Thank you for inviting me here: my last visit to Montreal was in 1967 for the Expo – the Buckyfuller dome was sparkling, Habitat had just been finished; I remember incessant sunshine and the city looked beautiful: I am very happy to be back.

As our hereditary Lords voted themselves out of office last week, one of our more creative politicians – Tony Benn – stated that in his view ‘England is the last colony of the British Empire’. If Canada was one of the first, you may have done better out of it than us.

When Edwin Lutyen’s daughter asked him what architecture was all about, he replied that it was remembering that rain ran uphill. Following this train of thought, interior design could be said to be to do with remembering that the floor is never flat. Although, having said that, the concept that fairness is only achievable on a level playing field has never been clear to me, as I clearly remember having to change ends at half time; but with the interior of a building there is no such luxury. But I speak metaphorically.

I think interior design is one of the most complex areas of the design profession – the floor is never flat. It is a profession about response. It responds to what is. It takes what is and makes something new.

In its modern form it is young. The first post graduate school in England was set up in 1953 and there were virtually no graduates to fill the places. The discipline did not exist Interiors were being designed – but they were credited to architects or decorators. We can describe what we do by calling it interior architecture but that is not quite it. Your organisation feels this ambiguity I think in its desire to develop and promote a teaching methodology. Because of its youth, there is little cultural theory it can claim for its own: it has to borrow from architecture which is an approximation.

Does this matter? Probably not.

It means that, unlike within architecture, it is hard to earn a living with projects on paper.

It means that the short bibliography that exists is largely descriptive – in other words there is, as yet, no critical tradition.

It means that even its name is open to broad interpretation and most people still think it is only wallpaper and curtain specification.

But it means that anything is still possible: it means that as practitioners, we can continue to carve out its territory.

We can work in office planning, refurbishments, private houses, museums and exhibitions, restaurants, cafes and bars, auditoria and stages, railway stations, airports, trains, ships, shops and hospitals. And, in most cases, what we do doesn’t last very long which allows us to take risks that our architectural friends cannot – or shouldn’t.

Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out that a physician can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines. NYTimes.

And it means that we do the bits that most people remember.

In my view this should be seen as a privilege as well as a responsibility. And for that reason I take it quite seriously.

I am one of two partners of a design practice formed in 1983 which we describe as an Interior Design Consultancy. There are about 11 of us – three architects, seven designers and a studio manager. We work out of central London and because most of London is nineteenth century or earlier, much of our work has been concerned with issues of inserting new into old. Since 1983 we have had a good time and not much money. Generally we have had good clients, (always at the bottom of the successful projects), few bad debts and we have spent too long on everything. This is now well out of hand because of the amount of museum work we are doing.

In spite of the museum work, we still think of ourselves as interior designers – and by that I mean designers concerned with space, materiality, light. There is a lot of cross-over between exhibition and museum design and regular interiors: how people learn, how people engage etc. and I have deliberately mixed the order of the work I am showing you this evening in order to demonstrate the connections – or lack of gap between them. I hope you will see consistent threads – many of which I will not be able to see – which are oblivious of context. In other words our work – I think and hope – is to do with communication, whether it is an office, a theatre set or a gallery in a museum. There is a language of space, of light, of tectonics and this is what we use to say whatever it is we – and our client – wants to say. Although Richard Sapper’s definition of design is that it is an opinion, it is also essentially about communication.

Count Francesco Algarotti wrote an essay on Painting in 1764. I would ask you to substitute designer for painter . I quote:

“I do not say true things, but probable things; because probability is, in fact, the truth of those arts, which have the fancy as their object”.

Maybe in the end we all have fancy as our object: I don’t object to that.

Last week I heard a critic who started his comments about a book he had been asked to read by saying ‘the covers of this book are too far apart’. I hope the covers of this lecture have not been too far apart.
Dinah Casson
Montreal, 1999