Interiors and Interiority

The book explores the historical connections between the notions of architectural interior, subjective space, human interiority, and represented space including virtual space. In the 18th century the notion of "interiority" understood as a paradigm of human subjectivity came to be articulated in a sustained way in architectural and visual, rather than only literary forms. While the notion of the interior and the processes of "interiorization" were, as Walter Benjamin demonstrated, the defining features of 19th-century bourgeois culture, it is the different forms of conceptual assault on, or deconstruction of interiority that define the approach to space and self in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book examines models of understanding "interiority" as these were developed in relation to notions of space and spatial experience.