The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity

Within the broad humanities field,Inhabiting the Doubled Interiorrepresents the first attempt to study the domestic interior as a specific concept. The book develops a new understanding of bourgeois domesticity by establishing the domestic interior as a context that emerged historically at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The arguments of the book are structured around a concept of the doubled interior. This novel concept recognizes that the interior emerged historically to mean both a space and an image of a space, as well as supporting material and immaterial forms of domestic experience. The book uses this concept to develop new ways of dealing with the historical evidence of the interior, and it allows an eclectic and novel array of historical and theoretical material to be brought together in a wide-ranging account of bourgeois domesticity.

Charles Rice is Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney.