bodies, households, routines and social relations it is expected to accommodate − and what happens when those assumptions prove too narrow.

Moving across domestic, institutional, workplace and commercial interiors, Lamine Zenakhri considers how circulation can become obligation, visibility can become surveillance, efficiency can obstruct care, and apparent neutrality can conceal unequal burdens. The book also examines the constructive capacities of space: its ability to provide protection, orientation, participation, encounter and personal authorship.

The argument is neither that design determines behaviour nor that designers can control the lives that unfold within their work. People appropriate, resist and reinterpret space in ways no drawing can fully predict. Nevertheless, spatial arrangements are not passive. They make some actions easier, some encounters more probable and some forms of adaptation more demanding.

To support more accountable professional judgment, the book develops a six-question inquiry for examining who a spatial decision serves, what it distributes, what it requires people to negotiate and how its consequences might be evaluated after occupation. This is not presented as a predictive formula, but as a disciplined way of questioning decisions that might otherwise pass as merely technical or aesthetic.

Written for architects, interior designers, students, clients and readers concerned with the built environment, The Interior Condition proposes that responsibility begins with a more precise understanding of what design can − and cannot − do.

Design cannot control life. But it must answer for the conditions it creates.