Furniture as Program: Exhibiting, Educating and Professionalising Interior Design at Belgium’s Saint Luke Schools in the 1980s

Abstract

This article analyses two furniture design exhibitions at the Belgian Saint Luke schools, organised in the 1980s within the programme of interior design. It demonstrates the pivotal role played by these exhibitions in the self-identification of interior design as a standalone discipline. Because of its relatively late emergence, the dialectic relationship with more established disciplines—most notably architecture—have heavily impacted interior design’s claims to professionalism. The history of institutions with programmes in both fields offers clear insight into this phenomenon. The prominence attributed to furniture design in the 1980s student exhibits resulted from an epistemological rivalry with the architecture program. This article revisits the pedagogical practices at the heart of both exhibits, and considers them as a continuation of the teaching methods that had constituted the institutional foundations of the Saint Luke school network. As the drawing and designing of furniture served to codify specific design knowledge inherent to the discipline of interior design, the untimely recovery of this pedagogy aimed to legitimise the professional knowledge held by interior design graduates.