ABSTRACT
At the heart of modern architecture lies a concern with the relationship
between interior and exterior space. The ‘bourgeois interior’ that Walter
Benjamin described so succinctly as a claustrophobic retreat from the dynamic,
modernizing city became one of the negative references against which
concepts of modern living space were developed in the early twentieth
century.1 Architects set out to design a new type of domestic interior, filled
with ‘light, air, and sun’, open and in touch with the outside world. However,
this outside world was not the city. Rather, it was ‘nature’ in various guises,
ranging from the wilderness outside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Houses, to
the fields of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, to the lawns stretching beneath
Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine. By and large, modernist architects and
planners bypassed the issue of the individual dwelling’s relation to public space
as a place of civic encounter, exchange and spectacle.2
