Interior Architecture Professor Liz Teston took her study of public interiority Down Under this summer, spending two weeks engaging with faculty and students at RMIT (The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) in Melbourne, Australia.

Traveling as a Fulbright Specialist, Teston said it was a whirlwind journey. She gave a keynote address at a symposium, held workshops for faculty and students, and worked on a case study for her next book, tentatively titled A Field Guide to Public Interiority. The forthcoming book will feature case studies Teston has completed all over the world, on trips funded by the Fulbright program, UT, and other grants, including the Arnold W. Brunner Grant from the American Institute of Architects’ New York Center for Architecture.

Teston describes the concept of public interiority as “exteriors that feel like or act like interiors.” Examples can range from an outdoor market, where an open area is transformed into a shared space; to Game Day in Neyland Stadium, where Vols fans experience a communal feeling; to outdoor areas where mist or heat is provided as arefuge from hot or cold weather.

Public interiority can typically be defined in five ways: political contexts, psychologicalconditions, programmatic states, atmospheric qualities, and formal “built” forms.

Teston said attention to “public interiority” is important because “in order to have healthy cities, we need to have experts in designing human-scaled spaces on teams that are designing exterior places for people.”

Teston, at UT since 2013, said her interest in public interiority was sparked in 2018 when she spent seven months as a Fulbright Scholar at Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, Romania.

“Looking at projects in Romania, I was interested in how political conditions there could reveal differences in architecture and space,” she said. She said people were making use of spaces in “improvisational and quick” ways and “it let you see the ingenuity of the people who lived there to use the city in a way that suited them.”

In 2023, Teston hosted the Public Interiority Symposium + Exhibition at UT, and she invited RMIT Professor Suzie Attiwill to do the keynote address.

“I got to know Attiwill through that experience, and she wrote the proposal for RMIT to host me,” Teston said.

After the UT symposium, Teston and three collaborators published an edited volume, Public Interiority: Exploring Interiors in the Public Realm. They received the Interior Design Educators Council 2025 Book Award for that work.

The trip to Melbourne was Teston’s first time in Australia.

In the scant free time she had, she explored the Melbourne area. She visited HealesvilleSanctuary, a wildlife refuge which houses many Australian animals, and ventured to St. Kilda Pier in Melbourne in hopes of seeing the colony of 1,400 Little Penguins (Eudyptula Minor) that live at the breakwater. She visited Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, Collingwood Yards arts center, the creative Fitzroy and Collingwood neighborhoods, and the State Library of Victoria, and she stayed in the oldest Chinatown in the southern hemisphere. She took lots of photos.

“What really captivated me was the quality of light. It’s very crisp,” she said, adding that she was fascinated by overlapping reflections on store windows. “The reflections created a sense of interiority that spilled out into the urban realm.”

Also, she said, she appreciated how every meeting in Australia began with a tribute acknowledging the area’s Indigenous Aboriginal people.

“I was really struck by the sincerity of that,” she said. “And how thinking about the Indigenous people contributes to alternative ways of reading the city.”

In many places, she said, that heritage is reflected in the way the city and its buildings have been developed in relation to the environment.

A good example is Federation Square, the public square that provides a gateway to Melbourne’s arts district. Today, visitors flock there for the museums and galleries, but the site on the Yarra River has been a gathering place for the local people for thousands of years.

“Everything is relating to context, and views, and people,” she said. “There’s also an importance relating to the specificity of place, or connection to Country; place is not a feeling for them but a living being to be respected.”