ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the notion that there are three primary cultural registers of humanity, interior architecture, the book, and digital media. It interrogates the evolution of these registers as modes of transference of human thought, examining the impact they have had on the dematerialization of space. Buildings and interior spaces, in addition to providing shelter and space for organized human activity, acted as the first primary human registers within which our stories and aspirations were communicated. Interior architecture can be thought of as embodying at least two paradigms in relation to its propensity to become a form of cultural communication. The paradigm through which the built environment becomes a form of cultural communication has to do with a conscious expression of, or response to, culture through interior architecture. The Industrial Revolution, with the clock and the printing press as its progenitor and exemplar, in substituting manpower for machine power, had driven material sensibilities to the brink of the immaterial interior.
