Since scanners became a common tool in architecture schools around ten years ago, the tendency has been to record what is there in the built environment in an attempt to discover the interrelationships between spaces obscured by the materiality of building. However, architects are now starting to speculate using these new technologies. Founding member of architecture firms Brrum and servo stockholm, and Professor of Architecture at the KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, Ulrika Karlsson investigates this through the work conducted by Michael Young, co-founder of New York-based practice Young & Ayata.

This paper examines the interior as a condition that is continuously in production through the arrangement of objects and furniture. This is done along two lines of inquiry. First by examining a few different historical and contemporary conceptions of the domestic interior through the lens of architectural representation. Second by using the technique of laser scanning to document a number of inhabited interiors in two apartment buildings. Through a series of representations, or cloud drawings, produced from the scans, the paper presents three ways of reading the interior: as environments, as assemblies, and as materialities. Departing from Robin Evans’ writing on drawing techniques for representing the interior and their correlation to ways of inhabitation, the paper poses questions around how the understanding of the interior may shift when using emerging techniques for architectural representation. Through readings of Walter Benjamin as well as Sylvia Lavin, the paper discusses such shifts in relation to changes in the conception of the interior and the objects that it contains.