ABSTRACT
Spaces within walls are never quite ‘of ’ the interior nor the exterior. The five thousand year old houses of Skara Brae (on the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, right) were provided with intramural cavities. These were used for purposes that did not belong in the main living space; the twentieth-century American architect Louis Kahn would have called them ‘servant spaces’ complementing ‘served spaces’ (see later in this chapter). In Skara Brae they were used for storage, for concealing valuables to keep them safe, for refuge in the event of attack, for accessing the bolts by which doors could be secured, and maybe even as lavatories (with drains) for use on cold winter nights. These are what we might call ‘abject’ spaces – spaces pushed out of the main living space as unworthy of inclusion.
