Interiority

Definition

Interiority names the innerness of interior design — the conscious and reflexive awareness of self, identity, community and others within a social environment. In Taylor & Preston's formulation, the "interdisciplinary arena of 'interiority'" "examines the innerness of interior design as that which is felt and projected upon and within the interior environment via body as a culturally lived organism" (p. 11). It is situated among philosophy and psychology, and it is the psychic and cultural correlate of the physical interior: where the room is the material demarcation of inside from outside (Elizabeth Grosz's point that there is no inside without some form of enframing), interiority is what that demarcation shelters — the reflexive inner life that the interior both houses and expresses. The hidden dressing-table niche of Intimus's emblematic photograph, where one sits "looking outwards and inwards simultaneously," is interiority built: a room "dressed in parity to the self-reflective body that inhabits it" (p. 7).

Taylor's later chapter ("Shape shifting," 2018) restates the cluster's content as a connection — "What might be called 'interiority'… offers a connection to psychological life, memory, closeness, and intimacy" — and then displaces it: "in recent years, the relationship between interiority and interior architecture has been affected by advances in digital, electronic, and interactive technologies, particularly the way real-time interaction alters physical and psychological engagement with built space." Under the dynamic paradigm the relationship is "dynamic and mobile, and ultimately aided by the inhabitant's response to the interior environment – and vice versa"; and if the supermodern interior keeps absorbing technological innovation, the discipline "forces consideration of alternate locations, sites, and environments as potential receptacles for interiority and dwelling of the individual." Interiority thus acquires a technological problem-setting: the non-place (inherently "impersonal and impermanent") as interiority's negative, and the responsive environment (interactive-architecture) as its uncertain new host.

A third, fabricated register appears in Marc Manack's chapter: interiority as the discipline's manufactured product rather than its lived content. The emancipated skyscraper interior was "completely indifferent to, and largely unaffected by, the architecture it is housed within, free to fabricate its own identity and position of interiority"; the technological decoupling of interior from architecture "emancipates the field to invent the disciplinary logic of interiority"; and the thesis follows: "Ultimately, the interiority of interior architecture is a complete fabrication, an artifice embedded within an edifice." Where Taylor & Preston's interiority is the reflexive inner life the interior shelters ("felt and projected upon… via body as a culturally lived organism"), Manack's is a designed artifice: "a complete and alternate world apart from the architecture, with unique authorial expression and embodied spatial effects" that "embodies a presence and identity that rivals architecture" — interiority as effect to be produced (fabrication), not depth to be protected. The disciplines diverge exactly here: psychology expects the interior to house an innerness it did not make; the fabricating discipline claims interiority as its invention.

A watery register appears in Sarah Treadwell's chapter: interiority as hydrological. "To live in the South Pacific is to be conscious of the watery nature of interiority"; the sea within the body ("We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood") and the body within the sea make the self's innerness liquid, permeable, and collective rather than solid, sealed, and private — "oceanic interiority is maintained by permeable membranes (skin and shore) that permit separation while allowing connections at individual and global scales." The register lands on the domestic interior: "Every domestic interior is, in some senses, oceanic, being liquid… and permeable (cut through with doors and windows and sound)… the domestic interior is oceanic in the tears that flow: sweat forms, blood falls, and waters break over the difficulties and pleasure of everyday life." Where the room shelters a reflexive inner life (Taylor & Preston), the oceanic interior carries the life's own liquids — grief, desire, birth, death — as its interior substance. See oceanic-interiority.

A fourth, everyday–scenographic register joins these in Pablo Meninato's chapter — the "everyday interiorities" of his title. Where Taylor & Preston's interiority is felt by the body, Manack's fabricated, Burns's denied, and Colley's desired, Meninato's is reassembled: "Conceiving space through scenographic means obliges the viewer to think of interiority as the site of reassembling, whereby the open quality of displacement takes the place of unity." Interiority here is not an innerness the room shelters but a condition of arrangement — produced when ordinary objects (the readymade's displaced wheel, Kienholz's lounge furniture and vending machine, Osorio's saturated son's room) are placed so that "the formation of interior space is not necessarily – or exclusive – the gestation of new forms." The register is also the tableau's viewing relation: interiority appears at the aperture, through voyeurism's peephole and barred window ("the only possible action is to spy"), where the interior is staged as withheld and its revelation is the work. See readymade, tableau, voyeurism.

A fifth, inherent register appears in Laura Garófalo-Khan's chapter: interiority as the grotto's birth-condition rather than its achieved state. The artificial grotto is "An interior literally formed from the landscape – but intentionally disassociated from its context – [that] does not index its exterior form or structure, making it a distinctively internal manifestation of form. In addition to its inherent interiority…" The English garden grottoes, though often "actually interior rooms, cellars, or aboveground pavilions," are "box-like spaces that celebrated their interiority through organic surface appliques" — interiority not as sheltered innerness (Taylor & Preston) nor manufactured artifice (Manack) nor hydrological continuity (Treadwell) but as self-sufficiency: an interior that envelops its occupants "in its own cosmology," needing no reference to the world it disembeds from. See artificial-grotto, interior-cosmology.

A sixth, gradient–nested register appears in Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson's chapter: interiority produced by environmental gradation rather than enclosure, and multiplied rather than singular. The campfire already "suggests a gradient of multiple environmental qualities with different degrees of interiority" — "the subtle creation of multiple interiors implied by simple environmental and, by extension, experiential variation"; its mechanical descendant (Banham's Standard of Living Package) "provide[s] multiple gradients of space surrounding it"; and the contemporary installations produce "variable degrees and zones of occupation" describable as "multiple interiors, multiple degrees and zones of activation that range in scale, scope, and perception as multi-layered, nested interiorities," aspiring to "gradients of enclosure and ranges of intimacy and interiority" — with the generalization that "these works create multiple and overlapping interiorities that may be applied at a various scales" (rooms, buildings, cities). Where Taylor & Preston's interiority is sheltered, Manack's fabricated, Treadwell's hydrological, Meninato's reassembled, and Garófalo-Khan's inherent, G&J's is graded and networked: interiority as a matter of degree, distributed across zones of activation and plugged into the data grid. See multiple-interiorities, the-campfire, sentient-spaces.

A seventh, contained register appears in Lee Edelman's chapter: interiority as the principle of containment the room models for the body. The men's room, windowless and mirror-filled, "gestures, despite the accessibility of that space to a subset of the 'public,' towards an idea of interiority, towards a principle of containment, implicit in the architectural imperative that shapes the subject – forming and informing him as the subject of ideology – in its own monumentalizing image, modeling the subject as container of space through the articulation of structural, because structuring, identities" (p. 103); and the interiorizing completes at the body, which "becomes a closet itself: a spatial enclosure for an autonomous subject… conceiving his body simultaneously as container and thing contained" (p. 104). Where Taylor & Preston's interiority is the innerness the room shelters, Edelman's is the innerness the room teaches: interiority as a lesson in enclosure that the subject then performs on his own body — with the uncanny ("a toppling of the walls within which the subject has been constructed and through which he has realized the imaginary architecture of a self," p. 107) as the register's failure mode. See the-closet, mens-room.

An eighth, pedagogical register appears in Ross T. Smith's chapter: interiority as architecture's existential warrant and its undecidable boundary. The chapter opens with the disciplinary claim — "Architecture does not stand in isolation from its surroundings or humanity; its integration of interiority makes it valuable to our existential circumstance" — making interiority the integration that gives building value, and its teaching aim: "Teaching and learning architecture is not only concerned with buildings, it is about the creative imagination of interior conditions." Its limit-case is literary: Calvino's Marco Polo — "It is our eyelids that separate … but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside" — interiority as the inside/outside division become undecidable in reverie (see inside-outside-dialectic). Where the other registers ask what interiority is (sheltered, fabricated, denied, watery, reassembled, inherent, graded, contained), Smith's asks what interiority does: it is the reason architecture exists, and the studio's business is to teach the sensitivity to it. See subtle-revelation, design-studio-pedagogy.

A ninth, psychoanalytic register appears in Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders's reading of Freud's Berggasse 19 office — the study where psychoanalysis was invented, read as the built apparatus of self-reflection. The Intimus editors' headnote frames the room as "this private chamber of close and personal exchange, of intimate interiorities," yet "turned inside out for public display via the photographic images" (p. 117) — interiority exposed rather than sheltered. Its spatial lesson is exteriorization: "the architectonics of the Freudian subject depends fundamentally upon a spatial dislocation, upon seeing the self exteriorized. It is not only that when we look in the mirror we see how others see us, but also that we see ourselves occupying a space where we are not" — innerness given to the self only as an object ("a subject who is, first and foremost, an object, a statue, a bust"), the mirror world "the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich" (Borch-Jacobsen). Where Taylor & Preston's interiority is the innerness the room shelters, Fuss & Sanders's is an innerness produced at a distance from the self: the study's mirror hung on the window "redirects the gaze inward," forcing the subject "to confront an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself" — interiority as the encounter with one's own exteriorized image. See mirror, mirror-stage, transference.

A tenth, intrauterine register appears in Simon Weir's chapter on Dalí: interiority as the egg's architecture, deliberately produced by concealment and containment. The Oval Room of Dalí and Gala's house at Port Lligat was "conceived as an architectural analogue of the egg": continuous pink couches, hemispherical form and couch curvature directing the seated occupant's line of sight across the floor, posture oriented away from the exit, windows that admit light "but… no views outside," a thermal climate separated from the prevailing weather, a low dome that excludes outside sound and amplifies the occupants' noises — "The total effect is a powerful sense of enclosure and interiority." Its entrance is concealed: "From the outside, the Oval Room has no recognizable entrance. The single access point is concealed within another unusual room, the Room of Cupboards" — a recessed cupboard door whose passageway is "effectively imperceptible" among photographs of Dalí and Gala's public life. Where the other registers ask what interiority is or does, Weir's asks what interiority contains: "In the intrauterine paradise, there is no unfulfilled hunger and no registration of a greater exterior totality that would generate a displaced synecdochic appetite"; "what is recognized internally as the world conveys a sense of wholeness; its finitude is a capacity to be grasped and eaten"; and the register's resolution is bodily — "Bodies and the space surrounding them are perceived as a single, unified interior." See intrauterine-paradise, concealment, enclosure.

An eleventh, cultural register appears in Frank Jacobus's chapter: interiority as the thought-content the interior was fabricated to preserve. The chapter's founding claim — "an underlying persistent desire seems to be the fabrication of spaces to embody human thoughts within material constructs. In this way, we can discuss interior architecture as a spatial and material construct meant to preserve cultural or personal beliefs" — makes the interior humanity's first cultural register: buildings "acted as the first primary human registers within which our stories and aspirations were communicated," reading cultures' beliefs through the "cultural mirror" of the two transference paradigms (the unconscious Egyptian plan; the conscious Greek embodiment — "the Parthenon is the body of Athena, but it is also the book of Athens"). Where the other registers ask what interiority is or does, Jacobus's asks what it stores: the interior as the register in which a culture writes its permanence — and, with the succession to book and digital media, as the register whose stored content dematerializes. See cultural-registers, dematerialization.

A twelfth, sociological register appears in Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson's chapter: interiority as the social knowledge mapped into bounded space. Their inhabitant is defined categorically: "An inhabitant is, if not a permanent occupant of the cell, at least an individual whose social existence is mapped into the category of space within that cell: more an inhabitant of the social knowledge defined by the cell than of the cell itself." Interiority here is not the innerness the room shelters (Taylor & Preston), fabricates (Manack), or stores (Jacobus) but the category the person belongs to: one inhabits a social knowledge — "a certain mode of organising experience, and a certain way of representing in space the idiosyncrasies of a cultural identity" — of which the bounded room is the local realisation. The reversal effect gives this register its scale paradox ("the most localised scale of spatial organisation tends to become the most global in its reference. The boundary refers to the principles of a culture"), and the inhabitant–visitor interface its social form: the visitor "may enter the building temporarily, but may not control it," lacking exactly the mapped-ness that defines interiority's privileged position. Where the other registers locate interiority in the body, the room or the culture, this register locates it in the category — innerness as membership in a transpatial order (see transpatial-solidarity, reversal-effect).

A thirteenth, multivalent register appears in Clay Odom's chapter: interiority as the ongoing product of production-oriented practices — pluralized as system rather than held as depth. POPs "tend to generate interiorities that are not discrete, temporally frozen responses, but multivalent systems, ongoing spatial effects, and atmospheric productions" — interiority not as the room's sheltered innerness (Taylor & Preston), the discipline's invention (Manack), or the category one belongs to (Hillier & Hanson) but as the output of systemized, iterative processes: "the installation, the generated effects, the emergent conditions, and the human experiences combined into one." The register is serial — its exemplar is Saraceno's On Space Time Foam, "one in a series of iterative projects completed across of range of sites and times using similar methods and materials" — and its temporal signature is the anti-freeze: interiorities generated "not… temporally frozen" but "ongoing," the produced condition that "supersede[s] constituencies of the system to produce wonder." Where Manack's register asks whether interiority is designed, Odom's asks what a practice can keep producing — interiority as production line rather than room-content. See multiple-interiorities, productions.

A fourteenth, envelope-articulated register appears in Marco Vanucci's chapter: interiority as the product of the building skin's articulation rather than the content a shell houses. "Among all the elements of architecture, the building envelope plays a key role in defining the relationship between the surrounding environment and the articulation of interior spatiality"; it "organizes the interior of the building and the external public realm with which it communicates; it controls the internal environment and marks the boundary of an architectural interiority" — and, "most importantly, the envelope is the main agent for the articulation of its architectural interiority." Where every earlier register locates interiority in what the room shelters, fabricates, stores, contains or grades, Vanucci relocates it into the skin: the interior "can be defined as the boundary that differentiates the exterior envelope of the building with the inside," because "difference in temperature, humidity, light condition, and sometimes even pressure is what makes the interior controlled environment of architecture different from the surrounding environment" — interiority as a difference-register maintained by the envelope, and, in its contemporary form, produced by hyperarticulation: "Heterogeneous interiority can be sought by means of a differentiated envelope" (performative-envelope). See heterogeneous-space, boundaries.

A fifteenth (museal) and a sixteenth, documented register appear in the Reader's two house-museum chapters. Downey's is re-experienced (visitors "attempt to re-experience past senses of interiority and spatiality"); Macken's is documented: interiority as what a preserved interior remains after the occupant leaves — the innerness that survives as document rather than as experience. The Brett Whiteley Studio's working space "is retained as though the painter had just recently walked out of the room"; the visitor enters "a space that is no longer used or inhabited, but which, in fact, resists inhabitation (except by the 'spirit' of the former artist). The space is observable but not occupiable"; and the room as such "becomes a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events… As a spatial document, the studio-museum is more specifically a document of interiority." Where every other register asks what interiority is (sheltered, fabricated, denied, watery, reassembled, inherent, graded, contained, pedagogical, psychoanalytic, intrauterine, cultural, sociological, multivalent, envelope-articulated), Macken's asks what interiority leaves: the residue of a former inhabitation, documentable precisely because the inner life has departed — interiority as trace-carried, "imprinted with traces of its own original space, but… no longer the original." See spatial-document, trace.

A seventeenth, topological–centralizing register appears in Johan Voordouw's chapter — interiority defined spatially rather than psychically: "Interiority, in relation to topology, is understood as an internalized centralization of space, a condition with an inherent spatial intimacy." Where Taylor & Preston's interiority is the innerness the room shelters and Macken's the innerness it documents, Voordouw's is the centralization the fold must construct: "Space is not found, it is structured, and from this structure interiority is constructed." The register's diagnosis is erosion from two directions — "one is the erosion of the facade from the outside, the second is the increased transparency and openness within space itself. 'Open space' is increasingly synonymous with the outside" — with the strongest formulation of the condition: "The outside is not only something to let in, there is no inside to be outside of." The register's programme is constructive, not defensive: "Interiority as a defined inside to a surrounding outside can retain the porosity but rescind the ambiguity that has previously undermined its articulation"; "Topology must simply fold in such a manner that deforms surface to form space"; and the relation redefined — "Interiority is not so much a defense against the outside as a counterpoint to recognize its boundaries and clarify its variability." Where every other register asks what interiority is, feels, stores, or documents, Voordouw's asks what interiority requires: demarcation — "the surface must spatialize, the interior must be demarcated, and the exterior must be defined as something 'out there.'" See topological-interiority, topology, threshold-to-gradient.

An eighteenth, exposed–reflexive register appears in Kevin Melchionne's chapter: interiority defeated by transparency, and self-consciousness as its residue. In the Glass House, "The glass walls render the occupant perpetually self-conscious of being watched; the sparseness of the furnishings and the extreme orderliness of the house… mean that one can never feel truly at home" (p. 229) — interiority presumed by full enclosure (plate glass still "enclos[es] the structure") yet destroyed by total legibility, since the 360-degree view runs both ways ("From the outside, one gets a free view into the interior as well," p. 228). The register's contribution to the concept is the mechanism: transparency does not dissolve innerness by opening the room but by reflexivizing it — the occupant's awareness turns from dwelling to being-seen, an interiority locked on the self as watched object ("perpetually self-conscious"), so that habituation fails ("one can never get used to the Glass House and so can never truly inhabit it," p. 229). Where Fuss & Sanders's register produces innerness at a distance from the self (the exteriorized mirror-gaze inside the room), Melchionne's produces exteriorization at the envelope: the gaze relayed by the transparent boundary, the room "a nest of prohibitions" (p. 232) for the watched body. The register names the interiority price of transparency — the condition Voordouw's erosion-diagnosis names ("'Open space' is increasingly synonymous with the outside") rendered at the scale of a house. See glass-house, privacy, visible-invisible.

A nineteenth, object-mediated register appears in Rachel Carley's chapter: interiority reached through objects precisely by withholding the person's inner life. In Perec's Life, "The psychological interiors of Perec's characters are not excavated in detail" — "Each object has its own itinerant history that helps the reader construct a partial biography of the resident," and the distancing effects of the narration are "a consequence of the regulatory principles Perec superimposes on the narrative" (Bellos: Perec "gives the reader virtually no access to the inner lives of its named characters"). The register inverts the depth-model the page's psychological registers assume: innerness is not excavated from the room's occupant but projected through the room's contents — interiority as the object-list's indirect yield, and the constraint-system (voluntary-constraints) as the very mechanism that keeps the person unexcavated. See interior-as-biography, infra-ordinary, still-life.

A twentieth, urban-atmospheric register appears in Jonathan D. Solomon's chapter — interiority promoted from disciplinary condition to political theory, and detached from the indoors. The promotion is explicit: "As both a space of expertise and a professional practice, interiors have tended to nest within architecture. As a disciplinary framework in the Anthropocene, interiority is expansive and pervasive, and becomes a space within which both architecture and urbanism operate. A general condition applicable to all spaces of public and private life in which atmospheric quality determines occupation and sets the stage for politics, interiority is increasingly the governing paradigm for urbanism in fast-growing cities and privatized suburban campuses alike." Hong Kong supplies the register's demonstration: "an urbanism of continuous 'interiority' that does not always correlate to the 'indoors'" — "a divergence between the 'indoors' and the 'interior'" — with occupation allocated atmospherically ("Cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air distinguishes cultural and economic strata") and politically ("the clouds of teargas in Admiralty and the perfumed air of the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall are both tools for reinforcing the hierarchies"). The register's formula is the page's most general: "If atmosphere has the same implications on social order as space, then interiority is not a disciplinary or spatial distinction, but a theoretical framework for understanding social order." Where every other register asks what interiority is, shelters, fabricates, stores, contains, grades, documents, or centralizes, Solomon's asks what interiority governs: the condition whose allocation — of air, of access, of occupation — "sets the stage for politics," with interiority itself (unlike atmosphere) non-neutral: "interior urbanism can make public life easier to snuff out, but at the same time allows it to waft." See atmospheric-politics, interior-urbanism, public-sphere. A twenty-first, perception-state register appears in David Erdman's chapter — interiority defined from the outset as a state, not a place: "If interiors are merely a category of professional work that occur on the inside of buildings, 'interiority' is the state of mind and perception induced by an architectural environment that is inwardly focused. An environment of this nature may have varying 'degrees of interiority' but is not limited to whether it is physically within or outside of a building." Where every earlier register locates interiority in a room, a body, a skin, a document or a city, Erdman's locates it in perception — induced by environments, distributed by degree, and design-operative: "Interiority… allows architects to consider how to alter the state of various environments. It opens up a productively disciplinary way to design interiors, while still considering them explicitly architectural." The register's instruments are the interiorized objects whose involutions "invoke degrees of a perceptual interiority, which is not always manifested through an intervention on the inside" — interiorization decoupled from the physical inside (a concave facade interiorizes from without) — and its urban face is the psychoanalytic corollary: the twenty-first-century city's interior/exterior contrast "could equally apply to the psyche of the contemporary urban subject, with their highly mediated and constructed exteriors (think Instagram, Facebook, etc.), that allow for a heightened contrast between their interior and exterior selves." Interiority here is the alterable state — the thing alteration alters.

A twenty-second, consumptive–interiorised register appears in Xiaobing Tang's essay — interiority produced by consumption and installed by design, then questioned as alibi. The Intimus editors' headnote sets the scene: "the transformed domicile is seen as an emergent form of interiority, which is connected to a new sense of private interior space and the mechanism of interiorisation" (p. 328). Tang's mechanism: "interior design, by instilling a sign-consciousness in our most private and personal sphere, serves to acculturate us to the system of sign-objects – namely, to interiorize the political economy of the sign" (p. 332) — interiority not as the innerness the room shelters (Taylor & Preston) or fabricates (Manack) but as the consciousness consumer culture installs through the decorated room. His protagonist's interiority is emergent in exactly this sense: the first display of wealth "for his consumption alone" wins "recognition, almost instantaneously" as his own (p. 329) — innerness minted by the sign system. And the register's limit-case is the essay's productive question: "not what alternative there is in an age of no interiority, but what function interiority, now recommended as spiritual resilience at a moment of worldly crisis or breakdown, is called upon to serve… What if interiority is served as an alibi in a culture that of necessity decorates and accessorizes everything for recognition?" (p. 333). Where every other register asks what interiority is, shelters, fabricates, stores, contains, grades, documents, centralizes or alters, Tang's asks what interiority legitimizes — and its failure mode, the injured interiority Dandan announces, may be the structure's truth ("its success in failure"). See interiorisation, sign-value, injured-interiority.

A twenty-third, indeterminate–haecceity register appears in Mark Taylor's own Intimus essay — interiority as what resists every determination the other registers supply. The question: "Could interior be thought of as haecceity – an element of existence on which individuality depends?" (p. 340); the process-form: "one could say that room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense and that becoming-interior is ever-changing" (p. 341); the multiplicity: "there are many rooms – many Bernards… Multiple narrations are now possible that subvert the form of the room (as internal) for the interior" (p. 341); and the register's explanation of the canon's silence: "the classic architectural theorists… could not write the interior because it lacks determination: like haecceities they are indeterminate" (p. 343). The register's conditional — "Might our sense of 'interiorness,' our interpretation of the interior depend on whether we, as inmates, are confined of our own accord?" (p. 342) — adds the voluntariness criterion no other register supplies: interiority as what self-chosen enclosure makes possible. And the essay's positive close gives the register its definition in the same Deleuzian vocabulary: the interior "concerns 'capacities to affect,' rather than it being defined or described by fixed moments or things… But it becomes events, 'in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life'" (p. 343). Where every other register located interiority in what the room shelters, fabricates, stores, grades, documents, articulates, alters, legitimizes or governs, Taylor's locates it in what the room becomes — and refuses to say "I am this, I am that." See haecceity, becoming-interior, refuge.

A twenty-fourth, inwardness register appears in Georges Teyssot's chapter — interiority as Innerlichkeit, the historical-philosophical formation the other registers presuppose. The definition is Kierkegaard's: "the subject as the only truth," reality "only his thinking within his room," anything outside the window "merely an illusion" — "the first theorist of privateness, the first theorist of the inwardness that the German had defined under the word Innerlichkeit" (p. 345), housed stylistically in "the interiors of middle-class households… the Biedermeier period between 1820 and 1850" (p. 345). The register's optics: in Hummel's drawing room the reflections multiply until "if the windows are mirrors, perhaps the exterior is a total illusion: there is no outside world… One exists only within this Innerlichkeit, this inwardness" (p. 346) — interiority as an optical regime that abolishes its own outside. Its pathology is the register's contribution: "Perhaps because it protects too much, this mirrored interiority leads to a kind of excess of interior life, an exaggeration of introspection" (p. 346) — interiority overfed by its own mirrors becoming boredom (Igitur's "mirror turned into boredom," p. 347) and mourning (Adorno: "Mirror and mourning hence belong together," p. 347). Where every other register asks what interiority is, shelters, fabricates, stores, grades, documents, articulates, alters, legitimizes, governs or becomes, Teyssot's asks what interiority costs — the mirroring excess that turns the sheltered inner life against itself. See inwardness, aesthetic-boredom, melancholy.

A twenty-fifth, expanded-boundaries register appears in Anne Troutman's chapter — interiority located at the house's peripheral spaces rather than its principal rooms. The claim is positional: the hidden spaces — hall, stairs, closet, attic — "are 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. Without them, I am uncomfortably fastened to the present, limited to the surface" (1997/2006, p. 357). Where every other register locates interiority in what a room shelters, fabricates, stores, grades, documents, articulates, alters, legitimizes, governs or becomes, Troutman's locates it where the room-system's boundaries extend: interiority as the depth the peripheral spaces give the self — the house's unconscious mapped onto its "smaller, peripheral spaces" ("with conscious securities and insecurities visible in the main rooms, and unconscious ones lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces," p. 356). The register's corollary is temporal: without the hidden spaces, the self is "uncomfortably fastened to the present, limited to the surface" — interiority as the means by which a dwelling gives its inhabitant a past. See hidden-spaces, childhood-spaces, fear.

A twenty-sixth, aural–conversational register appears in John C Turpin's chapter — interiority produced by talk rather than walls. The editors' headnote supplies the concept's aural formula: Turpin's "historical examination of this interior environment points to the aural spatial affect of conversations that are driven and influenced by the presence and interaction of company in such interior settings" (p. 368). The register's content is J.B. Priestley's neglected 1926 insight: certain dialogues are "atmosphere creating," exchanges whose "proximity… may evoke the feelings of an intimate space as the participants reveal information of a sensitive, personal nature" and whose confider "projects an aura of security onto the event" — an "implied space" generated by disclosure, with words themselves "but extra shutters and curtains and blazing coals and cushions." Where every other register locates interiority in what a room shelters, fabricates, stores, grades, documents, articulates, alters, legitimizes, governs, becomes or extends, Turpin's locates it in what a conversation creates: the salon as the case "where conversation created its own social space with carefully marked boundaries" (p. 369), and the drawing room as its degraded converse — staccato talk generating "an atmosphere characterized by a 'false view of life.'" The register is design-operative in reverse: de Wolfe's "room made for conversation" ("numerous conversation centers, intimate in spirit, such that no one chair is isolated," p. 373) is an interior built to host the aural register — the room designed around interiority's conversational production. See conversation, salon, etiquette.

A twenty-seventh, territorial–affective register appears in J Macgregor Wise's chapter — interiority as identification, the affective articulation of self and space, decoupled from the room altogether. What makes home-territories different from other territories is "on the one hand the living of the territory (a temporalization of the space), and on the other their connection with identity, or rather a process of identification, of articulation of affect. Homes, we feel, are ours" (p. 394): interiority not as what a room shelters (Taylor & Preston) but as a process of identification executed through lived space — the person's innerness articulated by and as territory. The register's mechanism is mutual becoming: "What creates that glow is the articulation of subject (homemaker) to object (home-marker), caught up in a mutual becoming-home" (p. 392) — subject and marker becoming home together, the interior as relation rather than container. And its spatial form is openness without enclosure: "No space is enclosed, but is always multidimensional, resonant and open to other spaces" (p. 393) — interiority distributed across the milieus any lived space opens onto (memory-spaces, nows, imagined places), so that one can "be at home simply in the presence of a significant other" (p. 394). Where every other register located interiority in what a room shelters, fabricates, stores, contains, grades, documents, centralizes, legitimizes, governs, becomes, extends or creates, Wise's locates it in what the lived territory articulates: innerness as identification, "a place we are" rather than a place we occupy. See home, milieu, territory.

Key Thinkers

• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — name interiority as a cluster of their matrix: "the conscious and reflexive awareness of self, identity, community and others within a social environment" (p. 11); Taylor's solo chapter then re-poses it under technological conditions — "a connection to psychological life, memory, closeness, and intimacy," now "dynamic and mobile."
• Shirley Ardener — the anthropological deepening: 'inner' as opposed to 'outer' operates as a criterion for "mapping metaphysical space" regardless of whether "some 'private places' can really be walked into" (p. 18) — interiority as a classificatory, not merely architectural, distinction.
• Gaston Bachelard — the phenomenological deepening of intimate inner space: the editors' introduction reads the dialectic of inside and outside as "a reflexive inquiry on interiority… what Bachelard calls intimate geometry grounded in imagination" (p. 22) — interiority as the spatiality of being, lived through the poetic image.
• (Related, not yet paged: Elizabeth Grosz on framing and the inside/outside demarcation — see log.)
• Charles Rice — the etymological register, from the primary text: the OED record gives "interiority" its birth date — "from the early eighteenth century, interiority was used to designate inner character and a sense of individual subjectivity" — a full century before the interior's architectural sense ("the inside of a building or room, esp. in reference to the artistic effect; also, a picture or representation of the inside of a building or room," early nineteenth century), and alongside the state's "domestic affairs" sense (mid-eighteenth). Interiority is therefore not the interior's psychological correlate by nature but by history: the term for innerness predates the room-concept that now houses it, and its birth-definition doubles the room with its picture — interiority's subject caught between material and immaterial registers, "producing de-realised experiences" (2004/2006). See doubleness, de-realisation.
• Marc Manack — the fabricating register: interiority as the discipline's invention — "free to fabricate its own identity and position of interiority"; "emancipates the field to invent the disciplinary logic of interiority"; "the interiority of interior architecture is a complete fabrication, an artifice embedded within an edifice."
• Karen Burns — the denial register: interiority as the property whose withholding is a racialized critical operation. Her Baker House essay shows architectural writing construing Josephine Baker as all surface — "Without an interior, she has no possibility for an internal psychic space and no fantasized locale for the identity of self. This lack of interiority, or deferral, renders her not only as different from other inhabitants, but as someone whose interior is completely unknowable" — and the unbuilt house compounding it: "Baker's interiority is in one sense never realized; it is eternally deferred." See corporeal-inscription.
• Ann C. Colley — the desire register: interiority defined by reach rather than repose. Her culminating claim, drawn from Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses: "an interior does not exist for its own sake but, instead, for the desire of reaching something or going somewhere" (p. 73) — with the note directing the principle to Tafuri's The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Her three body–interior models (invisible, aesthetic, ubiquitous body) give interiority a literary prehistory: rooms "shaped by the sick body's desire to escape from itself" (p. 71).
• Pablo Meninato — the everyday–scenographic register: interiority as "the site of reassembling, whereby the open quality of displacement takes the place of unity" — interiority produced by the placement of ordinary objects (readymade, tableau) and staged as withheld at the voyeuristic aperture.
• Sarah Treadwell — the watery register: "the watery nature of interiority"; interiority as liquid and collective ("the ocean is really in our blood"), held by "permeable membranes (skin and shore)," and carried by the domestic interior's own liquids ("the domestic interior is oceanic in the tears that flow").
• Winka Dubbeldam — the responsive register: interiority co-produced by the subject–surface feedback — "a set of supple, responsive and connected subjects and interiors" that are "constantly retooling and optimising each other"; bodies as "integral parts of a system of thing-shapes."
• Laura Garófalo-Khan — the inherent register: the grotto's "inherent interiority" — the interior formed from the landscape that "does not index its exterior form or structure"; the English follies "celebrat[ing] their interiority through organic surface appliques."
• Nataly Gattegno & Jason Kelly Johnson — the gradient–nested register: interiority multiplied as "multiple interiors, multiple degrees and zones of activation… as multi-layered, nested interiorities," produced by gradients of environmental quality and "applied at a various scales."
• Lee Edelman — the contained register: interiority as "a principle of containment" modeled by the room and performed by the body — "conceiving his body simultaneously as container and thing contained"; its failure the uncanny "toppling of the walls… of the imaginary architecture of a self" (1996/2006). See mens-room, the-closet.
• Ross T. Smith — the pedagogical register: interiority as architecture's existential warrant ("its integration of interiority makes it valuable to our existential circumstance") and the studio's business — "the creative imagination of interior conditions"; its undecidability via Calvino's eyelids.
• Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — the psychoanalytic register: the "intimate interiorities" of Freud's study "turned inside out for public display"; interiority as "seeing the self exteriorized" — the self encountered as statue, bust, death mask in its own mirrored image (1996/2006). See mirror, mirror-stage.
• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar — the denied-for-women register: the "topography of our inmost being" is assigned to women before they can inhabit it as their own. Against Bachelard's felicitous inner space and Erikson's female "inner space," women writers record enclosure anxiety — "the transformation of womb into tomb" — and the body pre-occupied as house (house-body-equation); the recovery Plath names ("a self to recover, a queen") makes interiority something a woman must recover from the house/body assignment, not something the room shelters by default (1979/2006). See felicitous-space, the-madwoman.
• Simon Weir — the intrauterine register: the Oval Room as "an architectural analogue of the egg" delivering "a powerful sense of enclosure and interiority"; interiority as containment engineered across sight, posture, climate and sound, with its entrance "effectively imperceptible" — desire interiorized until "bodies and the space surrounding them are perceived as a single, unified interior" (2018). See intrauterine-paradise, concealment.
• Frank Jacobus — the cultural register: interiority as what the interior stores — "fabrication of spaces to embody human thoughts within material constructs"; interior architecture as "a spatial and material construct meant to preserve cultural or personal beliefs"; the interior as "a cultural mirror into which we can look to gain access to the beliefs and customs of past cultures." See cultural-registers.
• Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson — the sociological register: interiority as category-membership — the inhabitant "more an inhabitant of the social knowledge defined by the cell than of the cell itself," a transpatial entity mapped into local bounded space (1984/2006). See inhabitant-and-visitor, transpatial-solidarity.
• Clay Odom — the multivalent register: interiority as the ongoing product of POPs — "interiorities that are not discrete, temporally frozen responses, but multivalent systems, ongoing spatial effects, and atmospheric productions"; "the installation, the generated effects, the emergent conditions, and the human experiences combined into one" (2018). See multiple-interiorities, productions.
• Marco Vanucci — the envelope-articulated register: interiority as the product of the skin — "the envelope is the main agent for the articulation of its architectural interiority"; "it controls the internal environment and marks the boundary of an architectural interiority"; "Heterogeneous interiority can be sought by means of a differentiated envelope" (2018). See performative-envelope.
• Marian Macken — the documented register: interiority as what the preserved interior documents — "a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events… more specifically a document of interiority"; the residue "observable but not occupiable," retaining the "spirit" of the former artist while resisting inhabitation (2018). See spatial-document.
• Johan Voordouw — the topological–centralizing register: interiority as "an internalized centralization of space, a condition with an inherent spatial intimacy"; "Space is not found, it is structured, and from this structure interiority is constructed"; the programme to "retain the porosity but rescind the ambiguity," with interiority as "a counterpoint to recognize its boundaries and clarify its variability" (2018). See topological-interiority, topology.
• Jonathan D. Solomon — the urban-atmospheric register: interiority "not a disciplinary or spatial distinction, but a theoretical framework for understanding social order"; "an urbanism of continuous 'interiority' that does not always correlate to the 'indoors'"; atmospheric quality as what "determines occupation and sets the stage for politics"; interiority "increasingly the governing paradigm for urbanism in fast-growing cities and privatized suburban campuses alike" (2018). See atmospheric-politics, interior-urbanism, public-sphere.
• David Erdman — the perception-state register: interiority as "the state of mind and perception induced by an architectural environment that is inwardly focused," with "varying 'degrees of interiority'… not limited to whether it is physically within or outside of a building" — and as an instrument: interiority "allows architects to consider how to alter the state of various environments," "a productively disciplinary way to design interiors, while still considering them explicitly architectural"; its instruments the interiorized objects whose techniques "invoke degrees of a perceptual interiority, which is not always manifested through an intervention on the inside"; its urban face the psychoanalytic corollary (the urban subject's "highly mediated and constructed exteriors… allow[ing] for a heightened contrast between their interior and exterior selves") (2018). See alteration, interiorized-object.
• Xiaobing Tang — the consumptive–interiorised register: the transformed domicile as "an emergent form of interiority" (headnote, p. 328); interior design "instilling a sign-consciousness in our most private and personal sphere" (p. 332); "an age of no interiority" in which interiority is "recommended as spiritual resilience at a moment of worldly crisis or breakdown" — and the alibi question ("What if interiority is served as an alibi in a culture that of necessity decorates and accessorizes everything for recognition?," p. 333) (1998/2006). See interiorisation, sign-value, injured-interiority.
• Mark Taylor — the indeterminate–haecceity register, from the editor's own essay: "Could interior be thought of as haecceity – an element of existence on which individuality depends?"; "becoming-interior is ever-changing"; "many rooms – many Bernards"; the voluntariness criterion ("whether we, as inmates, are confined of our own accord"); and the positive definition — the interior "concerns 'capacities to affect'… it becomes events, 'in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life'" (2001/2006). See haecceity, becoming-interior.
• Georges Teyssot — the inwardness register: interiority as Innerlichkeit (Kierkegaard's privateness housed in the Biedermeier interior); the mirroring optics that abolish the outside ("One exists only within this Innerlichkeit," p. 346); and the cost-thesis — "this mirrored interiority leads to a kind of excess of interior life, an exaggeration of introspection" (p. 346), with boredom and mourning as the excess's names (1996/2006). See inwardness, aesthetic-boredom.
• Anne Troutman — the expanded-boundaries register: interiority located at the house's peripheries — the hidden spaces as "the expanded boundaries of the house and my consciousness," where the unconscious "lurks"; without them, "I am uncomfortably fastened to the present, limited to the surface" (1997/2006). See hidden-spaces, childhood-spaces.
• John C Turpin — the aural–conversational register: interiority produced by talk — the "aural spatial affect of conversations… driven and influenced by the presence and interaction of company" (headnote, p. 368); Priestley's implied space of intimate exchange (words "but extra shutters and curtains and blazing coals and cushions"); the salon as "conversation created its own social space"; de Wolfe's "room made for co; de Wolfe's "room made for conversation" as the interior built to host the register (2003/2006). See conversation, salon.
• J Macgregor Wise — the territorial–affective register: interiority as "a process of identification, of articulation of affect" (p. 394); "a mutual becoming-home" of subject and home-marker (p. 392); the identification decoupled from rooms — "One can be at home simply in the presence of a significant other" (p. 394); "No space is enclosed, but is always multidimensional, resonant and open to other spaces" (p. 393) (2000/2006). See home, milieu.

Related Concepts

• Domestic Interior — the material counterpart: interiority is the inner life folded into the domestic interior's objects and rooms.

• Enclosure — the demarcation that produces an inside at all; Grosz's point that no inside exists without some form of enframing.

• Embodiment — interiority is felt and projected "via body as a culturally lived organism" (p. 11).

• Dwelling — being-at-home as the inhabited expression of innerness.

• Space — the alcove as "a pocket where body is central… and space is temporal, perhaps even subjective" (p. 8).

• Historiography of the Interior — Rice's etymology makes interiority itself time-bound: a concept with a birth date, not a universal.

• Quadrature — the Baroque production of interiority: "Baroque perspectival illusions sought to recreate the center of the universe within uniform space… by physically inhabiting the position from which the illusion converged with the physical to produce a transcendental interior experience" (La Coe) — innerness staged at an anchored point within a spiritual system of meaning.

• Dual Symbolic Classification — inner/outer as one of the cross-cultural oppositional pairs (with public/private, right/left, male/female): the symbolic machinery behind interiority's spatial imagination (Ardener).

• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the phenomenological form of interiority: the lived inside/outside division whose coefficient is value, not geometry (Bachelard).

• Intimate Immensity — interiority's maximal reach: "interior immensity" — immensity lived within the subject (Bachelard, via Rilke).

• Poetic Image — the vehicle of intimate interiority: the inhabited image ("Here the poet inhabits the cellular image") that shelters the inner life (Bachelard).

• The Drive-in House — interiority as datum: the driver's "Cyclopean line of sight… steadfastly vertical" around which the building rotates — "the building must rotate around the driver, rather than the driver around the building"; and the car as "the gorgeous object within," the interior organized around a venerated inner object.

• Narrative Space — interiority as the form of narration itself: "the physical structure of narration is characterized by interiority and the progression from a beginning to a finishing point" — narrative as an inside with a beginning and an end, walked through.

• Non-Places — interiority's negative: the supermodern transit spaces "inherently impersonal and impermanent" (Bingham, via Taylor) where connection is advertised but "we are… profoundly disconnected" — and the condition that forces the search for "alternate locations, sites, and environments as potential receptacles for interiority and dwelling of the individual."

• Interactive Architecture — interiority's uncertain new host: under the dynamic paradigm "the relationship between interior architecture and interiority is dynamic and mobile, and ultimately aided by the inhabitant's response to the interior environment – and vice versa."

• Politicizing the Interior — interiority's political register: the smartphone-housed identity ("what is the phenomenology of physical places when one's identity exists in a smartphone?") and the curated online character as interiority's postmodern, distributed forms.

• Non-Places — interiority's paradox: Teston's speculation that the non-place, by being less subjective, "allow[s] for experiences of psychological interiority" — the impersonal interior as introspection's trigger.

• Fabrication — interiority as product: Manack's thesis that interiority is what the discipline manufactures — "a complete fabrication, an artifice embedded within an edifice" — against the psychological tradition that treats innerness as given.

• Skyscraper Interior — the emancipation scene: where the interior became "free to fabricate its own identity and position of interiority."

• Wall of Books — interiority as décor's reassurance: the wall of books that "reassures its occupant that he or she is conforming to the complex image of rationality, literacy, and authenticity" (Braham).

• Epidermal Schema — the racial narrowing of the surface that interiority's binary presupposes: when difference is fixed at the skin, the raced subject is implicitly an all-surface being without an inner locale (Burns/Spivak).

• Psychoanalysis — the divided subject whose internal psychic space the interior is built to house; Burns: "Without an interior… Baker cannot be the divided subject who is the subject of psychoanalytic inquiry."

• Invisible Body · Aesthetic Body · Ubiquitous Body — Colley's triad of body–interior models: three ways "the consciousness of one's physical being illuminates the interiors of home" — the eye-only spectator, the permeable recipient, the escaping sick body; interiority as shaped by how a body inhabits, not by what a room contains.

• Mirror — interiority's reflexive surface: the mirror-on-window that "redirects the gaze inward," making the interior show the occupant to himself as an object.

• Mirror Stage — the psychoanalytic formation the interior can host: the subject assembled from "the statue in which man projects himself"; "the architectonics of the Freudian subject depends fundamentally upon a spatial dislocation."

• Transference — interiority's clinical engine: the doctor-patient transaction "orchestrated largely by the very precise spatial arrangement of objects and furniture" in Freud's study.

• Occupant as Designer — interiority's producing act: the arranging by which "the occupant… establish[es] their identity and create[s] a personal interior architecture" (Spankie) — innerness made by arrangement rather than housed by enclosure.

• Oceanic Interiority — interiority's watery register: the sea as "the most extensive interior that we confront," the membrane (skin and shore) as the boundary that "permits separation while allowing connections," and the interior's own liquids (tears, sweat, blood, breaking waters) as its substance.

• Intrauterine Paradise — interiority's egg register: the contained interior where "what is recognized internally as the world conveys a sense of wholeness; its finitude is a capacity to be grasped and eaten" — and where "bodies and the space surrounding them are perceived as a single, unified interior" (Weir/Dalí).

• Concealment — interiority's designed hiding: the entrance "effectively imperceptible" among cupboard doors — an interiority that exists by being concealed rather than exposed.

• Topological Interiority — interiority's geometric programme: the fold that "deforms surface to form space," the erasure diagnosis ("no inside to be outside of"), and the enclosed topology as the counterpoint to pervasive exteriority.

• Threshold-to-Gradient — interiority's boundary condition: the past-century evolution of the formal boundary "from a defined threshold to a porous, ambiguous gradient," whose ambiguity "prevents knowing" and whose porosity the programme retains.

• Topology — the surface-study whose continuity erodes interiority and whose spatializing fold could restore it.

• Sign Value — interiority's consumptive currency: the "explicit sign value" whose political economy interior design interiorizes (Tang).

• Interiorisation — the mechanism Tang names: sign-consciousness installed in "our most private and personal sphere" — interiority produced by acculturation rather than shelter.

• Injured Interiority — interiority's failure-and-truth register: the "injured form of interiority" Dandan announces; "its success in failure" (Tang/He Dun).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Ultrasuede (Wagner 2002/2006) — the envelopment register: interiority produced by continuous surface and consumed as commodity — 'The element of separation from the world was the very commodity these spaces offered' (p. 383–384), realized in Baldwin's velvet cave ('a cave,' p. 384) and the tented boudoir, 'a space for mental reflection and bodily suspension' (p. 383). Wagner adds the pictorial axis: the Newhouse bedroom's 'the architectural space of the room was subsumed by the pictorial space of the pictures' (p. 384), with Greenberg's color-field 'openness' read architecturally 'in terms of enclosure, interiority and delimitation' (p. 384) and Newman's 'space-dome' as painted interiority the viewer inhabits ('awaken an awareness of his being alive in the sensation of complete space,' quoted p. 384). Against the cluster's shelter-training and fabrication registers, Wagner's is interiority as suspension — the bodily 'charged zone' from 'waist and foot' (p. 381) enveloped by governing surfaces. See enclosure, interior-as-garment.

• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the source that names the concept: interiority as the conscious and reflexive awareness of self within a social environment, examined through the body as a culturally lived organism (p. 11).

• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the etymology from the primary text: "The word 'interior' has undergone several shifts in meaning. It had come into use in English from the late fifteenth century to mean basic divisions between inside and outside, and to describe the spiritual and inner nature of the soul. From the early eighteenth century, interiority was used to designate inner character and a sense of individual subjectivity, and from the middle of the eighteenth century the interior came to designate the domestic affairs of a state… It was only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that the interior came to designate what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records as: 'The inside of a building or room, esp. in reference to the artistic effect; also, a picture or representation of the inside of a building or room'" (pp. 283–284) — interiority a century older than the architectural interior, and the interior's birth-definition doubling the room with its picture. See doubleness, bourgeois-interior.

• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — reports Rice's OED etymology: "interior" from the late fifteenth century (inside divided from outside; the spiritual inner nature of self and soul); "interiority" from the early eighteenth century, "used to designate interior character and a sense of individual subjectivity"; from the mid-eighteenth century, the domestic affairs of a state — and only from the early nineteenth century "the inside of a building or room." The term for inner character predates the architectural interior by a century.

• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the interior as a "predominantly visual, tactile, and phenomenological mode of expression" whose provenance is entangled with modern art and architecture; and Loos's interior as the architectural container of private inner life: "the domestic life of the individual was an intensely private affair reserved for the interior."

• Quadrature (La Coe 2018) — the premodern episode: Pozzo's quadrature produced a "transcendental interior experience" by positioning an embodied observer at the convergence point of real and fictitious space, "re-center[ing] man within a system of meaning, both spatial and spiritual." Interiority here precedes the modern private interior: it is achieved spatially, at a marked vantage point, in a religious interior.

• The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — the anthropology of the inner/outer pair: "The notion of 'private' as opposed to 'public' is seen as a criterion for 'mapping' metaphysical space, as 'inner' does in opposition to 'outer,' regardless of the fact that some 'private places' can really be walked into" (p. 18); Hertz equates the 'inside' with the sacred, life and good (p. 19); and the volume's framing text "discusses the space of the interior beyond its physical dimensions and its social and symbolic aspects, as experienced by women" (p. 15). Interiority here acquires a cross-cultural, symbolic apparatus — see dual-symbolic-classification.

• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1958/2006) — the phenomenology of intimate inner space: the editors frame the selection as "a reflexive inquiry on interiority, what Bachelard calls intimate geometry grounded in imagination" (p. 22); the poetic image as "a solid framework for secret being" that the poet "inhabits" (p. 22); the interior/exterior exchange in which the exterior might be "an old intimacy" — interiority exceeding the room that encloses it.

• Inside out (Webb 2018) — interiority as fixed datum and venerated object: the driver's "Cyclopean line of sight" held vertical through all three phases of rotation ("the building must rotate around the driver, rather than the driver around the building"); the car installed at the drum's center — "The car has become the gorgeous object within"; and the solidified cone of vision whose contents "become components of an interior space" — interiority manufactured from representation.

• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — interiority as the decorator's practical criterion: the room must express "his own needs, his own preferences, his own ways of using space," since a superimposed "alien personality" cannot "bring off that wonderful warm atmosphere of a private, personal place" (p. 27); "Nothing is interesting unless it is personal" (p. 26) — the interior's value measured by the inhabitant's inner life held in it ("These give a room heart," p. 27), against the perfect room whose interiors are dead because no one's interiority inhabits them (see sterility-of-perfection).

• Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) — interiority at civic-institutional scale: the national museum's narration as an interior form — "The physical structure of narration is characterized by interiority and the progression from a beginning to a finishing point, calling attention to the performative acts of moving and viewing, of the ordering of one's experience of history as a continuous, unified story"; and the symbiotic blur "between inside and outside, past and present, architecture and interiority, city and museum" — interiority paired with architecture as one of the boundaries the museum dissolves.

• Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the technological re-pose of the concept, by the same author who named the cluster: interiority as "a connection to psychological life, memory, closeness, and intimacy"; the claim that "the relationship between interiority and interior architecture has been affected by advances in digital, electronic, and interactive technologies, particularly the way real-time interaction alters physical and psychological engagement with built space"; the relation now "dynamic and mobile"; and the demand for "alternate locations, sites, and environments as potential receptacles for interiority and dwelling of the individual" if the supermodern interior keeps absorbing innovation. See non-places, interactive-architecture.

• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the political and postmodern inversion: "we could speculate that non-places allow for experiences of psychological interiority. The contemporary physical experience of space is less subjective, thus allowing for greater introspection and the development of an internal narrative" — a condition "reinforced" by "society's obsession with social networking and uninterrupted engagement with online media." Her provocation: "what is the phenomenology of physical places when one's identity exists in a smartphone?" — and the counter: "an online identity may not be an everyday identity, but a character projected to others. Online, people represent their curated identity." Interiority here becomes non-place-generating rather than interiority-abolished, and political: people "have grown more political about the near environment." See non-places, politicizing-the-interior.

• Fabricating interiority (Manack 2018) — the fabricated register: the skyscraper interior "free to fabricate its own identity and position of interiority"; technological decoupling "emancipat[ing] the field to invent the disciplinary logic of interiority"; "a complete and alternate world apart from the architecture, with unique authorial expression and embodied spatial effects, embodies a presence and identity that rivals architecture"; the thesis — "the interiority of interior architecture is a complete fabrication, an artifice embedded within an edifice." See fabrication, skyscraper-interior.

• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — interiority manufactured at the public threshold: at Broadgate's unsealed gate, "space, temporality, body and identity are mutually confronted and constructed" in "the lived time of several seconds" of passage; the gate is "a form of mirror, by which the visitor is ultimately returned not a view of Broadgate but, in Augé's terms, of themselves playing a role within it" — "The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude"; the Sartrean "'other's look'" confers spatiality on the viewer, and the visitor, "as with Disneyland's staff, everyone becomes a 'cast member.'" Where the room shelters a pre-existing inner life (Taylor & Preston), the corporate threshold produces a role for the self to inhabit — interiority as the administered product of passage. See thick-edge, non-places, privatised-public-space.

• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — interiority as décor's reassurance loop: the Max Ernst bookcase collage showing that identity negotiation "involves both the inspecting gaze of the occupant and the return look of the interior. A wall of books not only appears masculine, but reassures its occupant that he or she is conforming to the complex image of rationality, literacy, and authenticity that books convey" (p. 61) — the interior as mirror that certifies the inhabitant's identity rather than housing it; and the methodological addendum — "The logic of color conventions cannot be grasped by theories of identity without an equivalent consideration of decorative variety and the attention to occasion, both of which require narrative forms for their exploration" (p. 61): interiority-by-decoration requires narrative, not theory. See wall-of-books, narrative-space.

• Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — interiority unanchored: "Interiority exists independent of territory as a located condition. The plant is a hidden, placeless island within an intentionally inconsequential landscape" — the Lockheed camouflage as the counter-case to Grosz's enframing thesis (an inside whose demarcation is a decoy, not an envelope), and the Migrant Interior's interior-as-elements that "defined a much more permanent sense of place than the architecture or location" — interiority carried by inhabitable elements and "a designed timeline for use and change from location to location" rather than sheltered by a fixed shell. See liberated-interior, territory.

• A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — the denial register: architectural writing construing Baker's house and body as all surface — "one that radically confounds the surface/depth binary" — and thereby as lacking: "Without an interior, she has no possibility for an internal psychic space and no fantasized locale for the identity of self… someone whose interior is completely unknowable" (p. 66); the unbuilt house as eternal deferral ("a model and plans whose interiors we are unable to inhabit," p. 66); the domestic interior as "an allegory of the psychic lives of its inhabitants" and "a topography of the individual's own interior life" (p. 66); and the challenge to the concept's politics — retrieving the subject as lacking interiority "is to keep pinning her back against the wall, to that place already assigned to her by criticism" (p. 66). See corporeal-inscription, epidermal-schema.

• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the literary desire register: "Articles do not define interiors; bodies that move and feel their way among these objects do" (p. 68) — interiority as the product of bodily movement and inhabitation rather than of articles; the child's being that "shapes and illuminates the interiors of home" (p. 68); and the culminating thesis, "one of the most vital experiences of interiority – the understanding that an interior does not exist for its own sake but, instead, for the desire of reaching something or going somewhere" (p. 73, principle referred via note 21 to Tafuri's The Sphere and the Labyrinth). See invisible-body, aesthetic-body, ubiquitous-body.

• Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect (McClure & McClure 2018) — interiority pluralized across scales: the chapter discusses "the value of spaces that possess the prospect of the aspect – multiple interiorities across scales," where each spatial moment "is simultaneously interior and exterior" and the interiors overlap recursively ("an overlapping of interiors" at Säynätsalo; the plaza occupant "both in and out"). Where the room shelters one interiority, the McClure buildings sustain a continuation of them — interiority as a scalar, recursive condition rather than a single room's innerness. See prospect-of-the-aspect.

• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — interiority in suspension and in absence: the waiting room is "caught between different scaled times and spaces. They meet one another in pockets of unrelated and ephemeral interiorities" — interiority as transient, unowned pockets rather than a housed innerness; and, after occupation leaves, interiority persists as trace: "The waiting room has an unwitnessed existence; walls, ceilings, doors, and windows are cupped around a space and have held it for a while," where "absence becomes the room's principle feature." The room holds interiority the way it holds time — "Something else occupies this mysterious emptiness and the different sounds that time makes in passing." See waiting-room, liminality.

• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the everyday–scenographic register: "Conceiving space through scenographic means obliges the viewer to think of interiority as the site of reassembling, whereby the open quality of displacement takes the place of unity"; the "everyday interiorities" of the title — Duchamp's displaced doors and windows, Kienholz's "uncanny agglomeration of domestic furniture, consumer advertisements, and political posters," Osorio's "space saturated with typical teenage belongings" — interiority as an effect of arrangement and displacement rather than of enclosure; and the voyeuristic staging of interiority as withheld ("the only possible action is to spy"). See readymade, tableau, voyeurism.

• Oceanic interiorities (Treadwell 2018) — the watery register: "To live in the South Pacific is to be conscious of the watery nature of interiority"; the sea as "the most extensive interiors that we confront, and on which we depend"; the interior's boundary as membrane — "permeable membranes (skin and shore) that permit separation while allowing connections at individual and global scales"; the uterine immersive interior ("a space of beginning that endlessly repeats the ordinary dramas of life and recognizes an exteriority within that cannot be expelled"); and the domestic culmination — "the domestic interior is oceanic in the tears that flow: sweat forms, blood falls, and waters break over the difficulties and pleasure of everyday life." See oceanic-interiority, sea-of-islands.

• Thing-Shapes (Dubbeldam 2002/2006) — the responsive register: interiority re-posed as a property of the subject–surface exchange. With the collapse of "subject-object and interior-exterior dichotomies and hierarchies," we get "a set of supple, responsive and connected subjects and interiors" that are "constantly retooling and optimising each other" (p. 99) — interiority no longer sheltered by the room (Taylor & Preston) but co-produced in the feedback between the inhabitant and the smart layers that register the body: "The smoothness of the interior registers a relationship to the human body" (p. 96). The body itself becomes interior to the system: "Bodies are seen not as objects in themselves but as integral parts of a system of thing-shapes" (p. 100) — interiority relocated from the room's innerness to the layered surface's relation to the body. See thing-shapes, crease, interactive-architecture.

• Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the inherent register: "An interior literally formed from the landscape – but intentionally disassociated from its context – does not index its exterior form or structure, making it a distinctively internal manifestation of form. In addition to its inherent interiority…"; the grotto as "not only a place outside the normal condition, but also a place that envelops its occupants in its own cosmology"; and the English follies as "box-like spaces that celebrated their interiority through organic surface appliques" — interiority as self-contained world-envelopment rather than sheltered innerness. See artificial-grotto, interior-cosmology.

• From ambient environments to sentient spaces (Gattegno & Johnson 2018) — the gradient–nested register: the campfire's "gradient of multiple environmental qualities with different degrees of interiority" and "the subtle creation of multiple interiors implied by simple environmental and, by extension, experiential variation"; Lightswarm's "variable degrees and zones of occupation" as "multiple interiors… multi-layered, nested interiorities"; the installations' aspiration to "gradients of enclosure and ranges of intimacy and interiority"; and the closing generalization — "these works create multiple and overlapping interiorities that may be applied at a various scales." Interiority here is a designed gradient produced by sensing surfaces, not a sheltered innerness — see multiple-interiorities, sentient-spaces, the-campfire.

• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the contained register: the men's room's self-reflexive enclosure — mirrors substituting for windows — "gestures… towards an idea of interiority, towards a principle of containment… modeling the subject as container of space through the articulation of structural, because structuring, identities" (p. 103); the subject's interiorizing of the lesson — the body "simultaneously as container and thing contained; as being and needing a closet" (p. 104); and the register's uncanny limit — "a toppling of the walls within which the subject has been constructed and through which he has realized the imaginary architecture of a self" (p. 107). Interiority here is ideology's spatial pedagogy: not what the room shelters but what it trains. See the-closet, mens-room.

• Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology (Smith 2018) — the pedagogical register: "Architecture does not stand in isolation from its surroundings or humanity; its integration of interiority makes it valuable to our existential circumstance" — interiority as the integration that gives building existential value; "greater sensitivity to our corporeal being reorients us to how we inhabit the interior environment in particular"; the closing comprehension — "We comprehend space not only as a volume to inhabit but also as moments of physical and psychological presence… relinquishing us to drift into reverie and connect with our lived moments of intimacy"; and the Calvino eyelids limit-case — "It is our eyelids that separate … but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside." See inside-outside-dialectic, design-studio-pedagogy.

• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the psychoanalytic register: the editors' headnote — "this private chamber of close and personal exchange, of intimate interiorities, is turned inside out for public display via the photographic images" (p. 117); "the architectonics of the Freudian subject depends fundamentally upon a spatial dislocation, upon seeing the self exteriorized" (p. 119); the mirror on Freud's window that "redirects the gaze inward" and forces the subject "to confront an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself" (p. 119); "What Freud sees in his mirror is a subject who is, first and foremost, an object, a statue, a bust" (p. 120); Borch-Jacobsen's mirror world as "the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich" (p. 119). See mirror, mirror-stage, transference, castration-anxiety.

• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the arranging register: interiority as what the occupant's arranging produces. Spankie's opening thesis — "The act of arranging allows the occupant to establish their identity and create a personal interior architecture which challenges the traditional understanding of the role of the designer and the concerns of form, function, and style" — makes the occupied interior the site where identity is made by rearrangement, not merely housed; and the Freud case shows interiority carried by objects as much as rooms — the desk's sixty-five antiquities as "markers or signposts to his thoughts" (Fliess) that "helped stabilize the evanescent idea, or keep it from escaping altogether" (H.D.). Where Fuss & Sanders's register exteriorizes the self in the mirror, Spankie's shows the self deposited in a furniture-and-object arrangement that survives every relocation — identity as arrangement. See occupant-as-designer, facilitating-environment, transitional-object.

• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — interiority's gendered distribution: the "topography of our inmost being" (Bachelard, p. 121) is precisely what the woman-as-house cannot own — her inner space is pre-assigned as womb, as room, as the property a man "ought to be inhabited [by]" — so her inner life appears in the archive as enclosure anxiety ("the transformation of womb into tomb") and her recovery as the hard-won reclamation Plath names: "a self to recover, a queen" (p. 124). The wiki's registers describe interiority as sheltered, fabricated, denied (Baker), watery, reassembled, inherent, graded, contained, pedagogical, psychoanalytic — Gilbert and Gubar add that its very assignment is gendered: who is imagined to have an interior, and who is imagined as the interior. See house-body-equation, felicitous-space, patriarchal-poetics.

• Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — the cultural register: the interior as humanity's first register of preserved thought — "an underlying persistent desire seems to be the fabrication of spaces to embody human thoughts within material constructs"; "we can discuss interior architecture as a spatial and material construct meant to preserve cultural or personal beliefs"; "Both paradigms, always working in conjunction, make interior architecture a cultural mirror into which we can look to gain access to the beliefs and customs of past cultures"; and the register's succession — "As our modes of register become more ephemeral so do our modes of experience, affecting both how we perceive and how we create our built environment." Interiority here is what the interior stores — and what dematerializes when the register migrates from stone to paper to bits. See cultural-registers, dematerialization.

• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — interiority's extension register, the conflation's positive face: in the industrial age "the home was seen as an extension of both her corporeal and spiritual self" — interiority not as what a room shelters (Taylor & Preston), produces (the Oval Room, Weir), or denies (Baker) but as what the interior is: "space becomes an extension of the female inhabitant and an embodiment of home" (editors' headnote, p. 126). The register runs bidirectionally — the woman "lean[ed] back with a sigh of satisfaction" into the room she fixed, "literally became one with it" (Margaret, p. 126), while Wharton's interiors take "possession" of their women (p. 128) — and its medium is metaphor made perception: "a simile – women and interiors were like one another – was transformed into a synonym" (p. 127). Gordon thereby dates and causes the conflation the page's gendered registers diagnose, and shows its mechanism was adornment: dress and furnishings as one "front" (p. 129). See house-body-equation, woman-as-decoration, separate-spheres.

• Salvador Dalí's Interiors with Heraclitus' Concealment (Weir 2018) — the intrauterine register: the Oval Room "conceived as an architectural analogue of the egg," delivering "a powerful sense of enclosure and interiority" — hemispherical form, continuous pink couches, posture directed away from the exit, windows admitting light but no views, a thermal environment "separated from the prevailing weather," a dome that excludes outside sound; the entrance "concealed within another unusual room, the Room of Cupboards," reachable through a recessed cupboard door whose passage is "effectively imperceptible"; and the interiorizing resolution — "In the intrauterine paradise, there is no unfulfilled hunger and no registration of a greater exterior totality that would generate a displaced synecdochic appetite," until "bodies and the space surrounding them are perceived as a single, unified interior." Interiority here is not the innerness a room shelters (Taylor & Preston) but one the room produces by containment — engineered across sight, posture, climate and sound. See intrauterine-paradise, concealment, enclosure.

• Buildings and their Genotypes (Hillier & Hanson 1984/2006) — the sociological register: the inhabitant as "a categoric concept, and therefore a transpatial entity" — "An inhabitant is, if not a permanent occupant of the cell, at least an individual whose social existence is mapped into the category of space within that cell: more an inhabitant of the social knowledge defined by the cell than of the cell itself" (p. 151); what is realised in every interior "already a certain mode of organising experience, and a certain way of representing in space the idiosyncrasies of a cultural identity" (pp. 149–150); and the visitor as the position that lacks interiority's mapped-ness ("they have no control over that building and their social individuality is not mapped into the structure of space," p. 151). Interiority here is not sheltered innerness but membership: the person's social existence as the local carrying of a categoric order. See inhabitant-and-visitor, reversal-effect.

• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — the multivalent register: POPs "tend to generate interiorities that are not discrete, temporally frozen responses, but multivalent systems, ongoing spatial effects, and atmospheric productions"; the system as the interiority's carrier — "the installation, the generated effects, the emergent conditions, and the human experiences combined into one," expanded by "individual visitors and interactive, informative components… into a coherent, if not completely self-aware, ecology"; the serial temporality ("one in a series of iterative projects completed across of range of sites and times"). Interiority here is produced and ongoing rather than sheltered or stored — see productions, production-oriented-practices.

• Inside-out and outside-in (Vanucci 2018) — the envelope-articulated register: "Among all the elements of architecture, the building envelope plays a key role in defining the relationship between the surrounding environment and the articulation of interior spatiality"; the envelope "organizes the interior of the building and the external public realm with which it communicates; it controls the internal environment and marks the boundary of an architectural interiority"; and "most importantly, the envelope is the main agent for the articulation of its architectural interiority." Interiority defined by difference: "Interior space can be defined as the boundary that differentiates the exterior envelope of the building with the inside. Difference in temperature, humidity, light condition, and sometimes even pressure is what makes the interior controlled environment of architecture different from the surrounding environment" — and its contemporary production: "Heterogeneous interiority can be sought by means of a differentiated envelope," whose spatiality is "experienced through its intensive qualities of visual porosity, humidity, light, ventilation, etc." Interiority here is not what the room shelters, fabricates, stores, or grades but what the skin articulates — see performative-envelope, heterogeneous-space, boundaries.

• To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the re-experienced register: interiority as what the house museum exists to let visitors re-feel — house museums "are sites of pilgrimage where visitors attempt to re-experience past senses of interiority and spatiality," conveying stories "told in the round, through all the senses"; and the museal interior's interiority is achieved with minimal means: "Even given the reduced access to original artefacts, the pieces that are on display allow for other optics and layered viewpoints," and at Casa Gaudí "the sense of interiority is strong, supported by the inclusion of a few original artefacts." Interiority here is not sheltered (Taylor & Preston), fabricated (Manack), articulated (Vanucci) or produced (Odom) but re-covered — an innerness sought in the preserved traces of another's dwelling ("Above all, they contain traces, objects, features, and small signs of dwelling that provide a tenuous journey of memory and interpretation"). See house-museum, trace, site-of-memory.

• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the documented register: the preserved studio as "a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events. In this way, the room is a trace left by the past. As a spatial document, the studio-museum is more specifically a document of interiority. This spatial document occupies the same site and structure as the original and is imprinted with traces of its own original space, but it is no longer the original"; the working space "retained as though the painter had just recently walked out of the room"; the visitor in "a space that is no longer used or inhabited, but which, in fact, resists inhabitation (except by the 'spirit' of the former artist). The space is observable but not occupiable"; and the durational yield — "the visitor experiences two presents: the ongoing present of the spatial document (the moment of the artist's inhabitation preserved) and the current present (the moment experienced by the visitor)." Interiority here is not sheltered, fabricated, or re-covered but left: the innerness that survives as document after the inhabitant departs. See spatial-document, thickened-present, house-museum.

• Topology and interiority: Folding space inside (Voordouw 2018) — the topological–centralizing register: "Interiority, in relation to topology, is understood as an internalized centralization of space, a condition with an inherent spatial intimacy"; the erasure diagnosis ("The interior is erased by its continual link to the outside"; "there is no inside to be outside of"); the constructive programme ("Interiority as a defined inside to a surrounding outside can retain the porosity but rescind the ambiguity"; "Topology must simply fold in such a manner that deforms surface to form space"); and the counterpoint thesis — "Interiority is not so much a defense against the outside as a counterpoint to recognize its boundaries and clarify its variability." Where other registers locate interiority in the room's shelter, the discipline's fabrication, or the preserved trace, Voordouw locates it in the fold's spatialization — see topological-interiority, topology, threshold-to-gradient.

• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the urban-atmospheric register: interiority as "a theoretical framework for understanding social order"; "an urbanism of continuous 'interiority' that does not always correlate to the 'indoors'"; the Anthropocenic promotion ("interiority is expansive and pervasive, and becomes a space within which both architecture and urbanism operate"; "increasingly the governing paradigm for urbanism in fast-growing cities and privatized suburban campuses alike"); the volatility verdict ("interior urbanism can make public life easier to snuff out, but at the same time allows it to waft. Such an urbanism is at once more rich and more treacherous; more powerful and more volatile"). Where other registers locate interiority in the room, the body, the object or the fold, Solomon locates it in the city's air — the condition whose allocation is politics. See atmospheric-politics, interior-urbanism, public-sphere.

• Living in Glass Houses (Melchionne 1998/2006) — the exposed–reflexive register: "The glass walls render the occupant perpetually self-conscious of being watched… mean that one can never feel truly at home" (p. 229); the transparency mechanism ("From the outside, one gets a free view into the interior as well," p. 228); the habituation failure ("one can never get used to the Glass House and so can never truly inhabit it," p. 229); the watched body's environment as "a nest of prohibitions" (p. 232). Interiority here is not what transparency dissolves but what it reflexivizes: the innerness locked onto the self as watched object. See glass-house, privacy, visible-invisible.

• Puzzle (Carley 2018) — the object-mediated register: "The psychological interiors of Perec's characters are not excavated in detail"; "Each object has its own itinerant history that helps the reader construct a partial biography of the resident"; interiority projected through contents and withheld persons (via Bellos: "virtually no access to the inner lives"). See interior-as-biography, still-life.

• Altered (e)states (Erdman 2018) — the perception-state register, and the concept's most design-operative formulation: "If interiors are merely a category of professional work that occur on the inside of buildings, 'interiority' is the state of mind and perception induced by an architectural environment that is inwardly focused. An environment of this nature may have varying 'degrees of interiority' but is not limited to whether it is physically within or outside of a building"; interiority as instrument — "allows architects to consider how to alter the state of various environments… a productively disciplinary way to design interiors, while still considering them explicitly architectural"; techniques that "invoke degrees of a perceptual interiority, which is not always manifested through an intervention on the inside"; and the psychoanalytic corollary — the city's interiority/exteriority contrast mapped onto "the psyche of the contemporary urban subject, with their highly mediated and constructed exteriors (think Instagram, Facebook, etc.)". See alteration, interiorized-object, objecthood.

• Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the consumptive–interiorised register, the concept's political-economic limit-case: the transformed domicile as "an emergent form of interiority" connected to "the mechanism of interiorisation" (headnote, p. 328); the interiorization thesis — "interior design, by instilling a sign-consciousness in our most private and personal sphere, serves to acculturate us to the system of sign-objects – namely, to interiorize the political economy of the sign" (p. 332); the Chinese condition — a quarter-century after "the idea of a private home was systematically erased," privatization giving rise to "homeowner awareness different from an aesthetics of austerity" (p. 332); and the productive question — "not what alternative there is in an age of no interiority, but what function interiority, now recommended as spiritual resilience at a moment of worldly crisis or breakdown, is called upon to serve… What if interiority is served as an alibi in a culture that of necessity decorates and accessorizes everything for recognition?" (p. 333); with the "astonishing speed" of interiority's global recycling as the essay's closing theoretical problem (pp. 333–334). See interiorisation, sign-value, injured-interiority.

• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the indeterminate–haecceity register, the concept's ontological floor and its voluntariness criterion: "Could interior be thought of as haecceity – an element of existence on which individuality depends?" (p. 340); "room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense and… becoming-interior is ever-changing" (p. 341); "there are many rooms – many Bernards… Multiple narrations are now possible that subvert the form of the room (as internal) for the interior" (p. 341); the canon's silence explained — "the classic architectural theorists… could not write the interior because it lacks determination: like haecceities they are indeterminate" (p. 343); the conditional — "Might our sense of 'interiorness,' our interpretation of the interior depend on whether we, as inmates, are confined of our own accord, have encounters we initiate, and the manner in which we re-live memories and are moved by them?" (p. 342); and the positive definition — the interior "concerns 'capacities to affect,' rather than it being defined or described by fixed moments or things such as geometry, order, artifacts and objects. But it becomes events, 'in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life'" (p. 343). See haecceity, becoming-interior, refuge.

• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the expanded-boundaries register: the hidden spaces "internal to the house's structure yet external to its principal rooms" as "the expanded boundaries of the house and my consciousness" (p. 357); the plan as psyche-map — "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 temporal corollary — "Without them, I am uncomfortably fastened to the present, limited to the surface" (p. 357); and the editors' framing of the whole account as "conscious and unconscious associations that redefine the interior through psychological space" (headnote, p. 356). See hidden-spaces, fear, childhood-spaces.

• Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — the aural–conversational register: interiority produced by talk rather than walls — "the aural spatial affect of conversations that are driven and influenced by the presence and interaction of company in such interior settings" (headnote, p. 368); Priestley's implied space of intimate exchange (the confider's "aura of security"; words "but extra shutters and curtains and blazing coals and cushions," p. 369); the salon as the case "where conversation created its own social space with carefully marked boundaries" (p. 369); the drawing room's degraded converse ("Staccato conversations permitted all present to participate in the creation of an atmosphere characterized by a 'false view of life,'" p. 372); and the design-side — de Wolfe's "room made for conversation," "numerous conversation centers, intimate in spirit, such that no one chair is isolated" (p. 373). Where every other register locates interiority in what a room shelters, fabricates, stores, grades, documents, articulates, alters, legitimizes, governs, becomes or extends, Turpin's locates it in what a conversation creates — and gives the room its converse function: built to host the aural register. See conversation, salon, etiquette.

• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the twenty-seventh, territorial–affective register: home-territories differentiated by "the living of the territory (a temporalization of the space), and on the other their connection with identity, or rather a process of identification, of articulation of affect. Homes, we feel, are ours" (p. 394); "the articulation of subject (homemaker) to object (home-marker), caught up in a mutual becoming-home" (p. 392); "No space is enclosed, but is always multidimensional, resonant and open to other spaces" (p. 393); "One can be at home simply in the presence of a significant other" (p. 394). Interiority as identification decoupled from rooms — innerness as what the lived territory articulates, "a place we are." See home, milieu, territory.

• source-notes/brown-2018-touch-taste-smell-multisensory-museum

• source-notes/marinic-2018-internal-disconnect-portman

• source-notes/morey-alkanoglu-2018-architectural-purgatory

• source-notes/olsen-2018-on-technological-limits

• source-notes/teyssot-2006-boredom-and-bedroom

Open Questions

• How does interiority relate to psychoanalytic interiority (the Freudian "psychic interior") and to Bachelard's poetics of intimate space — is it a design-disciplinary rediscovery of the same territory? The Bachelard selection (now ingested) supplies the phenomenological side: "intimate geometry grounded in imagination"; the psychoanalytic side is now brought into the cluster by Fuss & Sanders's Berggasse 19 (the self exteriorized in the mirror — "a subject who is, first and foremost, an object") — but the question sharpens rather than resolves: do the phenomenological (Bachelard's inhabited image) and psychoanalytic (Fuss & Sanders's death-mask reflection) describe one innerness or two?
• Is interiority a universalising value in its own right, or can it be deployed (as the editors hope) to "destabilise implicit homogeneities" about home, privacy and publicity?
• Can interiority be designed for directly, or is it only ever a projection onto built matter — the "latent effect… seething behind the detail" (p. 11)?
• Rice's etymology (via Hollis; now from the primary text, Rethinking Histories of the Interior) gives "interiority" a birth date — early-eighteenth-century "interior character and a sense of individual subjectivity." Does that historicity destabilise Taylor & Preston's use of interiority as a trans-disciplinary cluster, or confirm that interior design's territory is a historically specific formation?
• Rice's primary text adds the OED definition's doubling: the interior "esp. in reference to the artistic effect; also, a picture or representation of the inside of a building or room" — the room and its image born as one concept. Does interiority then have two registers from birth (the inner life housed by the room; the inner life pictured by the room's image), and is the wiki's cluster (sheltered, fabricated, denied, watery…) already tracking both without naming the split? See doubleness.
• La Coe's episode shows interiority produced as "transcendental interior experience" at a fixed point in a religious interior — a spatially achieved, collective interiority, not the private-reflexive kind the modern interior houses. Is the wiki's interiority concept (Taylor & Preston's reflexive awareness) a secular narrowing of a once-transcendental operation?
• Ardener (via Hertz) shows 'inside' assigned to the sacred, masculine, life-bearing pole of the cross-cultural oppositions, while the modern interior is culturally coded feminine (separate-spheres) — does interiority's innerness carry this buried ambivalence, and would un-pairing the oppositions change what "inner" can mean?
• Webb's driver is the interiority-holding datum — architecture orbits his steadfast gaze, and the car becomes "the gorgeous object within." Is interiority here the occupant's (the driver's unshakable center of vision) or the machine's (the object venerated at the interior's center) — and which does the modern interior actually house?
• Baldwin gives interiority a practical test — the room fails when "everything in it had to be an arrangement" (the client "so afraid of her own room") — an interiority diagnosable by the inhabitant's fear. Is the perfect interior precisely the one in which interiority has been replaced by arrangement, and can that test be operationalized?
• Stokes-Rees calls narration itself interior ("characterized by interiority") — is narrative interiority the national collective's inner life (Connerton's commemorative participation) rather than the private subject's, and does the museum then house an interiority no single inhabitant owns?
• Taylor's chapter re-poses interiority under technological conditions — "dynamic and mobile," aided by the inhabitant's response to a responsive environment — and demands "alternate… receptacles for interiority and dwelling" if the supermodern interior dissolves. Can interiority migrate to environments at all (a responsive surface, a data field, a wearable), or is interiority constitutively tied to the enclosed room (Grosz's enframing; Bachelard's cell)? Is Augé's non-place — "inherently impersonal and impermanent" — interiority's absolute limit case?
• Teston inverts the Taylor diagnosis: where Taylor's non-place is interiority-abolishing ("alone at last"), Teston speculates that non-places "allow for experiences of psychological interiority" — the less subjective the physical experience, the greater the introspection. Is this the same interiority (an intensification of the inner narrative) or a different, parasitic one — introspection as compensation for relation's absence? And if "an online identity… is a character projected to others," is the curated digital self interiority's new home, its mask, or its export?
• Manack's register cuts across the whole cluster: if interiority is "a complete fabrication" — the discipline's invention rather than the inhabitant's inner life — then Baldwin's client-tested room ("Nothing is interesting unless it is personal"), Bachelard's poetic image, and Taylor & Preston's reflexive awareness all name things the fabricating discipline does not claim to produce. Are there two interiorities here (lived innerness vs designed interiority-effect), and does the discipline's "complete fabrication" claim imply the second can dispense with the first — or that the second is only successful when it reliably induces the first?
• Burns shows interiority functioning as a norm of personhood: within the surface/depth binary, to lack an interior is to lack "a fantasized locale for the identity of self" — the raced female subject rendered unknowable rather than different. Is the wiki's interiority concept therefore politically double-edged — the value interior design exists to serve, and the exclusion-criterion by which some subjects are written off as all surface? Can interiority be claimed on Baker's behalf without repeating the binary (retrieving her "as an exemplum of alterity… pinning her back against the wall")?
• Treadwell's watery register relocates interiority's substance from the room to the body's liquids ("sweat forms, blood falls, and waters break") and from privacy to the collective (the sea "epitomizes our vacillations between individuality and collectivity" — immersion in the collective "in death"). Is oceanic interiority a species of the concept or its correction: does interiority remain an inner life at all when its interior is continuous with the ocean, held only by a permeable membrane?
• Edelman's contained register reverses the shelter-tradition: interiority not as the room's gift to the subject but as the room's training of the subject ("modeling the subject as container of space"). If the "imaginary architecture of a self" is built by rooms, is the uncanny (its "toppling") then architecture's own effect returning — and can a designed interior refuse to teach containment without dissolving the interior altogether?
• Hillier and Hanson's sociological register defines interiority by mapped-ness: the inhabitant belongs to "the social knowledge defined by the cell." Does this make interiority a position in a social order rather than a psychic depth — and if so, what is the interiority of the visitor, the guest, the patient (positions with "no control over that building" and no mapped social individuality)? Is a theory that locates innerness in the category compatible with the psychoanalytic registers (the body as container, Edelman; the exteriorized self, Fuss & Sanders), or does it replace innerness with membership altogether?- Odom's multivalent register pluralizes interiority as production: "interiorities… multivalent systems, ongoing spatial effects, and atmospheric productions." Can interiority be a product at all — or does production's seriality ("one in a series of iterative projects") convert innerness into content, the last step in the wiki's drift from sheltered innerness (Taylor & Preston) through fabrication (Manack) to output? And if interiority is "ongoing," does it still need a host — the room, the installation — or has the thirteenth register finally made the interiority-host relation optional?
• Vanucci's fourteenth register relocates interiority into the skin: "the envelope is the main agent for the articulation of its architectural interiority." Is envelope-produced interiority (a difference-register of temperature, humidity, light, porosity) a materialist completion of the cluster — the mechanism all the other registers presupposed — or its reduction, in which the psychological, cultural and embodied innerness the other fourteen registers describe becomes an aftereffect of building physics? And if interiority is articulated by the envelope, who owns it — the discipline that designs the skin, or the inhabitant who experiences its gradients?
• Downey's re-experienced register makes interiority an object of pilgrimage: visitors "attempt to re-experience past senses of interiority and spatiality" in conserved rooms, where "the sense of interiority is strong, supported by the inclusion of a few original artefacts." Is the museal interiority an innerness at all — or an act of historical imagination projected onto traces (the "tenuous journey of memory and interpretation"), a fifteenth register in which interiority is retroactive, achieved by the visitor rather than designed by anyone? And if a few original artefacts suffice to produce it, does interiority need interiors — or only signs?
• Macken's documented register completes the museum pair from the other side: where Downey's visitors re-experience interiority, Macken's preserved interior is "observable but not occupiable" — interiority documented by an absence ("a physical container of absence"). Is documented interiority an innerness at all, or its residue-value — the witness-claims ("curiously occupied," "exuberance, inspiration, and melancholy") projecting the very innerness the room no longer has? And if "the power of territory and ownership has gone: the space no longer exudes a presence," can a document of interiority contain interiority — or only the proof that interiority was there?
• Voordouw's register gives interiority a spatial definition the psychological registers never offered — "an internalized centralization of space" — and a loss condition ("no inside to be outside of") rather than a phenomenology. Is centralizing interiority a competing definition of the whole cluster or its geometric floor condition — the minimum every other register presupposes (something must be demarcated before it can be felt, fabricated, stored, or documented)? And does his counterpoint thesis (interiority "not so much a defense… as a counterpoint to recognize its boundaries") finally give the cluster a positive account of what the interior does with the outside rather than against it?
• Tang's register cuts the cluster politically: if interiority is what interior design instills ("to acculturate us to the system of sign-objects"), then the wiki's twenty-plus registers — phenomenological, psychoanalytic, pedagogical, sociological — may all be describing the consciousness a sign economy produces, while believing it describes one that precedes it. Is the cluster's innerness interiority's nature or interiorisation's product — and can the "historical inquiry" Tang anticipates ("once again exhausted and ripe for historical inquiry") be conducted from inside the discourse it studies? His injured interiority ("its success in failure") suggests the failure mode may be the only honest witness. See interiorisation, injured-interiority.