Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own

Author: Mark Taylor Year: 2006 (Intimus printing; original: "Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own," IDEA: Journal of the Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association, vol. 1, no. 2, 2001, pp. 14–22; © Mark Taylor, reprinted by permission of IDEA; Intimus pp. 339–344, excerpt of original pp. 15–21, with the elision marker "(…p 21)" at the essay's close in the raw file) Source type: chapter (the Intimus: Interior Design Reader selection, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 339–344) Raw file: raw/chapters/taylor-2006-a-roam-of-ones-own.md

Summary

Mark Taylor — one of Intimus's two editors, here contributing his own essay to his own anthology — writes the discipline's most direct literary claim for interior design's independence from architecture. The editors' headnote states the double operation: "first, it recalls Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own and the important role it has played in inspiring women to claim space and authority over their own domain. Second, through the use of close and gentle observation, it positions intimate detail and temporality in the discourse of interior design as a creative act. Speaking directly to the question of interior design needing a room apart from architecture, Mark Taylor reflects upon the dualisms that might hamper interior design's liberation, naming it as a physical and psychological refuge – a space within and yet with physical atmosphere" (p. 339). The essay performs what it argues: written as a day's roam — reading Woolf in "the 'architectural interior' of a Melbourne designer café," then in a room by the sea in late October, drawing blinds, lighting lamps, making coffee — it transposes Woolf's thesis (women's writing needs independent means outside patriarchy) into interior design's (the interior needs "independent means" outside architecture), proposes the interior be thought as Deleuzo-Guattarian haecceity — "the interior is discovered not built" — reads Wharton's ordered plans and Lily Bart's descent, indicts the canonical theorists (Alberti, Laugier) whose rooms none of them ever wrote about, and lands on the essay's 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).

Key Claims

The Woolf transposition is the essay's founding move: "Woolf's realisation is that writing by and for women can only be constructed when they write their own history outside patriarchy, epitomised by the need for independent means. Perhaps – and this is why I use her work – the same can be said of the interior… the interior requires liberating from architecture and offered independent means: a room (Raum), or should I say a roam of its own" (p. 340). The room/Raum/roam pun converts Woolf's feminist condition of authorship into interior design's condition of disciplinary authorship. See interior-design, gender-and-the-interior.
The discovery thesis: "her writing and intellectual position upholds the notion of woman as something discovered rather than built. Perhaps by acknowledging the role of women in relation to the interior, we might parallel this argument; the interior is discovered not built. Perhaps the interior, if it is to be displaced from architecture, needs to be sought, not necessarily in re-reading canonical architectural texts from an interior perspective but in finding new modes of expression for the interior" (p. 340). The discipline's liberation is methodological: not a rereading of architecture's canon but new expression.
The room apart, named by the editors: "Speaking directly to the question of interior design needing a room apart from architecture… naming it as a physical and psychological refuge – a space within and yet with physical atmosphere" (editors' headnote, p. 339). This is the wiki's corpus' most explicit statement of interior design's independence claim — written by an editor for the editor's own anthology. See interior-design-vs-architecture.
Benjamin interrogated — the enclosure/interior confusion: against "The interior was the place of refuge of Art. The collector was then true inhabitant of the interior" (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, quoted p. 339), Taylor asks: "Does Benjamin, in suggesting that the interior is there to house our collections – our prehistoric markings on cave walls – see it as a conscious thing measuring one's knowledge and ability in relation to societies' values? Or does he confuse enclosure with interior?" (p. 340). The essay's critical aside on the wiki's own primary interior-theorist: the collected interior may be enclosure mistaken for interiority. See the-collector, bourgeois-interior.
The haecceity thesis: reading Woolf's Bernard through Deleuze and Guattari ("'Bernard' has an individuality designating a multiplicity: 'Bernard and the school of fish'"), Taylor asks: "Could interior be thought of as haecceity – an element of existence on which individuality depends?" (p. 340). Thinking itself is quoted via Grosz as "a wrenching of concepts away from their usual configurations, outside the systems in which they have a home." See haecceity, assemblage.
Dualisms named and dissolved — twice: "Might the non-human architectural body need to be rethought away from oppositional dualisms such as structure/decoration, exterior/interior, masculine/feminine, etc., that continue an unhelpful homogenised binary position? For architecture (to have suggested that the inside is also the outside and the outside is also the inside) fares no better, since 'Bisexuality is no better concept than the separateness of the sexes'" (Deleuze & Guattari quoted, p. 340). Both the binary and its simple inversion are refused. See inside-outside-dialectic, ornament-vs-purity.
Becoming-interior, molecular: the Deleuze-Guattari body — "not in terms of binary opposites but as a 'discontinuous, non-totalisable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations,' through 'the body without organs'" (via Grosz's Volatile Bodies, p. 340) — yields the essay's process definition: "In suggesting that a body is not defined by the form that determines it, one could say that room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense and that becoming-interior is ever-changing" (p. 341). See becoming-interior.
The room as life's wealth, decorated by self-gathering: "this room is my life's wealth, it is 'decorated' by numerous things self-gathered and inherited, both consciously and unconsciously, it is room becoming interior; after all with a room of one's own, one is free to do this. Are these really 'collections' or the emphasised traces that Benjamin asserts we leave behind in the interior along with everyday imprints on loose covers and protectors?" (p. 341). Decoration reframed as self-gathering — the freedom Woolf's room grants. See occupant-as-designer, trace, interior-as-biography.
Many rooms, many Bernards: "as Woolf observes 'there are many rooms – many Bernards,' and that the room could determine our way of being, with different rooms reflecting different aspects of character, or character changes to suit the room… The desk and reading, the room and anger, the door and coming and going, the threshold and pausing. Multiple narrations are now possible that subvert the form of the room (as internal) for the interior" (p. 341). See interiority.
Wharton's ordered plan and its mercy problem: Edith Wharton's The Decoration of Houses advocates "an advocacy of classical regularity made through an appeal for a rationally determined relation between architecture and its parts" — "the ordered plan removes unexpected encounters and expresses carefully controlled patterns of movement, forming a 'projection of the idealized self, a retreat, a series of protective enclosures'" (p. 341); her own house The Mount "constructs the interior in relation to patterns of movement, but which in turn can be read as 'patterns of stillness.'" But decorating "in relation to a controlled and ordered set of spatial constructs… places social and societal encounters at the mercy of a greater force" (p. 341). And the interior's own dilemma stated through the asymmetry: "whereas Wharton depicts the plight of women from a woman's perspective no such position is afforded the interior which is still 'in a certain sense, "inside" architecture and its history'" (Grosz quoted, p. 341).
Woolf's dry land — the room against the watery outside: "Woolf's writing on the room is made in relation to the outside, the room is a refuge, a place of order, 'dry land,' whilst the outside is dark and watery, the site of psychological and physical chaos" (C. Ruth Miller via Taylor, p. 341); Taylor makes the coffee and understands her "reference to the 'deep waters of depression' and the 'dark places of psychology'" (pp. 341–342). "Could it be that the interior is constructed in relation to a physical and mental being; a place of reflection and withdrawal from the chaos of 'out there?'" (p. 342) — the essay's core definition of the interior as physical and psychological refuge. See refuge, privacy.
The empty room endures: "The room as a metaphor for the mind is sometimes full and occupied, but what if it is locked or even empty, because for Woolf although empty rooms are rooms 'devoid of human beings,' they still endure" (p. 342). See house-body-equation.
The Renaissance warning — no withdrawal when outside and inside are spatially the same: "But what if 'out there' becomes ordered and controlled, as occurred with renaissance planning and the interior became re-described from the city, then there would be no withdrawing for they are spatially the same" (p. 342). The refuge requires a genuine outside to withdraw from. See inside-outside-dialectic.
Lily Bart as the patri-architectural limit-case: "Might the descent of Lily Bart, the heroine of Wharton's The House of Mirth, from a rigidly ordered plan to one of complete disorder culminating in her tenement room suicide, be evidence of the necessary beneficial correlation of order for the interior… or the inevitable ending for one that strives to subvert an order that is endemic in a patri-architectural society? Was her 'downward path … through a series of actual houses' an inevitable descent?" (p. 342) — and the design-historical corollary: "Is the nineteenth century practice of covering surfaces both a cry and an attempt to escape this imposed order that in certain circumstances leads to madness and suicide?" (p. 342). See power-and-space, the-madwoman.
The refuge-prison dialectic and the condition of interiorness: "this refuge, this fortress protecting from the confusion without, may also be 'a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions,' that we return to with predictability" (Miller quoted, p. 342); the Yellow Wallpaper's madness as "confusion and pointlessness… brought within the prison or place of confinement." The essay's conditional definition: "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). Interiorness is indexed to the voluntariness of confinement. See privacy, the-madwoman, interiority.
The canonical theorists who never wrote the room: "the classic architectural theorists, Vitruvius, Alberti, Laugier, Le-Duc, Le Corbusier and many others; great men who had experienced anger, sorrow, pain, suffering, joy, love, birth and death from both afar and within their rooms, within their memories… how much time was spent within the buildings yet none thought to include a chapter, book or lamp on the interior" (p. 342). The canon's blindness is biographical: the theorists lived in rooms they never theorized. See historiography-of-the-interior.
Alberti's arrest of becoming: "Did Alberti as he divided the whole into homogenous parts, through partitio, area and proportio, think ornament only in relation to physical form when he so beautifully suggests it 'has the character of something attached.'… Did Alberti cleanse the room and re-surface it white in order to arrest and mask the fluidity of becoming-interior?" (p. 342). Ornament-as-attached and the whitened room as the two instruments by which architecture's wholeness pins down the interior's flux. See architectural-ornament, whiteness, proportion.
Laugier's sister: "Would Laugier's sister have 'pointed to,' if she could have produced an equivalent work? Might she be tempted to see not objects and 'forms,' but relations of movement and rest, moments of walking, crying and singing that occur alongside things; becoming; a moment that sees room becoming-interior" (p. 343) — the frontispiece's Muse read as the suppressed sister: "Might the Muse be Laugier's sister, that would amuse. As Woolf realised, Shakespeare's sister could never be, so is the fate of Laugier's sister who would find her maternal space obliterated and her destiny sealed behind masculine modes of thought" (p. 343). See primitive-hut, patriarchal-poetics.
The maternal debt and the hollowed interior: Grosz's diagnosis — "the construction of an 'artificial' concept of architecture utilising a spatiality that reflects men's own representations" (quoted p. 343) — transposed by Taylor into the essay's deepest architectural claim: "architecture in disavowing this maternal debt has left the interior in dereliction, homeless; it has touched itself from the outside (the city) in order to homogenise and recapture the sensation of the inside of a body; it has hollowed out its own 'interiors' and projected them outward and now requires interiors as supports for this hollowed space" (p. 343). Architecture's interiors are prosthetics for a hollowness of its own making. See interiority, inside-outside-dialectic.
Laugier's Spartan order as the control of excess: "the ex-Jesuit priest's desire for order, simplicity and naturalness reflected a male-centred Spartan existence; one that accorded with a desire by theorists to bring the wild excesses of women, home and decoration under control" (p. 343). The origins-myth as a gendered disciplinary operation. See primitive-hut, woman-as-decoration, ornamental-excess.
The indeterminacy thesis — why the canon could not write the interior: "Perhaps the classic architectural theorists, still in the bookcase, could not write the interior because it lacks determination: like haecceities they are indeterminate" (p. 343). The interior's unwritability in canonical terms is ontological, not incidental. See haecceity.
Light's double valence and the world-of-within: Woolf's window is "protective and transparent revealing both the external light of nature and the controlled light of within, from which the sun's light is associated with truth while candles and lamps foster illusions and circumscribe our world" (Miller via Taylor, p. 343). Taylor's avowal: "This world-of-within I like" — the candle-lit interior as the world of illusion the sun's truth-regime excludes. See atmosphere.
The capacities-to-affect definition (the essay's positive thesis): "When we encounter this candle-lit world, one is struck by the manner in which 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'" (Deleuze & Guattari quoted, p. 343). The interior defined affectively and temporally — the essay's answer to "new modes of expression." See atmosphere, event-space, haecceity.
The closing refusal of fixed identity: "Never again will Mrs Dalloway say of herself, 'I am this, I am that …'" (p. 343). The interior, like Woolf's self, refuses determination — the essay ends where it began, with Woolf's liberating undecidability.
The performative method itself: the headnote's "close and gentle observation" (p. 339) is enacted — lamps lit, blinds drawn, the wind lashing windows, the Paris cup, evening light "that hides things in shadows and catches others in lingering rays" (p. 341) — intimate detail and temporality positioned "in the discourse of interior design as a creative act" (headnote): the essay is itself the interior written as creative act, the methodological demonstration of the "new modes of expression" it demands. See temporality, everyday-life.

Connections

Concepts: interior-design (the "room apart" — independence claim and the discovery thesis) · interiority ("interiorness" indexed to voluntary confinement; many rooms/many Bernards; the indeterminate twenty-third register) · haecceity (the essay's ontological proposal for the interior; "like haecceities they are indeterminate") · becoming-interior ("room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense"; "becoming-interior is ever-changing"; what Alberti's whitening "arrest[s] and mask[s]") · refuge ("a physical and psychological refuge"; dry land against dark waters; the refuge-prison dialectic) · atmosphere ("a space within and yet with physical atmosphere"; "an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life") · privacy (withdrawal from "the chaos of 'out there'"; confinement of one's own accord) · domestic-interior (the room of one's own; the room as life's wealth) · gender-and-the-interior (Woolf's transposition; Laugier's sister; the patri-architectural) · patriarchal-poetics (Shakespeare's sister; writing outside patriarchy; masculine modes of thought sealing destiny) · the-madwoman (the Yellow Wallpaper's confinement-madness; Lily Bart's descent; surface-covering as cry) · house-body-equation (the room as metaphor for the mind; the hollowed interior recapturing "the sensation of the inside of a body") · the-collector ("The collector was then true inhabitant of the interior" interrogated; the failed collector; collections vs traces) · bourgeois-interior (the interior as "place of refuge of Art"; "does he confuse enclosure with interior?") · trace ("the emphasised traces that Benjamin asserts we leave behind"; "everyday imprints on loose covers and protectors") · temporality (intimate detail and temporality; day becoming night; "inseparable from an hour, a season") · everyday-life (the roam's quotidian observation; coffee, lamps, blinds) · whiteness (Alberti re-surfacing the room white to arrest becoming) · the-decorative (decoration as adding, subservient to architecture; the wild excesses brought under control) · architectural-ornament (Alberti's ornament "has the character of something attached") · primitive-hut (Laugier's frontispiece; structure privileged over the decorative; the Muse/Laugier's sister) · inside-outside-dialectic (the dualisms; the inside-is-also-outside refusal; the city re-describing the interior) · assemblage (events "in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere") · deterritorialisation (A Thousand Plateaus displacing "prevailing centrisms, unities and strata") · interior-as-biography ("different rooms reflecting different aspects of character, or character changes to suit the room") · occupant-as-designer ("with a room of one's own, one is free to do this" — the self-gathered decoration) · dwelling (the room one returns to "with predictability") · event-space (the interior "becomes events") · woman-as-decoration (the theorists' control of "the wild excesses of women, home and decoration") · ornamental-excess ("the wild excesses of women, home and decoration under control") · proportion (Alberti's partitio, area, proportio) · classical-orders (Laugier's "pointing to" the ancients) · liminality ("the door and coming and going, the threshold and pausing").

Authors: Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the Intimus editors, the second of whom is here the anthology's own contributing author (Taylor's third wiki source note, after "Proximities" and "Shape shifting") · Walter Benjamin — the interior-as-refuge-of-Art and the collector, quoted and interrogated ("does he confuse enclosure with interior?") · Gilles Deleuze (with Félix Guattari) — A Thousand Plateaus quoted four times: "Bernard and the school of fish," "Bisexuality is no better concept than the separateness of the sexes," "capacities to affect," "assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life" · Le Corbusier — named among the bookcase theorists who "thought to include [no] chapter, book or lamp on the interior". Cited without pages (see log): Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves via C. Ruth Miller), Edith Wharton (& Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses; The House of Mirth via Judith Fryer), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper), Elizabeth Grosz (Space, Time and Perversion; Volatile Bodies), C. Ruth Miller (Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life), Judith Fryer (Felicitous Space), Alberti, Laugier, Vitruvius, Viollet-le-Duc.

Debates: Interior Design vs. Architecture — the essay speaks "directly to the question of interior design needing a room apart from architecture": the Woolfian independence claim, the discovery thesis, and the dualisms named as what "might hamper interior design's liberation" · Ornament vs. Purity — structure/decoration named first among the dualisms; Alberti's ornament-as-attached; Laugier's privileging of "structure and form… over the decorative and ornamental"; the wild excesses of decoration brought under control · Power and Space — the refuge as "a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions"; the Yellow Wallpaper's confinement; the patri-architectural order Lily Bart dies subverting · Static vs. Dynamic Architecture — "becoming-interior is ever-changing" against the fixed room; the interior as events rather than "fixed moments or things."

Related source notes: Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the editors' programme ("the interiority cluster," the gender cluster) that this essay, by one of the editors, now argues from inside · Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — Taylor's later chapter: the 2001 essay's becoming-interior is the conceptual ancestor of the 2018 "dynamic and mobile" relation between interior architecture and interiority · Towards a Feminist Poetics (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — the confinement-side of Woolf's room: the Yellow Wallpaper as the room-of-one's-own's carceral double · The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1958/2006) — the phenomenological dialectic Taylor's dualism-critique both draws on and displaces (haecceity against sheltered innerness) · Rethinking Histories (Rice 2004/2006) — the Benjamin-refuge formation Taylor interrogates ("does he confuse enclosure with interior?") · The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the sibling literary method: close, gentle observation of rooms and their multiple narrations · Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — Wharton's possessive rooms (via Gordon) against Wharton's protective enclosures (via Taylor) · Oceanic interiorities (Treadwell 2018) — the dark and watery outside Taylor finds in Woolf, made positive in Treadwell's oceanic interior · Event-space (Hannah 2018) — "it becomes events": the 2001 essay's Deleuzian definition anticipating the event-space model's "there is no space without event" · The Dialectics of Outside and Inside and Chromophobia (Batchelor 2000/2006) — the whitened room (Alberti's arrest) beside the chromophobic purge of colour.

Direct Quotes

"This text operates in two significant ways towards expanding an understanding about the interior: first, it recalls Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own and the important role it has played in inspiring women to claim space and authority over their own domain. Second, through the use of close and gentle observation, it positions intimate detail and temporality in the discourse of interior design as a creative act." (Taylor & Preston, editors' headnote, p. 339)

"Speaking directly to the question of interior design needing a room apart from architecture, Mark Taylor reflects upon the dualisms that might hamper interior design's liberation, naming it as a physical and psychological refuge – a space within and yet with physical atmosphere." (Taylor & Preston, editors' headnote, p. 339)

"What construction of history and theory is invoked when undertaking such a task? What position is given architecture and the interior in such writing? Might it be interiors and what they are like; might it be architecture and interiors they create; might it be architecture and interiors they write; might it be written by the interiors encountered and the books read?" (p. 339)

"I am reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and I read 'Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not you will of course throw the whole of it into the wastepaper basket and forget all about it,' a necessary condition for establishing a shift in thought and expression over that which is held as authoritative and immovable. Unexpected thoughts on the interior." (p. 339)

"Woolf's realisation is that writing by and for women can only be constructed when they write their own history outside patriarchy, epitomised by the need for independent means. Perhaps – and this is why I use her work – the same can be said of the interior." (p. 339)

"This line I read sitting in the 'architectural interior' of a Melbourne designer café, prompting the thought that perhaps the interior requires liberating from architecture and offered independent means: a room (Raum), or should I say a roam of its own." (pp. 339–340)

"Further, her writing and intellectual position upholds the notion of woman as something discovered rather than built. Perhaps by acknowledging the role of women in relation to the interior, we might parallel this argument; the interior is discovered not built. Perhaps the interior, if it is to be displaced from architecture, needs to be sought, not necessarily in re-reading canonical architectural texts from an interior perspective but in finding new modes of expression for the interior." (p. 340)

"Across the desk lay scattered notes, two pens and a broken pencil, books piled high and a coffee cup from Paris – a single cup, perhaps a Benjaminian reminder of the occupant as failed collector, after all he asserts 'The interior was the place of refuge of Art. The collector was then true inhabitant of the interior.'" (p. 340)

"Does Benjamin, in suggesting that the interior is there to house our collections – our prehistoric markings on cave walls – see it as a conscious thing measuring one's knowledge and ability in relation to societies' values? Or does he confuse enclosure with interior?" (p. 340)

"Thinking is never easy; not when laughed and sneered at, and forced to anger; not here in late October; when spring is coming and one wave intermingles with another as a thousand white-horses fringe the edge of the earth." (p. 340)

"Nothing seems static any more. Think. Think – that thinking involves 'a wrenching of concepts away from their usual configurations, outside the systems in which they have a home, and outside the structures of recognition that constrain thought to the already known.'" (Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, quoted p. 340)

"Could interior be thought of as haecceity – an element of existence on which individuality depends? Might the non-human architectural body need to be rethought away from oppositional dualisms such as structure/decoration, exterior/interior, masculine/feminine, etc., that continue an unhelpful homogenised binary position? For architecture (to have suggested that the inside is also the outside and the outside is also the inside) fares no better, since 'Bisexuality is no better concept than the separateness of the sexes.'" (p. 340)

"The Deleuze and Guattari body is discussed not in terms of binary opposites but as a 'discontinuous, non-totalisable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations,' through 'the body without organs.'" (Grosz, Volatile Bodies, quoted p. 340)

"In suggesting that a body is not defined by the form that determines it, one could say that room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense and that becoming-interior is ever-changing." (p. 341)

"When later I survey this room in an evening light that hides things in shadows and catches others in lingering rays, it is day becoming night: and this room is my life's wealth, it is 'decorated' by numerous things self-gathered and inherited, both consciously and unconsciously, it is room becoming interior; after all with a room of one's own, one is free to do this." (p. 341)

"Are these really 'collections' or the emphasised traces that Benjamin asserts we leave behind in the interior along with everyday imprints on loose covers and protectors?" (p. 341)

"Or, as Woolf observes 'there are many rooms – many Bernards,' and that the room could determine our way of being, with different rooms reflecting different aspects of character, or character changes to suit the room." (p. 341)

"The desk and reading, the room and anger, the door and coming and going, the threshold and pausing. Multiple narrations are now possible that subvert the form of the room (as internal) for the interior." (p. 341)

"With this in mind I opened Edith Wharton's Decoration of Houses, to find an advocacy of classical regularity made through an appeal for a rationally determined relation between architecture and its parts. She reveals that the ordered plan removes unexpected encounters and expresses carefully controlled patterns of movement, forming a 'projection of the idealized self, a retreat, a series of protective enclosures.'" (p. 341)

"Planned in relation to social traditions her own house 'The Mount' constructs the interior in relation to patterns of movement, but which in turn can be read as 'patterns of stillness.' And the interior is a result of decorating in relation to a controlled and ordered set of spatial constructs, that places social and societal encounters at the mercy of a greater force." (p. 341)

"But what of this argument that advocates decoration as adding to: yet is subservient to architecture; does it realise the dilemma faced by the interior; does it release the interior from the bounds of architecture? You see whereas Wharton depicts the plight of women from a woman's perspective no such position is afforded the interior which is still 'in a certain sense, "inside" architecture and its history.'" (Grosz quoted, p. 341)

"Looking back I saw that Woolf's writing on the room is made in relation to the outside, the room is a refuge, a place of order, 'dry land,' whilst the outside is dark and watery, the site of psychological and physical chaos." (p. 341)

"The room as a metaphor for the mind is sometimes full and occupied, but what if it is locked or even empty, because for Woolf although empty rooms are rooms 'devoid of human beings,' they still endure. Could it be that the interior is constructed in relation to a physical and mental being; a place of reflection and withdrawal from the chaos of 'out there?'" (p. 342)

"But what if 'out there' becomes ordered and controlled, as occurred with renaissance planning and the interior became re-described from the city, then there would be no withdrawing for they are spatially the same." (p. 342)

"Might the descent of Lily Bart, the heroine of Wharton's The House of Mirth, from a rigidly ordered plan to one of complete disorder culminating in her tenement room suicide, be evidence of the necessary beneficial correlation of order for the interior, in which dominance and continuity are maintained, or the inevitable ending for one that strives to subvert an order that is endemic in a patri-architectural society?" (p. 342)

"Is the nineteenth century practice of covering surfaces both a cry and an attempt to escape this imposed order that in certain circumstances leads to madness and suicide?" (p. 342)

"But then again this refuge, this fortress protecting from the confusion without, may also be 'a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions,' that we return to with predictability." (p. 342)

"And what if that confusion and pointlessness is brought within the prison or place of confinement, generating madness as befell the heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper? Might this be the same pointlessness of bringing the city within the home, and its haunting ability to control a situation in a curious undefined way?" (p. 342)

"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)

"There were the classic architectural theorists, Vitruvius, Alberti, Laugier, Le-Duc, Le Corbusier and many others; great men who had experienced anger, sorrow, pain, suffering, joy, love, birth and death from both afar and within their rooms, within their memories." (p. 342)

"How much time was spent within the buildings yet none thought to include a chapter, book or lamp on the interior." (p. 342)

"Did Alberti as he divided the whole into homogenous parts, through partitio, area and proportio, think ornament only in relation to physical form when he so beautifully suggests it 'has the character of something attached.' The-wind-blows-the-curtain; the-door-creaked-as-it-opened? Did Alberti cleanse the room and re-surface it white in order to arrest and mask the fluidity of becoming-interior?" (p. 342)

"Let us look closer at Laugier's 'influential' image that was used to 'point out' or 'point to' the ancients as the object of desire, in the process of which an opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated for the primitive hut, one in which structure and form is privileged over the decorative and ornamental." (p. 343)

"Would Laugier's sister have 'pointed to,' if she could have produced an equivalent work? Might she be tempted to see not objects and 'forms,' but relations of movement and rest, moments of walking, crying and singing that occur alongside things; becoming; a moment that sees room becoming-interior, as when Woolf cried 'The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road?'" (p. 343)

"Might the Muse be Laugier's sister, that would amuse. As Woolf realised, Shakespeare's sister could never be, so is the fate of Laugier's sister who would find her maternal space obliterated and her destiny sealed behind masculine modes of thought." (p. 343)

"This as Grosz observes, is the construction of an 'artificial' concept of architecture utilising a spatiality that reflects men's own representations." (p. 343)

"Further, if one transposed her argument one could say that architecture in disavowing this maternal debt has left the interior in dereliction, homeless; it has touched itself from the outside (the city) in order to homogenise and recapture the sensation of the inside of a body; it has hollowed out its own 'interiors' and projected them outward and now requires interiors as supports for this hollowed space." (p. 343)

"I mused how the ex-Jesuit priest's desire for order, simplicity and naturalness reflected a male-centred Spartan existence; one that accorded with a desire by theorists to bring the wild excesses of women, home and decoration under control." (p. 343)

"Perhaps the classic architectural theorists, still in the bookcase, could not write the interior because it lacks determination: like haecceities they are indeterminate." (p. 343)

"That is, in another use of light. Used to differentiate between types of light, the window is protective and transparent revealing both the external light of nature and the controlled light of within, from which the sun's light is associated with truth while candles and lamps foster illusions and circumscribe our world. This world-of-within I like." (p. 343)

"When we encounter this candle-lit world, one is struck by the manner in which 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)

"Never again will Mrs Dalloway say of herself, 'I am this, I am that …'." (p. 343)

"Mark Taylor, 'Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own', IDEA, vol 1 no 2, 2001, pp 14-22." (source attribution, p. 344)

Open Questions

The roam as programme. "a room (Raum), or should I say a roam of its own" (p. 340): the pun converts Woolf's spatial condition (a room) into a temporal-motional one (a roam). What would interior design's "new modes of expression" look like when written as roam — and is the essay's own performative day (café, desk, sea, lamp, blinds) the demonstration, or only the gesture?
Does Benjamin confuse enclosure with interior? Taylor's question (p. 340) is aimed at the wiki's most-cited interior theorist: if the collected bourgeois interior is enclosure mistaken for interior, then bourgeois-interior, the-collector and the refuge-register built on Rice's Benjamin all inherit the confusion. Does the 1939 exposé's refuge survive the charge, or is Taylor's haecceity-thesis the correction of the wiki's Benjamin formation?
Discovered not built vs. complete fabrication. "the interior is discovered not built" (p. 340) stands in direct tension with Manack's "the interiority of interior architecture is a complete fabrication" (source-notes/manack-2018-fabricating-interiority). Can the wiki's interiority cluster hold both registers — the interior as found (haecceity, becoming) and as made (fabrication) — or does Taylor's essay mark the limit of the fabrication thesis?
Laugier's sister and the origin-myth's gender. Does the sister-reading (the Muse "that would amuse"; "her maternal space obliterated") require the primitive-hut page's Summerson lineage (the hut as modernism's classical germ) to be rewritten as a gendered fabrication — "an opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated" (p. 343) — and what would an origin-myth written from "relations of movement and rest" look like?
The candle-lit world of illusions. "the sun's light is associated with truth while candles and lamps foster illusions and circumscribe our world. This world-of-within I like" (p. 343): Taylor's avowal inverts the Platonic valence — illusion fostered as the interior's truth. Does the wiki's atmosphere cluster (Pallasmaa's felt, Baudrillard's calculated) have room for a third, fostered-illusion sense — the interior as the lie-space the sun's truth-regime needs?
"Capacities to affect" as the interior's definition. If the interior is events "in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life" (p. 343), can it be designed at all — or only hosted? The tension with the sheltered-innerness register (Bachelard, Taylor & Preston's interiority) and with the event-space model (Hannah) is unresolved.
Interiorness indexed to voluntary confinement. "whether we, as inmates, are confined of our own accord" (p. 342): is this testable against the wiki's registers — the Glass House (watched, not self-chosen), Gilman's rest-cure room (imposed), the migrant interior (voluntary)? Where does self-confinement end and the prison "constructed of conventions and illusions" begin?
The elided ending. The raw file's elision marker "(…p 21)" closes the excerpt at Mrs Dalloway's refusal of self-definition; the original essay's final pages (pp. 21–22 of IDEA 1.2) are unrecovered here. What concludes the roam — and does the archive hold it?