ABSTRACT
“Supreme Privacy: Seven Public Interiorities” explores two layers of American infrastructure—case law and the built environment—to explore delineations between privacy and publicness and related delineations between interiority and exteriority. In the context of evolving privacy rights and liberties related to bodily autonomy, seven landmark Supreme Court cases are turned into architectural case studies. Using contemporaneous written and photographic evidence, each case is synthesized into a digital mock-up representing the real architectural settings where contested events central to each case took place. Reframing interiority as something generated by sociopolitical contexts rather than solely by architectural enclosure enables studying an otherwise disparate collection of architectural spaces as a curated set, unbound by typological silos or geographic proximity. As interiors are brought out into public view, and exteriors are brought in, both sanguine and cautionary dimensions of public interiority are revealed.
