‘An armoire radiates a very soft light in the room, a communicative light’

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1957

The houses of eighteenth-century naturalists provide useful models of knowledge production related to subjects now defined as the ‘sciences’, but which were understood in the period as ‘natural philosophy’. In the twenty-first century, reflecting on interior spaces where such knowledge was generated, a kind of ‘doubleness’ is clear to see; representative of an expansive and extractive empire on one side, and, on the other, prototypes of modern urban laboratories formed to scrutinise the natural world. Arguably contributors to the current anthropocentric crisis, when reimagined, these spaces might also be considered as indicative of the very type of relationships now needed with our interiors between human and more-than-human species. Therefore, this paper describes a Latourian and phenomenological approach to reimagine houses and homes of naturalists during the enlightenment, explaining how, among their cabinets, museums, herbariums, libraries, and drawing rooms, an embodied form of knowledge existed, emerging as they lived and worked closely alongside products of the natural environment. The paper reassembles (Latour, 2007) the contents of houses that belonged to the Scottish anatomist, Dr William Hunter (1718-1783), Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), and Dr William Cullen (1710-1790), to demonstrate what Elizabeth Yale calls ‘sociable knowledge’ (Yale, 2016) and Bachelard alludes to in ‘communicative’ light (Bachelard, 1957). William Cullen, the Edinburgh-based physician and chemist, is a good example. Buying a ‘bleak and disagreeable’ plot of land to build his home at Ormiston Hill, he deliberately set out to demonstrate how it might be possible to thrive in what many considered to be a difficult environment. Cullen ‘improved’ the buildings and land at Ormiston Hill in a fashionable, eighteenth-century, sense, but from our own perspective, we might consider his intentions as ‘environmentally conscious’, as he sought to create an interior interconnected to the immediate exterior landscape, inhabiting a space of human and more-than-human knowledge.

• https://imagining-interiors.eca.ed.ac.uk