Constant Interior

Definition

"Constant interior" is Morey & Alkanoglu's diagnosis of twentieth-century mobility: "Today's constant stream of movement finds humanity constantly moving through the interiors of the world, only viewing glimpses of the exterior environment. Inside our homes, automobiles, and offices, the world has become a constant interior." Movement, expected to deliver exteriority, delivers enclosure instead: the highway tourist sees "only blurs between red lights and parking garages"; "focus shifted to the destination, highway signs, and turns"; "once differentiated, cities became similar, only identified by their highway exit numbers. Garages grew over parks; people became cars and buses in photos."

The concept joins the wiki's supermodern cluster (non-places, space-of-flows, dromology) but inverts its usual figure. Where Augé's non-place is a transit without dwelling, the constant interior is transit as dwelling — the cabin, the office, the home rendered continuous by the moving interior that connects them. The exterior is demoted to "glimpses" through glass, a view held at the speed of the enclosure.

Key Thinkers

• Anthony Morey & Volkan Alkanoglu — the concept's authors.
• Marc Augé — the non-place frame the concept superimposes on the vehicular interior.
• Paul Virilio — the dromological regime of speed, highway, and terminal.
• Reyner Banham — the portable interior ("You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car") as the constant interior's vernacular prehistory.

Related Concepts

• Car as Inhabitant — the vehicle interior as the constant interior's mobile room.
• Architectural Purgatory — the garage as the constant interior's domestic terminus: the room one passes through without arriving.
• Non-Places — transit without dwelling; the constant interior as dwelling-through-transit.
• Space of Flows — the network condition beneath the moving interior; "If connectivity is no longer based on proximity, is a car needed for relevance or transport?"
• Dromology — speed as the medium through which the world is glimpsed.
• Interiority — interiority detached from stasis: a state of motion.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the defining passage ("the world has become a constant interior"), the highway-exit-numbers homogenization, the red-lights/white-lights passage ("We follow the red lights to our destination, looking at the white lights of those that have experienced our adventures return to where we come from"), and the connectivity question.

Open Questions

• Is the constant interior the non-place's complement or its negation — does moving through interiors restore dwelling to transit, or seal transit off from the world it moves through ("only viewing glimpses of the exterior environment")?
• The chapter's connectivity question ("If connectivity is no longer based on proximity, is a car needed for relevance or transport?") suggests the constant interior could exist without motion. Is a stationary constant interior still an interior — or the final dissolution of the inside/outside dialectic?
• How does the constant interior relate to the wiki's interior urbanism register — is the atrium hotel (Marinic's Portman chapter) the architectural building-type of the same condition?