Rice, Charles

Bio Sketch

Charles Rice is an architectural historian, theorist and critic, and the wiki's principal historian of the interior. Currently Professor of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, he has previously taught at Kingston University (UK), the Architectural Association, London, and the University of New South Wales (bio web-verified via the publisher's author biography, Bloomsbury, for Interior Urbanism, 2016). "Rice's research considers key questions of modern architecture through the interior." His monograph The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (Routledge, 2007) — reviewed as extending "the idea, derived from the writings of Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, that it was in the late nineteenth century, at the birth of the concept of modernity, that the 'emergence' of the interior took place" (JSTOR review) — established the interior as a time-bound concept whose emergence can be historically dated and whose image/space doubleness structures both experience and historiography. His later Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (Bloomsbury, 2016) carries the interior question to the American downtown's atrium hotels; his chapter "The Inside of Space: Some Issues Concerning Heterogeneity, the Interior and the Weather" appears in the Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

Key Works

*Rethinking Histories of the Interior* (2004) — the Journal of Architecture essay (9.3, 2004, pp. 275–87), reprinted in Intimus (2006, pp. 283–292): the interior's etymological time-boundedness, the architects-vs-upholsterers birth of "interior decoration," the doubled interior read through Baudelaire, Benjamin and Freud, the critique of Praz/Thornton/Gere's essentialism, and the effective-history programme — the argument's first full statement and the direct ancestor of the 2007 book.
The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (Routledge, 2007) — the monograph: the interior's emergence as a nineteenth-century event, its doubleness (physical three-dimensional space and image, "with neither sense being primary"), the constructivist account of representation — the book the wiki's Hollis, Brooker and now-Rice source notes report and quote. (Not yet ingested as its own source.)
Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (Bloomsbury, 2016) — the atrium hotel as interior urbanism — the book behind Marinic's Portman chapter's theoretical frame. (Not yet ingested as its own source.)
"The Inside of Space: Some Issues Concerning Heterogeneity, the Interior and the Weather," in Hensel, Hight & Menges (eds.), Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 185–93). (Not yet ingested as its own source.)

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

historiography-of-the-interior — the field he re-methods: traditional vs effective histories of the interior; the essentialism critique (Praz, Thornton, Gere); the "sleep of historical consciousness."
bourgeois-interior — the formation he dates and defines: the interior "emerg[ing] with conceptual specificity in the context of bourgeois domesticity."
doubleness — the interior's constitutive condition he theorizes: spatial and imagistic, material and immaterial, "with neither sense being primary."
de-realisation — the doubled experience's yield, from Benjamin's exposé.
interior-view — the genre whose historical specificity anchors his critique of essentialist evidence.
effective-history — Foucault's alternative he imports: the interior's emergence as event, the "reversal of a relationship of forces."
the-collector — Benjamin's figure he deploys: "the true resident of the interior"; the historian-as-collector as essentialism's mechanism.
interiority — the etymology he establishes: "interiority" from the early eighteenth century, the architectural interior from the early nineteenth.
representation — the non-transparency thesis: "representations construct interiors on a two-dimensional surface as much as practices of decoration and furnishing construct interiors spatially" (2007, via Hollis).
interior-urbanism — his later register: the Portman atrium and downtown America.
trace — the interior's emergence "through an accumulation of traces" (Benjamin).
upholsterer — the professional struggle he dates: the interior as "a site of professional struggle between architects and upholsterers" (1801–1807).

Relevance to the Core Research

Rice is the wiki's primary historiographic source for the interior cluster: where Hollis reports the position of The Emergence of the Interior and Brooker quotes its doubleness thesis, the 2004 essay gives the argument in Rice's own words — with the full Baudelaire/Benjamin/Freud apparatus (de-realisation, the collector, the suite of rooms) that the secondary accounts compress. For the interior-design-vs-architecture debate he supplies the earliest dated episode (the architects-vs-upholsterers struggle marked by Hope 1807 and Percier & Fontaine 1801) and the discipline-separation thesis ("interior decoration began to articulate itself separately from architecture"). For the wiki's historiography-of-the-interior he is the constructive pole: the effective-history programme that makes the interior's history writable without essentialism — the method against which the style-manual tradition (Praz, Gere, Thornton) that Taylor & Preston's introduction names is measured. His Benjamin lineage also bridges the interior cluster and the spectacle cluster (de-realisation, phantasmagoria), and his Portman monograph links the interior-urbanism register (atrium-hotel) to the atrium analysis already in the wiki.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

Rethinking Histories of the Interior (2004/2006) — the Intimus selection (excerpts of the 2004 Journal of Architecture essay, pp. 276–82; Intimus pp. 283–292): the full argument — etymology, doubleness, Baudelaire/Benjamin/Freud, the Praz/Thornton/Gere critique, and the effective-history close.
(Reported secondhand in: (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — the 2007 book's position; The dialectics of appropriation (Brooker 2018) — the doubleness claim quoted from 2007, p. 2.)