History of Interior Design I
Over the past three months, the History of Interior Design course has unfolded each period revealing how architecture expresses human beliefs, power, ritual, and beauty. From ancient civilizations shaping sacred forms to Gothic altarpieces elevating spiritual awe, from Renaissance rationality and ornament to the French influence on modern interiors, I learned to read design as cultural language. I explored how façades, furniture, textiles, and decorative arts evolved across eras. Linenfold carving mimicked drapery, Spanish and Italian Renaissance details communicated prestige, Chinese roof curvature was meant to guide energy, and Buddhist spiritual intent shaped spatial experience. I discovered that interiors are never isolated objects but reflections of philosophy, identity, technology, and aspiration. This class strengthened my ability to analyze symbolism, identify stylistic characteristics, and relate historical concepts to contemporary practice. History of Interior Design I deepened my appreciation for design as an ongoing narrative that continues to shape the way we live.
A Journey of Devotion at the
Nelson-Atkins Museum:
Altarpiece from early 15th century
Step into Gallery 105 of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, and you’ll find yourself transported to fifteenth-century Kingdon of Aragon, a world of devotion, craftsmanship, and quiet resilience. Before you tower a masterpiece shimmering with gold and faith: The Altarpiece with Scenes from the Life of the Virgin. Painted nearly six hundred years ago, its radiant panels unfold like a celestial narrative, guiding the viewer through the tender, triumphant story of Mary, the woman who came to embody strength through humility and compassion through suffering. In its gilded glow, one feels not only the grandeur of Gothic art, but also the heartbeat of an age when faith and artistry intertwined to honor the sacred feminine.
Each scene of the Altarpiece with Scenes from the Life of the Virgin is framed by a sumptuous Gothic canopy, transforming every narrative moment into its own sacred shrine. Above the painted scenes, a delicate canopy of gilded ogee and trefoil arches unfolds, its tracery curling upward into a crown of miniature finials and foliate motifs. This gilded frame is not merely ornamental, it echoes the structural vocabulary of Gothic architecture, recalling the ribbed vaults, pointed arches, and canopy niches that adorned the apses of 15thcentury Aragonezes churches. The painter and woodcarver translated these monumental stone forms into carved and gilded wood, to transform the painted space into a divine sanctuary.
The central image of the Virgin and Child is composed of a harmonious triangular arrangement, a symbol of divine stability and the Holy Trinity, surrounded by a choir of angels whose rhythmic placement enhances the celestial atmosphere. The sequence of pointed trefoil arches crowned with poppy-head finials reveals the artist’s devotion to ornamental richness and architectural precision. Here, the classical capitals from the roman columns are replaced by simplified forms, and the shafts are distinguished by cinctures or narrow rings that subtly separate the column’s base from its capital, an adaptation of Corinthian design. Together, these elements (tracery, gilding, geometry, and sculpted rhythm) create an architectural microcosm of a Gothic church, enveloping the Virgin’s story in a golden vision of faith and craftsmanship.
In the Late Gothic period, women lived under strict social hierarchies that confined them mainly to domestic and religious roles, leaving little room for education, independence, or public authority. Within this context, the figure of the Virgin Mary emerged as a spiritual ideal and a symbolic elevation of womanhood. The Altarpiece with Scenes from the Life of the Virgin at the Nelson Atkins Museum reflects this duality: while real women were expected to embody humility and obedience, Mary was exalted as both a humble servant of God and the Queen of Heaven. The faithful saw Mary as the intercessor who could plead on behalf of sinners to her Son. Her mercy, gentleness, and compassion offered comfort in a time of war, plague, and social unrest. The multiple panels showing her Annunciation, Nativity, and Coronation, narrate a woman’s journey from ordinary life to divine glory, offering believers, especially women, a vision of dignity and purpose beyond earthly limitations. Through its rich gold leaf and tender human expressions, the altarpiece transforms the medieval perception of womanhood, presenting Mary not merely as passive purity but as a compassionate mediator and powerful intercessor, an image that subtly challenged the limitations imposed on women in the Late Gothic world.
What was once part of local worship in Aragon became, through the currents of the early twentieth-century art trade, a key example of Spanish Gothic painting now preserved in Kansas City. The Altarpiece with Scenes from the Life of the Virgin was removed from the Parish church of Puerto Migalvo in the early 1900s, when many rural churches faced economic hardship and secular reforms after Spain’s Desamortización (ecclesiastical confiscations). As religious art entered the international market, this radiant retablo journeyed from Spain to Barcelona, then across the Atlantic, where it found a permanent home at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in 1932. Today, as you stand before its gilded panels, the centuries collapse, the devotion of medieval Aragon and the quiet strength of the Virgin Mary still shimmer, inviting visitors to look, reflect, and feel the same awe that once filled the candlelit chapels of her homeland.
Ancient Civilizations influences to contemporary Design and Architecture
The Carnegie Library located at West Fifth Avenue in Arkansas City, Kansas is a compressed lesson about ancient architecture inheritance, that a public building constructed in the early of the 20th century carries in it. Standing upon its faced, from the top to base, the symmetrical geometry, the pitched roof projected above two columns with capitals that turns the corners, estate from a stepped elevation from the street level, in clear reference to the ancient Greek temples, the library can be read as a “temple of knowledge”. This small-scale building also carries more elements that were seen first by the ancient civilizations: its corners alternate materials and color in an intention of reinforcing its legibility of its vertical edge’s geometry, and the cornice brackets, modillions, making the transition from wall to roof. Alternating bricks and stones, or stone colors was a Byzantine architectural characteristic used to create a distinctive decorative look. In the Islamic architecture this technique was called abalac. All the echoing of ancestry architecture present at the Carnegie Library tells us a story of features and strategy that works for a purpose still in the actual days.
The most eligible ancient reference on the Carnegie Library is the columned entrance and triangular pediment. In Greek temples the columns, capital, entablature, and pediment, were characteristics that frame a building with a civic identity. Although the Library does not bring a sculpture, the symmetrical balance and the pediment’s geometry work powerfully on communicating the viewer of the importance of the building. The library’s pediment keeps the ancient clarity yet respecting the site scale.
In ancient Egypt civilizations, the ziggurats formal staircase leading to the top were the precursors of the church steeples and towers from the Middle Ages on. This concept was refined and widely used later by Greek Roman civilization temples. The flight of steps lifting the viewer from the sidewalk to the entry porch is the direct continuation of an ancient architectural idea that public buildings announce their importance by rising onto a platform and staging ascent. The present step elevation converts the entry to the building into an intentional act and expresses the sacred ancient dignity of the building elevated from the common ground to a prepared place.
A closer look to the volume geometry and its corners, another ancient pattern is noticed: the alternating materials, from brick on the walls to lighter stone on the corners, to enhance the volume, recalls to a technique popularized by Byzantine architecture. This alternating, corner-focused pattern produces a striped effect right where the eye reads edges. In Late Antique and Byzantine walls, builders often alternated brick and stone in courses across entire surfaces, setting up polychrome stripes and textures that locked structure and ornament together. The library does not wrap in continuous stripes. Instead, it concentrates the ancient idea, contrast through alternation, at the corners, where regularly spaced stone blocks interrupt the brick’s uniformity and create a vertical accent.
In sum, the Carnegie Library’s visible features attach directly to ancient civilizations’ architectural characteristics, and because they are all materially present on this very building, the references are not metaphors: they are enacted every time someone stands on the walk and looks up. Observing the use of forms and strategies learned from the past gives new designers the security to create the new world based on what proved its functionality along the years, through many civilizations. The result at the Carnegie Library is a modest Kansas Library that borrows the authority of very old ideas without ceasing to be itself: a neighborhood “temple of Knowledge” that elevates the eyes of them who passes by, making its importance legible immediately.