The Emergence of the Interior. Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity

This work contributes to a growing body of research that seeks to place the domestic interior within the context and understanding of modernity. It proposes that during the nineteenth century, the domestic interior emerges as a concept for understanding built space alongside constructional, ornamental and surface definitions. Organized in two parts, the study seeks first to uncover ‘orientations’ and then subsequently ‘trajectories’ in its bid to describe the ways in which the interior emerged as a conceptual and spatial manifestation. Central to the book's thesis is an understanding of the interior as a ‘doubled’ or ‘two-fold’ entity comprising both space and image. This work initially locates its subject within a detailed analysis of two key figures in the historic conceptualization of the interior: Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud. This two-chapter opening section of the book seeks to uncover ways in which the interior has been accounted for through representation and the means by which the subjectivity of its inhabitants might be understood within these contexts. Using Benjamin to critique a number of established histories of the interior, Rice demonstrates the problematic ways in which painterly and illustrated representations of the interior have been used to construct and project notions of historical domesticity that do little more than conjure up ‘a dreamed realization’ (p. 5). This, he argues, has led to a generalizing and essentialist understanding of the interior. Analysis of Freud allows Rice to engage the notion of subjectivity within the history of the interior so as to connect the inhabitant to the room.