ABSTRACT
Without going so far as to claim another ‘death’ of architecture, we may begin to detect
a certain architectural nihilism present today, by looking at the way in which one of
architecture’s fundamental categories – interior – has become a kind diagram for all
others. Populating peri-urban spaces of global cities, there is a distinct kind of architecture
that constructs itself around what we could call a strategy of interior: architecture
reduced to a single act of enclosure. It produces vast spaces that, from within, appear at
every turn to conceal limits, to obscure frontiers, to draw a spectacle around its ability to
appear as a horizon. It is an architecture whose design agenda seems consciously
concerned with denying its status as a finite object. The inconvenience of its object-
status, captured only by roaming satellites and banking airplanes, turns out to be an
advantage for an architecture whose exteriors are otherwise impossible to capture as a
whole. From its exterior, it appears at once totalising and partial, ubiquitous and
fragmented. This is architecture that approaches a background condition. From within,
however, this architecture expresses something wholly different: it offers itself only in
the singular, a unitary space perceived solely through its impossible attempt of
sublimation into a state of pure interiority.
