Seeing Double

The subject of this essay is the author’s unrealised proposal for a temporary interior installation commemorating the return of a historic archive to Croome Court — a neo-Palladian house in a landscape garden of international significance near Worcester, UK. The proposed Archive Rooms installation would transform a suite of uninhabited spaces on the first floor of the house into a stimulating setting for exhibitions of artefacts from the returning collection. The design project was originally undertaken as part of the author’s practice-led doctoral inquiry exploring potential contemporary applications of picturesque concepts, techniques, and strategies in architectural design. The proposal was informed by the interior design techniques of one of Croome’s principal designers, the architect Robert Adam (1728–1792), whose contribution to the development of the picturesque in the eighteenth century remains only partially articulated. The essay reflects on the proposal through the lens of a series of perceived doublenesses in the project, delimiting latent spaces of potentiality for imagining new interiors between research and proposition, past and future, representation and reality, stasis and movement. Oscillating between historical-interpretative research into the work of Adam, descriptions of unrealised design proposals, and critical commentary on the design-led research methodology employed by the author, the essay elucidates often overlooked elements of Adam’s interior design practice and situates them in the context of eighteenth-century discourse on the picturesque. It reveals esoteric and forgotten ways of designing and representing interiors that have potential utility in contemporary design. It also suggests foundational methodological strategies for future historically informed and propositionally oriented design-led research inquiries in the field.