Professor Graeme Brooker - Royal College of Art

Professor Graeme Brooker - Royal College of Art
About
Press
Papers
We're Hiring!
Professor Graeme Brooker
Royal College of Art
Interior Design
Faculty Member
Followers
2,075
Following
53
Co-authors
Public Views
Graeme Brooker is the head of Interior Design at the Royal College of Art, London. He has practised and studied Interior Design in both London and Manchester, receiving his Masters Degree in 1995 with distinction for the project ‘The Room and the City’. Between 1997 and 2004 he taught Interior Architecture at University of Wales institute Cardiff (UWIC), before moving to Manchester where, between 2004 and 2010, he was the programme Leader of both the BA and MA Interior programmes as well as the leader of the Centre for Design Research. From January 2011 until January 2013 he was Principal lecturer in Interior Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Brighton. From 2013-2015 he was the head of the newly formed department of Fashion and Interiors at Middlesex University, London.
In September 2015 he undertook the role of head of Interior Design at the Royal College of Art where he was awarded his professorship in 2016.
Graeme Brooker’s research interests are focussed on all aspects of the design and architecture of interior space. He has written extensively on the cultural, historical and philosophical implications of reusing existing spaces and buildings. He has written and published numerous books, papers, articles and reviews on this subject, including the highly acclaimed ‘Rereadings’, (2005 - co-authored with Sally Stone), recognised as a key text in interior architecture and design publications. A second volume was published in 2018.
He is a series editor for 'Designing Interiors' for Lund Humphreys and he is also a member of the editorial advisory board of the magazine ‘Interiors: Design: Architecture: Culture’ published by Bloomsbury, IDEA Magazine (Aus/NZ), and INNER magazine (Italy). He is the co-founder and now president of Interior Educators (IE), the national subject association for interiors courses in the UK. He founded it in Manchester in 2006 and was its inaugural chair from 2006-8. He was re-elected as its director in April 2010.
He is currently working on a number of publications one of which is The Story of the Interior: a reworking of Ernest Gombrich's seminal Story of Art- but as told through the lens of inside space (Thames & Hudson 2025) . He is also writing ‘The superREUSE Manifesto (Routledge 2025).
He was awarded an HEA National Teaching Fellowship for 2015-16 and is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA)
Research Interests
Graeme Brooker’s research is focussed on the theories, histories, processes and practices of the creation of interior space. These include:
- Building reuse
- Histories, processes and theories of Interiors and spatially related site-specific constructed environment disciplines ranging from art installation to architecture
- Sustainability, material ecologies and ‘superuse’ in building
- Questions of spatial identity via the realisation of program and material economies
- The development and substantiation of the perception and profession of the discipline of Interiors
- Pedagogy in the design of interior space
- Questions of spatial representation by digital and analogue methods.
less
Related Authors
Galen Strawson
The University of Texas at Austin
E. Wayne Ross
University of British Columbia
Alejandra B Osorio
Wellesley College
Andrea Peto
Central European University
Stefano Maffei
Politecnico di Milano
Imma Forino
Politecnico di Milano
David Seamon
Kansas State University
Claire Bishop
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Shaun Gallagher
University of Memphis
Armando Marques-Guedes
UNL - New University of Lisbon
Interests
View All (18)
Uploads
all
Videos
23
Books
76
Papers
Drafts
Book Reviews
More
Talks
Videos by Professor Graeme Brooker
54:43
In conversation with Jonathan Forsster - MST (Multi-Storey Thinking Podcast)

MULTI-STORY-THINKING
Architectural, interior and furniture design
In conversation with Jonathan Forster - Designer, Educator, and host of the Multi Story Thinking ...
more
In conversation with Jonathan Forster - Designer, Educator, and host of the Multi Story Thinking Podcast on Interior Design
MULTI-STORY-THINKING
Architectural, interior and furniture design
35 views
01:27:19
50 WORDS FOR REUSE
A talk given on January 8th 2021 for the Interior Architecture students at the Eastern Mediterra...
more
A talk given on January 8th 2021 for the Interior Architecture  students at the Eastern Mediterranean University. I discuss my research work, my students work, in the Interior Reuse platform that I have run for 5 years at the RCA, and then I describe 50 terms for reuse which I use regularly and which I hope become useful to describe what this aspect of the interior entails.
422 views
Books by Professor Graeme Brooker
The Story of the Interior
The Story of the Interior
, 2025
From traditional nomadic dwellings to state-of-the-art airports, from monumental temples and Baro...
more
From traditional nomadic dwellings to state-of-the-art airports, from monumental temples and Baroque palaces to high-rise apartments and high-fashion boutiques. The Story of the Interior is an exploration into how the fundamental elements of a room have evolved and endured. And why it matters. In this beautifully illustrated volume, expert interior designer Graeme Brooker examines a wide range of iconic and offbeat examples of interior design from the world of architecture, urbanism and furniture design, as well as art installations and imagined spaces. In this way, the reader is deftly guided through diverse places both drastically different and yet with
surprisingly similar interior spaces, such as;
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater
• Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project
• The Prada store in Marfa, Texas
• Sou Fujimoto’s NA House
• The rock-cut Buddhist temples of India
• Medieval European castles
• Ancient Egyptian tombs
Organized into three sections – The Room, The Private Interior and The Public Interior – this groundbreaking book presents a fascinating new analysis of how the interior has been conceived and thought of from antiquity to the present day. By calling attention to the most basic elements of inside space – walls, doors, windows, furniture, ambience to name a few – this engaging exploration delves into how private and public interiors actively shape the way we live, work, learn and play.
The superREUSE Manifesto
The superREUSE Manifesto
, 2025
The superREUSE Manifesto is a critical exploration of ideas, research and practices in reuse. Reu...
more
The superREUSE Manifesto is a critical exploration of ideas, research and practices in reuse. Reuse identifies insights into cities, buildings, interiors and objects constructed through working with extant material. Super is an elevated pitch for a 21st century that is characterised by responses to the challenges of the climate emergency and social justices. The superREUSE Manifesto coalesces ideas in the designed and built environment that react and work with these challenges. It is an uncompromising collection of ideas and propositions designed to stimulate its reader to rethink their position in relation to how we must transform everything into its superREUSE.
Prefaced and foreword by Internationally recognised professors and designers Silke Langenberg and Ben Kelly the eight chapters traverses topics as diverse as histories of reuse (Tabulas), waste, anxieties manifest in appropriation, demolition and salvages. Each synthesise material from a broad range of thinkers and critics to form unique insights into superREUSE. The book ends with a coda.  Histories of the built environment have been surmised by aphorisms and dictums that neatly precis epochs of ideas. The superREUSE Manifesto supports this tradition and the eleven points of superREUSE advocates for its participants to pay forward what is an intergenerational inheritance of the future built environment.
It has been well documented that construction is the 40% industry, its carbon output accounting for almost half of the worlds carbon emissions. Decades of
climate awareness and resource-depletion initiatives to reduce the impacts of rapacious industrialisation have still not produced the results needed to resolve inequalities between the North and the South and the slow the heating of the planet. This book will not solve these issues but it does expand on how can designers of the built environment begin to comprehend this, understand it, and cope with it? This superREUSE MANIFESTO is the guide.
改造 / 重塑 --再利用的策略 Re-make/Re-model -Strategies for Reworking the Existing 吴美萍 校 Proofreading by WU Meiping
The Architect
, 2020
This paper examines how building reuse is a fundamental process to making interior space. By inte...
more
This paper examines how building reuse is a fundamental process to making interior space. By interpreting three 'contexts', proximities, inhabitations and identities, lenses through which the primary concerns of the architecture, design and decoration of the interior, and a number of strategies through which these contexts can be activated to solve particular problems such as reworking the existing matter to be found on site, assisting in how occupation may take place in the new environment and how they act as devices that relay particular spatial identities. In a world of finite resource, when the manipulation of what is already with us is increasingly prescient, hence the remaking and remodelling of existing environments is an increasingly important approach. As opposed to straightforward demolition, reusing existing spaces not only utilises sustainable approaches to the built environment, but it also reinforces continuous links between the past and the present, reinforcing identity and connection to spaces and places. Besides, reworking existing matter also requires a unique sensibility, one that is comfortable with the ambiguities of authorship and the challenges of manipulating existing material into new elements and space. Because of this, arguably, a situation which loosens the traditional roles between the architectural container, the interior, and the built environment is inevitable. A situation which Ross Exo-Adams describes as ultimately the 'interiorising of all of architecture'.
BRINKWORTH - So Good So Far
Brinkworth: So Good So Far
, 2019
Since 1990, the London- and New York-based design studio Brinkworth has realised over 2,500 proje...
more
Since 1990, the London- and New York-based design studio Brinkworth has realised over 2,500 projects in 80 countries. The beginnings of the studio, primarily as a design and build workshop, has infused the practice with an obsession with making and process. All of its projects exemplify this approach: one based on a fascination with fabrication and a precision with details. Their work is epitomised by pioneering interior and experiential environments, innovative new-build architecture and inventive furniture and product designs. In essence, Brinkworth projects are renowned for their carefully crafted and meticulously assembled qualities: environments and elements that typify their fascination with design, detail and materials.
Beautifully illustrated with colour photographs and concept sketches of Brinkworth's innovative projects, this is the first book to bring together the complete range of the company’s internationally renowned and award-winning work. It’s insightful in-depth interviews – with partners Adam Brinkworth and Kevin Brennan, along with a range of their clients and other members of the Brinkworth team – throw light on their unique design process and creative collaborations.
Interiorities: artistic, conceptual and historical reassessments of the interior
by
Vlad Ionescu
Judith Wambacq
Benjamin Binstock
Professor Graeme Brooker
Bart Verschaffel
B. G . Tassone
Imma Forino
Angelique Campens
, and
Dominique Bauer
This collection addresses interiority as a concept debated by artists and philosophers, historian...
more
This collection addresses interiority as a concept debated by artists and philosophers, historians and sociologists alike. From Augustine to Montaigne, from the monk’s cell to the Renaissance studiolo, the artist’s studio and the modern library, the interior has provided subjectivity with a protective layer that defined one’s identity and its relation to the world. The goal of this interdisciplinary collection is to approach interiority and the interior as relational entities that interact with architectural spaces, visual arts and music, social and political ideologies, geographical and historical structures. How does the interior—of mankind, of the earth, of architecture—affect identity, its historical, cultural and artistic representation? How do we think of the interior other than as Cartesian solipsism or as a volatile architectural decorum? How does the Earth’s interior relate to the world we experience every day? Just as the façade relates a building to the public space and betrays something of its interior structure, the interior is hereby approached as a space that mediates between the psyche, its history and its impact onto the world.
Rereadings - Volume 2
by
Professor Graeme Brooker
and
Sally Stone
The second volume of the groundbreaking book on adapting the existing built environment.
Key Interiors Since 1900
Interior space encloses the daily routines of human life. Each space will invoke different respon...
more
Interior space encloses the daily routines of human life. Each space will invoke different responses due to their function and organisation, their history and atmosphere, and their environmental and material conditions. The room is central to the understanding of the interior. It is an enclosure of space within which occupancy, in its myriad of forms, takes place. This is a book about the history of Twentieth Century Interior Design, as told through a series of exemplary interiors and rooms.
The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design
The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design
, Jul 2013
The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design offers a compelling collection of original essay...
more
The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design offers a compelling collection of original essays that seek to examine the shifting role of interior architecture and interior design, and their importance and meaning within the contemporary world. Interior architecture and interior design are disciplines that span a complexity of ideas, ranging from human behaviour and anthropology to history and the technology of the future. Approaches to designing the interior are in a constant state of flux, reflecting and adapting to the changing systems of history, cultur and politics. It is this process that allows interior design to be used as evidence for indentifying patterns of consumption, gender, identity and social issues. The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design provides a pioneering overview of the ideas and arrangements within the two disciplines that make them such important platforms from which to study the way humans interact with the space around them. Covering a wide range of thought and research, the book enables the reader to investigate fully the changing face of interior architecture and interior design, while offering questions about their future trajectory.
From Organisation to Decoration: An Interiors Reader
by
Professor Graeme Brooker
and
Sally Stone
From Organisation to Decoration: An Interiors Reader is a reader for students, scholars and pract...
more
From Organisation to Decoration: An Interiors Reader is a reader for students, scholars and practitioners interested in the theories, processes and principles of the aspects of the theory and practice of interior architecture, interior design and interior decoration.
The book is divided into three parts, which reflects the focus of the different strands. It aims to contextualise, explore and clarify past and present debates in all three areas of the field of interiors. Each section is concerned with the processes, histories and ideas that shape the interior and includes discussions about development, identity, organisation, conservation, material and surface concerns and attitudes towards the host building. A broad range of writings are included – cultural theory, historical essays, scholarly papers, commissioned texts, extracts from books, interview transcripts, and magazine and newspaper articles. A case study and an annotated guide to further reading concludes each section, thus offering a succinct overview of the theories and ideas underpinning the interior for the beginner, as well as providing stimulation for students and practitioners in the field.
Rereadings: Interior Architecture and the Principles of Remodelling Existing Buildings.
by
Professor Graeme Brooker
and
Sally Stone
Re-readings is an authoritative testament to the complex process of remodelling existing building...
more
Re-readings is an authoritative testament to the complex process of remodelling existing buildings. Although buildings have always been reused, the process of doing so has rarely been treated as an artform. In recent years, however, a huge amount of press coverage has been devoted to remodelling projects such as the Tate Modern in London, the Baltic Art Factory in Gateshead, the Grand Louvre pyramid and courtyard, and the Reichstag in Berlin, to name but a few.
By attracting prestigious architects to its practice, it would appear that remodelling, once the dowdy cousin of the more glamorous architecture, has gained a new respectability. Re-readings responds to remodelling as an artform, making sense of the considerable structural, aesthetic, environmental, contextual and programmatic challenges of remodelling existing buildings. Illustrated throughout with a rich international portfolio of case studies, it explains the theory behind the way that architects and designers interpret and adapt buildings.
What is Interior Design?
by
Professor Graeme Brooker
and
Sally Stone
The study and practice of designing interior spaces is a constantly evolving subject. However des...
more
The study and practice of designing interior spaces is a constantly evolving subject. However despite the popularity of interior design at both undergraduate and post-graduate level, there is still very little legislation or definition available.
What is Interior Design? aims to serve as an introduction for students, scholars, and practitioners who have an interest in interior design and architecture. This book examines the fundamental characteristics of interior space—the analysis and understanding of existing buildings, the nature and qualities of organising an
interior space, and an understanding of the material and surface qualities of found and applied textures. What is Interior Design? contextualises current issues around education and practice, examines both
historical and contemporary concerns in design, and looks at the work of key practitioners in the field.
Form and Structure
by
Professor Graeme Brooker
and
Sally Stone
The subject of interior architecture currently lacks a detailed and educationally focussed text. ...
more
The subject of interior architecture currently lacks a detailed and educationally focussed text. The new Basics Interior Architecture series will fill this gap, and expand students knowledge of interior design/interior architecture and give an insight into some of the principles and methods of professional interior architects. The first book in the Basics Interior Architecture series, Form & Structure will examine the basic ideas that underpin the design and remodelling of interior space, from the establishment of a relationship between the existing building and the new components that inhabit it, to the careful positioning and design of significant elements within the space. The book will propose a method of analysis, understanding and exploitation of the existing building that can be used to realise the design of a new insertion.
Context and Environment
by
Professor Graeme Brooker
and
Sally Stone
There are currently few detailed and educationally focussed texts on the subject of interior arch...
more
There are currently few detailed and educationally focussed texts on the subject of interior architecture. The new Basics Interior Architecture series helps to fill this gap, and will expand students' knowledge of interior design/interior architecture and give an insight into some of the principles and methods of professional interior architects. The second in this series, Context & Environment examines the ways in which elements based both inside and outside of the host building can influence and effect the interior space. The book proposes a method of interpretation, evaluation and utilisation of physical factors, such as light and orientation, the contextual issues of the urban form and the subject of sustainability, and their influences on the design of the interior and the remodolling of existing buildings.
Elements + Objects - occupying the interior
by
Professor Graeme Brooker
and
Sally Stone
Basics Interior Architecture: Elements and Objects explores the manner in which an interior space...
more
Basics Interior Architecture: Elements and Objects explores the manner in which an interior space can be manipulated through the precise placement of forms. This title describes the principles underpinning the design of objects, and their placement within the interior space. It also discusses the influence that this has upon the character and perception of the space; providing focus or rhythm, controlling visual movement or expressing scale. Basics Interior Architecture: Elements and Objects teaches how the manipulation of objects and elements can create interior spaces of distinctive and apposite qualities.
Papers by Professor Graeme Brooker
The Pedagogies of Re-Use
Routledge eBooks
, Jun 18, 2024
The Street
Routledge eBooks
, Feb 9, 2024
Raw 3 ‘The Re-Use Imaginary’
Routledge eBooks
, Jun 18, 2024
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. FIGURE 5.1 Members of The R...
more
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. FIGURE 5.1 Members of The Reuse Imaginary team screen-grabbed and then reimagined into the
The Future is Interior and Interiorised
Inner-Propriations
Routledge eBooks
, Nov 19, 2021
The Interior Condition: Impact & Agency
Võrdlemisi sageli nenditakse, et sisearhitektuur on teoreetiliselt ebamäärane valdkond. 1 Sedasor...
more
Võrdlemisi sageli nenditakse, et sisearhitektuur on teoreetiliselt ebamäärane valdkond. 1 Sedasorti hägusus võib mõnikord olla ebamugav. Vahel viib see liighõlpsa oletuseni, et sisearhitektuur on olemuslikult pinnapealne ning ei allu mõtestamisele. Niisugune tabamatus on aga minu arvates interjööri raison d' être 2 , üks selle alustalasid. Just vastuokslikkus ja vabadus pakub sisearhitektuuriga tegelejaile nii praktilises, teaduslikus kui ka pedagoogilises plaanis palju tegutsemislusti. Käesolevas artiklis võetakse vaatluse alla väide, et sisearhitektuuri mõistmisel mängib keskset rolli teatud ruumiline, teoreetiline ja professionaalne kõhelus, milleta pole võimalik valdkonna olemust, selle pedagoogilisi, praktilisi, teoreetilisi, ajaloolisi ja kutsealaseid aspekte käsitleda.
or
or
reset password
Need an account?
Click here to sign up
About
Press
Papers
Topics
Academia.edu Journals
work
We're Hiring!
help
Find new research papers in:
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
Health Sciences
Ecology
Earth Sciences
Cognitive Science
Mathematics
Computer Science
Content Policy
Academia ©2026