Rethinking Histories of the Interior

Author: Charles Rice Year: 2006 (Intimus printing; original: "Rethinking Histories of the Interior," The Journal of Architecture, vol. 9, no. 3, 2004, pp. 275–87, excerpts pp. 276–82; © 2004 The Journal of Architecture, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd) Source type: chapter (the Intimus: Interior Design Reader selection, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 283–292) Raw file: raw/chapters/rice-2006-rethinking-histories.md

Summary

Rice's historiographic essay on the relationship between the image of the domestic interior (media) and the domestic environment (setting), through the historical emergence of the bourgeois domestic interior. The word "interior" only came to mean "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" from the early nineteenth century (OED) — the definition itself doubling the room and its picture. The interior "emerges with conceptual specificity in the context of bourgeois domesticity": not simply architectural (it borrows architecture's enclosure and is articulated "through decoration, the literal covering of the inside of an architectural 'shell'"), and not simply spatial, "but is equally an image-based phenomenon." Rice reads this doubleness through Baudelaire's "The Twofold Room" (1862), Benjamin's 1939 exposé on the bourgeois interior (whose material space "produces de-realised experiences"; the collector as "the true resident of the interior"), and Freud's suite-of-rooms model of the unconscious — then asks what such doubled experience means for how the interior's history can be written. His targets are the established texts of Mario Praz, Peter Thornton and Charlotte Gere, which take the inhabiting subject and the interior as pre-given and render visual representations "transparent to spatial conditions of domesticity," producing "a transhistorical and essentialised view of the domestic interior." Against them he proposes Foucault's effective history: the interior's emergence "cast as an event in the schema of effective history," whose recognition enables "a 'reversal of a relationship of forces'" — for essentialised histories of the interior, privacy and domesticity "have produced a sleep of historical consciousness."

Key Claims

The concept's etymology is time-bound and inherently doubled: the OED records "interior" from the late fifteenth century (inside divided from outside; the spiritual inner nature of the soul), "interiority" from the early eighteenth century (inner character, individual subjectivity), and from the mid-eighteenth century the domestic affairs of a state — and "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.'" The architectural interior's birth-definition doubles the room and its image.
The interior's first domestic use is theatrical scenery: dated 1829, from A Companion to Theatres — "A few interiors, two or three streets, and about the same number of country views, would last as stock scenery for several seasons." The interior enters domestic English as a set-design term, not an architectural one.
The second sense is a genre of representation: George Eliot's diary (1858) — "The two interiors of Westminster Abbey by Ainmueller admirable" — the interior as picture-genre recorded before (and alongside) the interior as room.
"Interior decoration" also has a dated founding text: the OED's entry ("The planned co-ordination for artistic effect of colours and furniture, etc., in a room or building") gives its first use as the title of Thomas Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807) — which, with Percier and Fontaine's Recueil de décorations intérieurs (1801), "marked the newly emergent interior as a site of professional struggle between architects and upholsterers."
The discipline's separation is a nineteenth-century process: "Through the nineteenth century, interior decoration began to articulate itself separately from architecture" — interior design's professional birth dated and characterized.
The interior is not simply architectural, not simply spatial: "the interior emerges with conceptual specificity in the context of bourgeois domesticity. It is not simply architectural, but it borrows on the enclosure provided by architecture to be articulated through decoration, the literal covering of the inside of an architectural 'shell.' In this sense the interior is also not simply spatial, but is equally an image-based phenomenon."
Doubled experience is held in material and immaterial registers (Baudelaire): "The Twofold Room" (1862) captures "the way in which an inhabitation of the interior is caught between material and immaterial registers" — the daydream room ("A room just like a daydream, a truly spiritual room") whose animate coherence collapses with reality's intrusion: "a terrible, heavy thump" on the door, and the room revealed as "this hovel, this home of everlasting boredom."
The doubled interior is de-realised (Benjamin): Benjamin's 1939 exposé of the bourgeois domestic interior "describes it as a material space which produces de-realised experiences" — the interior as space separated from work and productive labour, a refuge from the city's alienating experience, in which "subjects confront themselves in psychologically charged ways through the medium of objects and furnishings."
The collector is the interior's true resident: Benjamin's collector takes possession of things "in divesting them of their character as commodities," bestowing "a 'connoisseur's value,' rather than a 'use value'" — "delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better – a world in which… things are freed from the drudgery of being useful." These things become the traces of inhabitation.
Reverie's intrusion measures the working class: Baudelaire's interior is "sealed off from the everyday world only in reverie"; his plight "figures the way in which the increased awareness of the bourgeois interior as a space removed from the everyday world also produced a measure for assessing the living conditions of the working classes, those for whom the domestic and the productive spheres were not necessarily separated" (Mayhew's slum research, note 7) — the bourgeois interior's separation is also a social measure.
The doubleness gives the bourgeoisie's century its frame: "this relation between reverie and the reality of the onward march of time gives a context for understanding the bourgeoisie's relation to the world of objects as commodities, to the industrialising city, and to their social and political identity through the nineteenth century."
Freud's unconscious is a suite of rooms — a further doubled condition: the Introductory Lectures' model — the unconscious as "a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals," consciousness as "a separate, narrower, room – a kind of drawing-room," the censor as "a watchman… on the threshold between these two rooms" — extends the interior's doubleness into the psyche's own plan.
Freud's consulting rooms were a domestic interior made by collection: "Historically, Freud was a collector of antique statuary which adorned and, in Benjamin's terms, made his consulting rooms, which were attached to his apartment in Vienna, into a domestic interior" — the setting for the scene of transference (citing Fuss & Sanders, note 9); and "much of the force of the Oedipus Complex as a model… comes from the consolidated, and in some ways overdetermined place of the family in bourgeois life from the nineteenth century" (citing Donzelot and Rose, note 10).
The interior's emergence is trace-accumulation with occluded meanings: "The bourgeois domestic interior emerges historically in the nineteenth century through an accumulation of traces, and in relation to occluded meanings."
The historiographic problem stated: "the interior's spatial and imagistic senses do not map directly onto each other. As we learn from Baudelaire, the imagistic sense of the interior is not simply transparent to its spatial sense. This presents problems for conventional ways in which the evidence of the interior is gathered to reconstruct and interpret historical conditions of domesticity."
The interior view is a dated genre (Gere): interior views were painted and drawn "as ends in themselves, as a specific genre" from the beginning of the nineteenth century; Gere links the genre directly to decoration practice — so many views "show rooms that must just have been decorated and newly arranged" (prompted by the Percier & Fontaine and Hope publications).
The genre's life-cycle: "The depiction of rooms for their own sake… germinated, reached its fullest flowering and died within the space of one century"; the watercolours "were intended to be placed in albums rather than to be framed and hung, and remained an almost secret possession"; when fashion passed, "their very existence seems to have been forgotten. They were rendered obsolete by the development of a photographic camera capable of focusing on a great depth of field" — and the photographic albums (1880–1910) "before they too were forgotten, like the albums of paintings they had superseded."
The evidentiary shift: familial to public: "While Perrot realised the ultimately private nature of the evidence of privacy, Gere is signalling the shift of visual representations of the interior from being familial possessions to becoming historical, and therefore public, documents" — Praz's 1964 rediscovery as the moment the private evidence became history.
Gere's hidden essentialism: her album "provides a history of the decoration of the nineteenth-century interior evidenced through its representation, but this project hides an essentialist view of the interior which betrays the historical specificity of the bourgeois interior doubled between representational and spatial practices."
Praz's platform is timeless human nature: witnessing bombed houses after WWII ("some still furnished corner, dangling above the rubble"), Praz concludes "The houses will rise again, and men will furnish houses as long as there is breath in them" — "an observation of the timeless qualities of 'human nature'" is "the platform upon which Praz launches his history of the interior," working from "a basic division of human nature between those who 'care about their house, and those who care not at all about it.'"
Praz's retrospective-exhibition model: "perhaps even more than painting or sculpture, perhaps even more than architecture itself, furniture reveals the spirit of the age. And there is nothing like a retrospective exhibition of furnished rooms in a chronological sequence to declare to us, at first glance, the varying personalities of the rooms' occupants" — the book as "the published equivalent of this 'retrospective exhibition,' taking the idea of the inhabiting subject, and the interior and its decoration, as pre-given concepts… not ones that have emerged out of particular historical conditions."
Praz's transparency error named: citing Benjamin's exposé "at length," Praz "collects traces of the inhabitant through their visibility in the interior. Yet he generalises this bourgeois condition as one obtaining across all history. He ignores the historical specificity of the genre of the interior view… by rendering the idea of visual representation across many genres transparent to spatial conditions of domesticity." The verdict: "What has been tacitly recognised as a particular historical emergence has been used to authorise a transhistorical and essentialised view of the domestic interior."
Thornton's cue is Macaulay's humble topographer: Authentic Décor (1620–1920) takes its cue from Macaulay's 1848 wish that historians "had sometimes spared a few pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose of letting us know how the parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors looked" — the interior's history as supplement to grand narrative, "whereby one's supposed innate appreciation of domesticity would colour the background of past events."
The way of seeing diagnosed: "What is common in all of these histories of privacy, domesticity and the interior is that they attest to a post-nineteenth-century way of seeing. This way of seeing authorises a general historical retrospection which is itself not appreciated within an historical context."
Foucault supplies the alternative (traditional vs effective history): against traditional history's "dull constancy of instinctual life" — belief that it "continues to exert its force indiscriminately in the present as it did in the past" — "a knowledge of history easily disintegrates this unity, depicts its wavering course, locates its moments of strength and weakness, and defines its oscillating reign" ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"). Effective history "is a history of discontinuity, for the sake of breaking tendencies for recognition and 'rediscovery of ourselves.'"
The interior's emergence as event: "the emergence of the interior, in its doubleness, can be cast as an event in the schema of effective history, an event that, when perceived as such, enables a 'reversal of a relationship of forces.'" By returning to Benjamin's exposé, "we shall see the importance of understanding the historical emergence of the interior within this schema."
The closing verdict: "far from providing an increased consciousness of everyday domesticity within the continuum of history… essentialised histories of the interior, privacy and domesticity have produced a sleep of historical consciousness."

Connections

Concepts: bourgeois-interior (the concept this source defines and dates) · doubleness (the interior's doubled condition: spatial/imagistic, material/immaterial) · de-realisation (Benjamin's term Rice deploys for the doubled experience) · interior-view (the genre whose historical specificity Praz ignores) · effective-history (Foucault's alternative Rice proposes) · the-collector (Benjamin's collector as "the true resident of the interior") · historiography-of-the-interior (the page this source anchors: essentialist vs effective historiography) · interiority (the OED etymology, now from the primary text) · domestic-interior (the interior's emergence "with conceptual specificity in the context of bourgeois domesticity") · representation (the non-transparency thesis in Rice's own words) · privacy (the critique of privacy's historiographic constant) · separate-spheres (interior separated from work; the measure for the working classes) · upholsterer (the architects-vs-upholsterers struggle, 1801–1807) · interior-design (interior decoration "articulat[ing] itself separately from architecture") · architectural-photography (photography rendering the interior view obsolete; the albums of 1880–1910) · trace ("an accumulation of traces"; Benjamin's traces of inhabitation) · interior-as-biography (Praz's "varying personalities of the rooms' occupants" — the biography-claim at its most essentialist) · the-decorative (decoration as "the literal covering of the inside of an architectural 'shell'") · spectacle (the interior as image-based phenomenon; de-realised experience) · arcades (Benjamin's 1939 exposé, Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century) · transference (Freud's consulting rooms as the setting for the scene of transference) · psychoanalytic-setting (the consulting rooms as domestic interior made by collection) · history (effective history's interior application) · advice-literature (Hope's 1807 title as the OED's first "interior decoration") · interior-design-vs-architecture (the professional struggle dated)

Authors: Charles Rice — the author · Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the Intimus editors framing the selection · Walter Benjamin — quoted at length (the 1939 exposé; the collector; traces) · Michel Foucault — "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" supplies the methodological frame · Sigmund Freud — the suite-of-rooms unconscious; the collecting occupant of Berggasse 19 · Thomas Hope — the 1807 title the OED's "interior decoration" entry cites · Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — "Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office" cited in note 9. Cited without pages (see log): Charles Baudelaire ("The Twofold Room"), Mario Praz, Peter Thornton, Charlotte Gere, Michelle Perrot, Henry Mayhew, T. B. Macaulay, Jacques Donzelot, Nikolas Rose, Robin Evans, Percier & Fontaine, George Eliot, Ainmueller.

Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture — the "newly emergent interior as a site of professional struggle between architects and upholsterers" (1801–1807): the debate's earliest named episode, a generation before Eastlake's polemic.

Related source notes: (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — reports the position of Rice's 2007 book (The Emergence of the Interior), of which this 2004 essay is the direct ancestor: the OED etymology, the non-transparency of representations, the critique of traditional history — here in Rice's own text with the doubleness/de-realisation framework Hollis's account omits · The dialectics of appropriation (Brooker 2018) — quotes Rice's 2007 doubleness claim via Baudelaire's "Two-fold Room"; this source supplies the poem's full arc and its 2004 formulation · Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — the folio whose title Rice dates as the first use of "interior decoration," and whose author-publisher Hope marks the architects-vs-upholsterers struggle · Berggasse 19 (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — cited in Rice's note 9; the reading of Freud's office this essay's "collector… made his consulting rooms… into a domestic interior" line condenses · Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the consulting-room arrangement Rice's transference-setting claim opens onto · Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the anthology's introduction, which names Praz, Gere and Thornton as the style-manual historiography this essay itself critiques from within the same volume · To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the trace-accumulation register Rice's "emerges… through an accumulation of traces" extends to the museal interior.

Direct Quotes

"Architectural historian Charles Rice examines the relationship between an image of the domestic interior (media) and the domestic environment (setting) through the historical emergence of the bourgeois domestic interior. To expose a problematic between the spatial and imagistic sense of the interior, Rice notes that for both Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire this doubled experience is held within material and immaterial registers, producing de-realised experiences." (Taylor & Preston, editors' headnote, p. 283)

"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. Also, in a theatre, a 'set' consisting of the inside of a building or room." (OED definition quoted, pp. 283–284)

"The first use of the word in this domestic sense is dated 1829 from a publication entitled Companion To Theatres: 'A few interiors, two or three streets, and about the same number of country views, would last as stock scenery for several seasons.'" (pp. 283–284)

"The two interiors of Westminster Abbey by Ainmueller admirable." (George Eliot, diary 1858, quoted, pp. 283–284)

"The planned co-ordination for artistic effect of colours and furniture, etc., in a room or building." (OED on "interior decoration," quoted, pp. 283–284)

"Through the nineteenth century, interior decoration began to articulate itself separately from architecture." (p. 285)

"In this way, the interior emerges with conceptual specificity in the context of bourgeois domesticity. It is not simply architectural, but it borrows on the enclosure provided by architecture to be articulated through decoration, the literal covering of the inside of an architectural 'shell.' In this sense the interior is also not simply spatial, but is equally an image-based phenomenon." (p. 285)

"A room just like a daydream, a truly spiritual room, in which the air is tinged with rosiness and blue." (Baudelaire, "The Twofold Room," quoted, p. 285)

"The furniture takes on elongated shapes, prostate and languorous. Each piece seems to be dreaming, as if living in a state of trance, like vegetable and mineral things. The draperies speak an unvoiced language, like flowers and skies and setting suns." (Baudelaire, quoted, p. 285)

"The collector proves to be the true resident of the interior." (Benjamin, quoted, p. 285)

"[The collector] delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better – a world in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the real world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful." (Benjamin, quoted, p. 285)

"Yes, this hovel, this home of everlasting boredom, is indeed my own. Look, there are the fatuous bits of junk, my dusty and chipped furniture; the fireless hearth with not even a glowing ember in the grate all fouled with spit; the dingy windows down which the rain has scrawled runnels in the grime; the manuscripts riddled with cross-outs or left half done; the calendar on which the evil days of reckoning are underlined in pencil." (Baudelaire, quoted, p. 286)

"A space of immaterial, de-realised experience, Baudelaire's interior is also the space of his work, and of his relation to the productive cycle." (p. 286)

"His plight figures the way in which the increased awareness of the bourgeois interior as a space removed from the everyday world also produced a measure for assessing the living conditions of the working classes, those for whom the domestic and the productive spheres were not necessarily separated." (p. 286)

"Let us therefore compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall is a separate, narrower, room – a kind of drawing-room – in which consciousness, too, resides. But on the threshold between these two rooms a watchman performs his function: he examines the different mental impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the drawing-room if they displease him." (Freud, quoted, p. 286)

"Historically, Freud was a collector of antique statuary which adorned and, in Benjamin's terms, made his consulting rooms, which were attached to his apartment in Vienna, into a domestic interior. This interior provided the setting for the scene of transference taking place between Freud and his patients." (p. 286)

"The bourgeois domestic interior emerges historically in the nineteenth century through an accumulation of traces, and in relation to occluded meanings." (pp. 286–287)

"The primary complicating factor is the idea that the interior's spatial and imagistic senses do not map directly onto each other. As we learn from Baudelaire, the imagistic sense of the interior is not simply transparent to its spatial sense. This presents problems for conventional ways in which the evidence of the interior is gathered to reconstruct and interpret historical conditions of domesticity." (p. 287)

"That this interest in interior decoration (prompted by the publications from Percier and Fontaine, and Hope) had a direct bearing on the taste for interior views is evidenced by the fact that so many of them show rooms that must just have been decorated and newly arranged." (Gere, quoted, p. 287)

"The depiction of rooms for their own sake, rather than as a background to a narrative, anecdotal or portrait painting, germinated, reached its fullest flowering and died within the space of one century." (Gere, quoted, pp. 287–288)

"They were intended to be placed in albums rather than to be framed and hung, and remained an almost secret possession." (Gere, quoted, pp. 287–288)

"They were rendered obsolete by the development of a photographic camera capable of focusing on a great depth of field and thus able to do the job of the interior view-painter much more quickly and no less efficiently." (Gere, quoted, pp. 287–288)

"While Perrot realised the ultimately private nature of the evidence of privacy, Gere is signalling the shift of visual representations of the interior from being familial possessions to becoming historical, and therefore public, documents." (p. 288)

"The houses will rise again, and men will furnish houses as long as there is breath in them. Just as our primitive ancestor built a shapeless chair with hastily-chopped branches, so the last man will save from the rubble a stool or a tree stump on which to rest from his labours; and if his spirit is freed a while from his woes, he will linger another moment and decorate his room." (Praz, quoted, p. 288)

"perhaps even more than painting or sculpture, perhaps even more than architecture itself, furniture reveals the spirit of the age. And there is nothing like a retrospective exhibition of furnished rooms in a chronological sequence to declare to us, at first glance, the varying personalities of the rooms' occupants." (Praz, quoted, p. 288)

"What has been tacitly recognised as a particular historical emergence has been used to authorise a transhistorical and essentialised view of the domestic interior." (p. 289)

"Readers who take an interest in the progress of civilisation and of the useful arts will be grateful to the humble topographer who has recorded these facts… and will perhaps wish that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose of letting us know how the parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors looked." (Macaulay 1848, quoted via Thornton, p. 289)

"What is common in all of these histories of privacy, domesticity and the interior is that they attest to a post-nineteenth-century way of seeing. This way of seeing authorises a general historical retrospection which is itself not appreciated within an historical context." (p. 289)

"We believe in the dull constancy of instinctual life and imagine that it continues to exert its force indiscriminately in the present as it did in the past. But a knowledge of history easily disintegrates this unity, depicts its wavering course, locates its moments of strength and weakness, and defines its oscillating reign." (Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," quoted, p. 289)

"the emergence of the interior, in its doubleness, can be cast as an event in the schema of effective history, an event that, when perceived as such, enables a 'reversal of a relationship of forces.'" (p. 289)

"far from providing an increased consciousness of everyday domesticity within the continuum of history… essentialised histories of the interior, privacy and domesticity have produced a sleep of historical consciousness." (p. 289)

Open Questions

The evidentiary regime after non-transparency. If "the imagistic sense of the interior is not simply transparent to its spatial sense" (p. 287), can the interior view be used against the grain — Gere's albums read both as documents of decoration practice and as evidence of the genre's own ideology — or does every use of images as evidence re-commit the transparency error?
The theatre origin. The interior's first domestic sense is stock scenery (1829, A Companion to Theatres). Does the interior's conceptual birth in theatrical set-design retroactively warrant the wiki's performance model of spatial design (event-space, scenography) — and was the interior's "image-based" half theatrical from the start?
De-realisation vs the sign-system. Benjamin's collector divests things "of their character as commodities" (p. 285); Baudrillard (the wiki's Structures of Atmosphere) reads the same interior as a combinatory sign-system where accumulation is "nothing but a combining variant." Is de-realisation a resistance to commodification or its interior form — the sign-value that use-value's absence creates?
Which plan models which. Freud models the unconscious as entrance hall, drawing-room and censor (p. 286); the bourgeois interior is described as a space where "subjects confront themselves… through the medium of objects." Does psychoanalysis model the psyche on the bourgeois plan, or does the bourgeois interior model itself on the psyche — and can the two directions be distinguished?
The recurrent obsolescence of evidence media. The interior view died of photography; the photographic albums "too were forgotten, like the albums of paintings they had superseded" (pp. 287–288). Is the interior's evidentiary medium structurally doomed to obsolescence — and what dies with the current regime (the Instagram interior)?
Perrot's problem. Perrot "realised the ultimately private nature of the evidence of privacy" (p. 288): if privacy's evidence is itself private, can a public history of privacy be written at all — or only from the moment privacy's objects turn public (the albums, the house museum)?
What would the reversal be? The interior's emergence, perceived as an event, "enables a 'reversal of a relationship of forces'" (p. 289). What does the reversal consist in for interior design's historiography — the discipline's re-orientation to the imagistic register? And has it happened (interior design's own image-economy)?
The excerpt's elisions. The Intimus selection omits the original article's pages 277–278 and 281–282 (the "… p 278" and "… p 282" markers): the elided passages presumably develop the Gere critique and the effective-history programme. How much of Rice's constructive alternative lies outside this excerpt — and should the full 2004 article (or the 2007 book) be ingested to complete the argument?
Benjamin and Baudelaire as "media" historians. The headnote frames both figures as registering "material and immaterial registers" of the interior. Does Benjamin's collector and Baudelaire's reverie give the wiki's spectacle analysis a domestic prehistory — the interior as the spectacle's first room?