This paper examines the interior as a condition that is continuously in production through the arrangement of objects and furniture. This is done along two lines of inquiry. First by examining a few different historical and contemporary conceptions of the domestic interior through the lens of architectural representation. Second by using the technique of laser scanning to document a number of inhabited interiors in two apartment buildings. Through a series of representations, or cloud drawings, produced from the scans, the paper presents three ways of reading the interior: as environments, as assemblies, and as materialities. Departing from Robin Evans’ writing on drawing techniques for representing the interior and their correlation to ways of inhabitation, the paper poses questions around how the understanding of the interior may shift when using emerging techniques for architectural representation. Through readings of Walter Benjamin as well as Sylvia Lavin, the paper discusses such shifts in relation to changes in the conception of the interior and the objects that it contains. 

The climate crisis has prompted new imaginaries in architecture and design that go beyond technical responses to issues of sustainability and into critical and creative practice. Recent discourse suggests that architects and designers can intervene in this cultural condition by constructing and materialising alternative realities. Models, as means of representation, hold particular promise for such intervention, as they can accommodate both theoretical concepts and material interventions. These concerns are explored through Under Construction, a design project that imagines a city that is constantly being rebuilt using a limited stock of materials. Consisting of a scale model of a neighbourhood constructed from demolition waste, the project explores how salvaged pieces of material can be situated in “real” material flows while simultaneously representing something other than themselves. The project argues that the ambiguities that the blending of the real and the fictional result in can unlock new possibilities for architectural representation.