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The British architectural historian, critic and writer, Reyner Banham, formed the concept of ‘unhouse’ in a period of intense technological transformation during the middle years of the twentieth century. His unhouse proposed the seemingly radical idea to dematerialize the walls and roof of a house, to remove the strictures that tie buildings, and thus people, to the encumbrances of what he termed: ‘the dead weight of domestic architecture’ (A Home is Not a House, 1965). Presented as an accumulation of technological services, including landscape flood lights, TV and stereo speakers, radio and tape deck, electric cooker and refrigerator, the unhouse would cater for all essential human needs, providing a convenient and transportable ‘standard of living package’. Combined with a ‘power membrane’, which would furnish a curtain of hot or cold air around the unhouse, the design proposed that the exterior building or fixed structure might be dispensed with altogether. While recognized as deliberately provocative and slightly eccentric at the time, Banham’s ideas have acquired a certain currency again, in the early years of a new century, in a similar period of immense technological transformations. Faced with the challenges of climate change, mass movement of people, and globalized economic systems, the unhouse, which suggested new features of solar power, natural insecticides (the universal pest lure and destructor) and environmentally-friendly noise reduction or anti-noise pollution, demonstrates certain practices of sustainable design behavior that has influenced some recent architects and designers. Overall, however, the unhouse does not represent a freeing up of humans from their environment, with a low-cost, itinerant lifestyle choice. Rather, unhouse exists within theories or ideas that might be described as ‘anti-interiority’, themes that originate within Modernist architecture and that have been challenged over recent decades. Therefore, this paper situates Banham’s unhouse within a category of dominant architectural and design theory that suppressed or diminished the importance of interior spaces and their relevance to human wellbeing and social relations. (Reed, 1996; Colomina et al, 1996; Sparke, 2008; and Hollis, 2009). It argues that architecture and design in the twenty-first century, whilst acknowledging the prescient nature of Banham’s concept, takes into account the significance of social meanings that are ascribed to the interior. For example, in exploratory designs from more contemporary projects, such as Superflux’s Mitigation of Shock (2017-19) and Philips’ Microbial Home (2011), the designers seek to create immersive experiences in future interiors. Subjective encounters with internal spaces are incorporated with much thought and consideration for human patterns of behavior; of domestic rituals, self-sufficiency, comfort and embodied materiality. Banham (and others) sought to expunge the interior of historical ‘weightiness’ but in doing so merely avoided the intrinsic, and sometimes, difficult nature of our relationship to our interiors, and the ways in which physical interiors are not simply reflective of our personalities but are, importantly, the summation of our interiority as human beings. In Banham’s shift from ‘form and hardware to service and software’ (Whiteley, 2002), he essentially repeated Modernist attitudes to domestic life in the interior, as elements of our being that ought to be streamlined, updated and restructured, in an ‘almost universal expendability’ (A Home is not a House, 1965); in this sense, the ‘mess’ and subjectivity of life in the domestic interior was not an important factor in the delivery of new technologies. The opposite might be said today as domestic technologies are grounded in user experiences. Such ideas are explored in this paper that explains how new theories of interior space are emerging from architecture and design practices engaged with the many layered meanings of interiority, embracing the significance of ‘home’ that Banham and others appeared to overlook.

Animalia, Autopsia, Natura: George Stubbs’s The Moose, 1770\ud ‘Mr. Stubbs, an artist not less happy in representing animals in their still moments, than when agitated by their furious passions; his matchless paintings of horses will be lasting monuments of the one; and that of the lion and panther the other’. \ud Thomas Pennant, British Zoology, 1776-77.\ud Two paintings belonging to the original collections of the physician and anatomist, Dr. William Hunter (1718-1783), now in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, are believed to have been commissioned from George Stubbs, while Hunter was engaged in research on comparative anatomy: one, the Nylgai (1769), in the possession of Queen Charlotte and the other, The Moose (1770), belonging to the Duke of Richmond. Both paintings demonstrate the close professional relationship between Stubbs and Hunter in the middle years of the eighteenth century, with Hunter tellingly remarking that The Nylgai was painted by Stubbs ‘under my eye’, confusing the authorship between artist and anatomist. While Stubbs’s Nylgai formed the basis of Hunter’s paper presented to the Royal Society in 1771, his researches on the Moose were not published and existed as manuscript notes only for many years. Remaining in such obscurity, The Moose, appears to be an unlikely exemplar of the sublime works by Stubbs referred to in Thomas Pennant’s quotation from British Zoology cited above. However, this paper asks how The Moose might be incorporated amongst Stubbs’s pioneering works of animal painting by suggesting that the artist’s keen knowledge of comparative anatomy, zoology and natural history are present in the rather somber and solitary image of the Moose, or Canadian Elk. Much of the cultural fascination surrounding this animal in the eighteenth century originated in ideas of migration, domestication and extinction and Hunter was particularly intrigued by such theories. In his depiction of the Moose, Stubbs encompasses a significant range of ideas current within art and science debates during the period. As this paper explains, the painting owes more to the sublime meanings of Edmund Burke’s essay and the subjective expressiveness of the artist’s imagination than might at first seem apparent. It is no coincidence that Stubbs’s naturalist friend Pennant chose the image to illustrate Plate VII of his Arctic Zoology, (1784-1785); combined with lines from James Thomson’s, poem, The Seasons, ‘Winter’ (1726), The Moose represents the artist’s understanding of pure description and of the interconnectedness of living species. Situated between Stubbs’s series of great works depicting a horse attacked by a lion and the potentially ground-breaking Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl (1795-1806), Hunter’s commission to paint a singular species type, the Moose, presented the artist with an opportunity to create a subtle work of moving imagery that invokes critical debates of the time concerning the representation of the natural world and of the production of knowledge more generally, and are explored in this paper.

In her book, Women and Power: A Manifesto (2017), Mary Beard describes how the public voice of women has been silenced over millennia by patriarchal structures that have extinguished female voices and actions. She chooses Elizabeth I as just one example. A powerful and long-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth I ought to signify a shift in understanding women’s roles in public life. For Beard, however, Elizabeth remains significant in the public imagination because of her identification with male characteristics. Beard’s point is that, despite alluding to this male identity, Elizabeth’s history has also, until very recently, been written and spoken largely by men. The queen’s voice, body, manners, habits and language have been determined by male writers and have, subsequently, been altered, tailored to the attitudes and circumstances of male power over the centuries. In this project, which takes the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I as its starting point, students have investigated the ‘materials’ of monarchy in ways which prioritise elements of the agency of kings and queens through intimate knowledge of their clothing and jewellery; questioning accepted historical precepts of gender and power and challenging the conventions of historicised language. The exhibition of work in Splendour surveys the Renaissance and Stuart courts of Scotland and England, renowned for their exuberance, luxury and excess. Materials are gathered together in ways that parallel wider associations, while simultaneously offering a critique of display and performance of royal privilege. During this period, Britain’s wealth was acquired through its exploitation of trade in precious commodities and the expression of its supremacy was often through allusion to jewels. For example, in one controversial staged performance, Masque of Blacknesse, the performer remarks: \ud For were the world with all his wealth a ring,\ud Britannia, whose new name makes all tongues sing,\ud Might be a diamond worthy to encase it….\ud It is these associations that are foregrounded in this project, Splendour, provoking questions and meanings surrounding power and agency; who owns it and who might speak it.

‘Housing the Collection: The Great Windmill Street Anatomy Theatre and Museum’, in William Hunter and the Art and Science of Eighteenth-Century Collecting, Ashgate (Histories of Material Culture and Collecting 1700-1900)\ud Year of Publication: 2013\ud \ud This essay describes the original house and collection of the eminent Scottish anatomist, Dr William Hunter 1718-1783 and explains how the Great Windmill Street Anatomy Theatre and Museum connected Hunter’s ambitions for his collection, an accumulation and combinability of natural and artificial curiosities, with the ambitious plans of ‘improvement’ for the city itself. Hunter’s ‘great school’ incorporated details of the urban architectural schemes of John Gwynn in his London and Westminster Improved (1766) and constituted an exemplar of the public/private spaces characteristic of late eighteenth-century London.

The origins of William Hunter’s town house at 16 Great Windmill Street, Westminster, began with a petition to the First Lord of the Treasury, the third Earl of Bute, requesting a piece of land on which to build a ‘great school’ of anatomy. Hunter believed a school dedicated to the science and patronised by the King, would reflect a work of ‘publick magnificence’ commensurate with the capital’s cultural and commercial ambitions. In this sense, Hunter’s project belongs amongst the fiercely contested sites of London’s elite environs during the second half of the eighteenth century; sites such as those delineated by John Gwynn in his London and Westminster Improved (1766). While Hunter’s proposed scheme was never realised, his house at Great Windmill Street surpassed its initial objective, as Robert Mylne’s design incorporated a school of anatomy alongside an extensive collection of natural history, books, coins, paintings, prints and drawings. The interiors were designed to reflect the pre-eminence of Hunter’s collections overall, with marble fireplaces, richly painted ceilings, and mahogany cabinets. As this paper explains, an interior dedicated to scientific research quickly emerged behind the domestic façade of Great Windmill Street, animating the worlds of anatomy, natural history, and the fine arts. William Hunter’s museum, like the Soho Square mansion of Sir Joseph Banks, acted as a centre to the periphery of a nascent scientific community with one distinctive feature however; as the home of the first Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts, it not only served to provide instruction to physicians and surgeons but to artists also. As one contemporary remarked: ‘Dr. Hunter’s fine injection [anatomical preparation] is like a painters’, (Cruickshank, 1779) demonstrating how Hunter and his London home foregrounded anatomy within the cultural sphere of fine art practice.

In his book, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, The British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution, John Cascoigne remarks that the gentleman naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks represented a ‘splendid anachronism’, explaining how Banks and his collection of natural history and antiquities, gathered in his museum in London’s Soho Square, epitomized a ‘planned obsolescence’ allowing naturalists to become professionals and diminishing his own status within the networks of late eighteenth-century scientific communities. Similarly, in his eulogy to Dr. William Hunter, the French physician, Félix Vicq d’Azyr, describes how his museum at 16 Great Windmill Street in Westminster, formed a ‘superb cabinet’, one ‘where his mind would recapture a picture of all his ideas’. On Hunter’s death, however, the meanings of the collection changed: ‘the chain of all these truths is broken; all is silent in this vast structure’ (Vicq d’Azyr, 1805). Without the guiding hand of the collector early scientific interiors and collections quickly became less comprehensible, often broken up and sold among other collectors, or, like William Hunter’s, became the foundation for the type of public museum that we might recognize today. Early scientific collections encompassed such a broad range of material objects, both natural and artificial, that the collector was intrinsic to the purpose of the collection overall and to the knowledge embodied in each individual object. Collectors such as Banks and Hunter were intimately connected to the very materiality that constituted their extensive collections, an interdependence that is made more significant when the material is formed of human and animal anatomy, the very fabrica of life. This paper explores this relationship between collector and the collection and accounts for the entanglements of meanings that have direct consequences for the ways that we interpret the material culture of museum collections today.