ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 highlighted how interior photographs can render similar discontinuous manifestations of modernity. This photographic veiling disturbs the idea of there being transparent access to a supposedly primary spatial manifestation of the interior. This chapter focuses on how to think about the interactions between the interior as space and as image in various forms. The context for this discussion is the way in which Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier dealt with what Walter Benjamin called the bourgeois interior’s liquidation. Considering Loos and Le Corbusier together augments the network of relations surrounding architecture’s relation to the interior. Loos was the architect and cultural critic who made one of the most acute contemporary critiques of the German Werkbund,1 and specifically Hermann Muthesius’s goals of ‘quality of workmanship and the creation of a style for our times’;2 however, this critique also reveals a shared affinity with and admiration for English domestic architecture and ways of life, about which, as he acknowledges, Muthesius instructed a German readership.3 Yet in both substance and form, Loos’s critique shifted focus away from architecture intervening directly within the world of the commodity and its design and production. He used print media to project his critique,4 and the visual medium of photography both to critique and to conceptualize an architectural response to the problems of domesticity. The case of Le Corbusier is similarly invested in the role various forms of media play in articulating a modernist sense of spatial organization. He confronted directly the relation between two-and three-dimensional expressions of a spatial conception, grappling with doubleness in the wake of the interior’s liquidation.
