Lecture: Liz Teston

Join us for a public lecture by Liz Teston, Assistant Professor of Interior Architecture at the UT College of Architecture and Design, on Monday, November 19, 2018. Teston’s lecture, titled “Interiority,” will explore her research of interiority as a perceived condition rather than a thermally-controlled space inside a building. Within her research, interiority can be a fleeting experience, an intimate place, amongst transient and improvisational settings. Teston will discuss how interiority can be found inside structures, but also in the exterior, public sphere. Her discussion will be framed in both generalized models and specific instances–from pedestrians in Bucharest to protests in Minneapolis and ephemeral conditions in downtown Knoxville. Through a series of examples, Teston will discuss these transient conditions that bring the interior to the city, and the related contributions of memory and the everyday.

Teston is a designer and assistant professor of Interior Architecture in the UT College of Architecture and Design. Teston’s teaching and research is situated at the intersection of urban interiority, design politics, and cultural identity. She is the James Johnson Dudley Faculty Scholar (2017-19) and was a Fulbright Scholar in Bucharest, Romania (2018). She has published works in the Interior Architecture Theory Reader, MONU, A Guide to the Dirty South: Atlanta, and the International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design, with forthcoming contributions to Interior Futures (anticipated 2020) and Transient Spaces (anticipated 2019). She challenges the concept of interior architecture by examining how people use public places as they would use interiors. She believes disciplinary discourse often overlooks topics such as interiority; however, Teston’s work attempts to expand the discipline by breaking boundaries and seeking outsider perspectives of interiority.

This lecture is funded by the Robert B. Church Memorial Lecture fund. Unless otherwise noted, lectures begin at 5:30 p.m. in Rm. 109/McCarty Auditorium in the Art + Architecture Building, 1715 Volunteer Blvd. All are welcome.