ABSTRACT

Chapter 3 analysed the way in which architecture staked a particular claim for the domestic with the codification of asymmetrical planning. The interior as an imagined condition was crucial to the articulation of this claim. It aided an architectural discourse that was oriented along new lines inscribed by domestic comfort and the management of domestic relations, without simply being reducible to it. This chapter considers how the interior became the staging ground around the turn of the twentieth century for a reconsideration of nineteenth-century architectural values, particularly around the question of style. The interior performed this role at a crucial moment, the moment, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, of its liquidation. In examining this context, the English interior is investigated as it travels, as both an image-based condition and a set of material artefacts, to the different geographical contexts of Germany and Australia.