Interior Provocations: WEATHER
Interior Provocations: WEATHER
The Interior Design Program at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture is hosting the Interior Provocations symposium, in collaboration with Pratt Institute, on Friday, November 7, 2025 . The annual symposium, founded and organized by Pratt Institute faculty in the History of Art and Design and Interior Design Departments, provides a public forum for critical thinking about the design, theory and history of the interior. Comprised of provocative and boundary-expanding presentations by design practitioners, historians, and theorists, Interior Provocations is dedicated to furthering the scholarship of the expanding fields of Interior Design and Interior Design History through mutual collaboration and exchange.
This year’s theme, developed by UT Austin faculty, is WEATHER. The symposium keynote speaker is the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm based in Paris, known globally for his multi-scalar explorations of the built environment in the age of climate change.
The thematic brief and call for presentations below encourages design practitioners, historians, and theorists in and beyond academia to engage in this year’s discussion. Initial submissions are due by Monday, June 16, 2025.
WEATHER
Weather is a situated state of atmosphere; an atmospheric event marked by place and time. As a term, atmosphere refers to the gaseous layers that envelop astronomical objects, but more broadly also encompasses mood, vibes, and other similarly spatial and social phenomena. Following such an expanded definition, how might weather similarly stretch beyond meteorology to permeate other facets of living environments, past, present, and future? Furthermore, what can the framing of weather as an unfolding and dynamic yet situationally specific condition reveal about the role that interiors play—or have historically played—in the shaping of both social and ecological atmospheres?
What roles and responsibilities do fields engaged in shaping the atmosphere of interiors assume in the age of extreme weather events unfolding across a heating planet? What do past examples of this illuminate about atmospheric patterns, traditions, metaphors, or mishaps, and how do these relate to our shaping of current interior responses? How do shifting weather patterns signal the urgent need for rethinking interiors and interiority as a composite space that engages multiple forms of life, mixed realities, evolving urbanisms, and emerging material conditions with profound social and environmental consequences? What projections, speculations, and mitigations might be needed in response to impending weather? How do we, in other words, forecast changes in the field’s atmosphere?
Interior Provocations: WEATHER encourages provocative, boundary-expanding proposals from design practitioners, historians, and theorists that challenge traditional definitions of atmosphere within the interior realm of living environments. Using WEATHER as a prompt, the aim is to reflect upon the interconnected nature of atmosphere throughout history as both a social and environmental condition, and in this way open questions about the potential of interiors as a space of design speculation and experimentation in the age of planetary change.
Initial submissions are to include:
- abstracts based on original, unpublished research (no more than 300 words),
- one to three images;
- 2-page CV, with contact information.
If you are interested in participating in a teaching roundtable with a five-minute presentation, followed by a panel discussion, please prepare the materials listed above and indicate “pedagogy” at the time of the submission.
Please combine all the submission materials into one multi-page PDF, named yourlastname_yourinstitution.pdf. Completed proposals are to be submitted by no later than June 16, 2025, using the SUBMISSION PORTAL. When submitting your proposal through the portal, please indicate whether the presentation is to be considered (1) history/theory, (2) practice/theory, or (3) pedagogy in the “File description” field.
Selected proposals will be developed into full papers to be presented in person at The University of Texas at Austin.
Any questions can be directed to Interiorprovocations@gmail.com. Please do not make final submissions via email.
Image credit: Yu-Hsuan Hsieh (BSID '24).