Hidden Spaces

Definition

Hidden spaces (with secret places) name, in Anne Troutman's account, the peripheral rooms and cavities of the dwelling — "closets, hallways, stairways, doors and windows, attics, basements, eaves, and cabinets" — which "expand and contract with fear and desire" and constitute "the night side of the house, in which the identity and security of domestic life is symbolically tested" (1997/2006, p. 356). Their defining property is positional and psychic at once: they are "internal to the house's structure yet external to its principal rooms" — "the expanded boundaries of the house and my consciousness" — "condensed spaces, tight spaces, often storage spaces, repositories of the activities and memories just beyond and within the main episodes of my life" (p. 357). Incorporated within the house, "they form another realm where daily life is displaced, condensed, fragmented" (pp. 356–357) — a second house operating by the dream-work's mechanics. Their contents are not furniture but psychic contents: "Wishes, dreams, fantasies, fears, desires are the inhabitants of the internal boundaries of our everyday environment: the place of the other, the imagined, the double, the dream" (p. 357); "In these hollow walls dwells the unknown, the in-between, the impossible, the unseen" (p. 358). The concept re-maps the domestic interior topographically: "Its interiors are a map of the conscious and unconscious, with conscious securities and insecurities visible in the main rooms, and unconscious ones lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces" (p. 356).

The concept is distinct from its wiki neighbours: the closet is one member of the family (and, in Edelman, a psychic container-form); poché is the architectural name for the thick wall-space the hidden spaces inhabit; concealment is the mode of their access (the door "hidden behind all the clothes," the locked cabinet); refuge is one of their two charges ("refuge and passage… quiet places in which to nest and dream, dark places in which to hide or from which to flee"); liminality is their temporal condition ("spaces in which I am usually alone or on the way to somewhere else"). Hidden spaces is the collective concept: the house's other realm.

Key Thinkers

• Anne Troutman — the concept's theorist (1997/2006): the night-side thesis, the map of the conscious and unconscious, the inhabitants of the internal boundaries, the hollow walls where the unknown dwells; the eaves club, the linen hall and the back bedroom as the concept's three remembered cases.
• Gaston Bachelard — the day-side antecedent (via the wiki's Intimus selection): the house's drawers, chests and cupboards as the "cosmos" of the intimate — Troutman's hidden spaces supply their fear-register.
• Sigmund Freud — the essay's theoretical spine: anxiety/fear, repression (the "repressed fears" that "transform surface into cavity"), and the dream-work mechanics the other realm obeys (displacement, condensation, fragmentation).

Related Concepts

• The Closet — the smallest member: the brother's closet whose "small rounded door… hidden behind all the clothes" opens into the eaves; the hidden system's threshold.
• Refuge — the hidden spaces' positive charge: "the refuge of the half-realized"; the parallel world "of refuge and passage."
• Fear — their affective currency: the spaces "expand and contract with fear and desire"; the child explores them "in order to explore my fears."
• Childhood Spaces — their primary inhabitant and cartographer: the eaves club, the undetected fear-work, the memories of loss resonating in "long dusky hallways and cabinets with box latches."
• Poché — the architectural name for their substance: hollow walls, eaves, the disused dumbwaiter shaft — the thick wall's inhabited dark ("surface into cavity").
• Concealment — their access-mode: the door hidden behind hung clothes; the locked cabinet at the end of the fortress-nesting; the entrance "effectively imperceptible" (Weir's Oval Room is the concealment concept's paradise pole, the locked cabinet its fear pole).
• The Uncanny — their affect when encountered unbidden: the unknown in the hollow walls; the house "in which someone has been buried behind the wall, alive."
• Memory — their archive-function: "repositories of the activities and memories just beyond and within the main episodes of my life. Without them, I am uncomfortably fastened to the present, limited to the surface."
• Interiority — their psychic extension: "the expanded boundaries of the house and my consciousness."
• Boundaries — their address: "the internal boundaries of our everyday environment."
• Dwelling — their host: the mirror-relationship house in which the home "dwells in us."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the concept's founding wiki source: the night-side thesis ("They are the night side of the house, in which the identity and security of domestic life is symbolically tested," p. 356); the other realm ("where daily life is displaced, condensed, fragmented," pp. 356–357); the map thesis (conscious securities in the main rooms, unconscious ones "lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces," p. 356); the inhabitants ("the place of the other, the imagined, the double, the dream," p. 357); the expanded boundaries of consciousness (p. 357); the hollow walls ("dwells the unknown, the in-between, the impossible, the unseen," p. 358); the fortress-nesting ending in the locked cabinet's ellipsis (p. 356); the three cases — linen hall and dumbwaiter shaft (loss), eaves club (fear-work), back bedroom (locks, bolt, chain, shaft-wind, "strange noises at all hours").

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• The hidden spaces are enumerated (closets, hallways, stairways, doors and windows, attics, basements, eaves, cabinets) but not classified: is there a typology (circulation-hidden [hall, stairs], storage-hidden [closet, cabinet], structural-hidden [eaves, cavity, shaft], threshold-hidden [door, window]) — and does each type carry a distinct affect?
• Troutman's map assigns the unconscious to "smaller, peripheral spaces" — a plan-psychology. Can it be designed with (pockets of intentional unlabeled-ness), or does designing the hidden destroy the hidden (the assigned meaning is the occupant's, "consciously and unconsciously")?
• The wiki's poché tradition treats the hollow wall as inhabitable and generative (Spuybroek's portals, the dressing-table niche as "a mode of liberation"); Troutman's hollow walls house "the unknown, the in-between, the impossible, the unseen." Are these two valences of one space — the poché that liberates by day and frightens by night — or two architectural kinds?
• The child "explores these hidden spaces in order to explore my fears"; the adult's back bedroom has "two locks, a bolt, and a chain." Does the hidden space's charge invert across a life (exploration → fortification), and what would a design for the adult version of the eaves club be?

Stub note: This page was created from a single source (Troutman 1997/2006) and requires fuller treatment — the storeroom/attic/basement literature of the domestic interior, the attic-and-cellar typologies of vernacular housing, and the secret-passage tradition (servants' corridors, priests' holes) alongside the literary archive (Poe's walled-up precursor, the Gothic castle's locked cabinets).