The use of the word interior to refer to the inside of a house emerged in the 19th century and assumed some significance in modernist discourses. While the rise of digital media has shaped contemporary notions of space, these notions remain indebted to an idea of interiority that coalesced early last century. This discussion demonstrates the significance of the interior to modernists of different stripes and its consolidation as an idea across disciplines and geographical regions, despite the divergent attitudes it encompassed. Le Corbusier and Sigmund Freud viewed the interior and interiority as problematic, a view that found extreme expression in Richard Neutra’s domestic architecture. At the same time, visual artists such as Salvador Dali and the architects Alvar Aalto and Eileen Gray saw the interior as crucial to modern living, an approach revisited in the participatory art, architecture, and therapy that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
AaltoA. (1940). The Humanising of Architecture. The Technology Review, 43(1), 14–16.
2.
AdamP. (2000). Eileen Gray: Architect/designer. Harry N Abrams. (Original work published 1987)
3.
AdesD. (Ed.). (2000). Dali’s optical illusions. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Yale University Press [Exhibition Catalogue]. Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Connecticut, January 21–March 26, 2000, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, April 19–June 18, 2000 and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, July 23–October, 2000.
4.
BallantyneA. (2011). Architecture, life and habit. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69(1), 43–49.
5.
BatesV. (2018). “Humanising” healthcare environments: Architecture, art and design in modern hospitals. Design for Health, 2(1), 5–19.
6.
BentonT. (1990). The myth of function. In GreenhalghP. (Ed.), Modernism in design (pp. 41–54). Reaktion Books.
7.
BernsteinS. (2008). Housing problems: Writing and architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud and Heidegger. Stanford University Press.
8.
BresnahanK. (2003). Housing complexes: Neurasthenic subjects and the bourgeois interior. Space and Culture, 6(2), 169–177.
9.
CampbellM. (2005). What tuberculosis did for modernism. Medical History, 49, 463–488.
10.
CampensA. (2017). The sociological dimension of concrete interiors during the 1960s. Palgrave Communications, 3, 17035.
11.
CartwrightV. (2012, March12–14). Themes of light: Aalto’s Libraries from Viipuri to Mt. Angel. In Working Papers—Alvar Aalto Researchers’ Network (pp. 1–7). Alvar Aalto Museum.
12.
CartwrightV. (2022). Pine forest and sunlight. In BlissA. M.KopecD. (Eds.), Architectural factors for infection and disease control (pp. 57–64). Routledge.
13.
ColominaB. (Ed.). (1992). Sexuality and space. Princeton University Press.
14.
ConstantC. (1994). E1027: The non-heroic modernism of Eileen gray. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 53(3), 265–279.
15.
ConstantC. (2017). E.1027 Eileen Gray. In LeatherbarrowD.EisenschmidtA. (Eds.), The companions to the history of architecture, Volume IV: Twentieth-century architecture (pp. 1–12). Wiley-Blackwell.
16.
CronanT. (2011). “Danger in the smallest dose”: Richard Neutra’s design theory. Design and Culture, 3(2), 165–192.
17.
FinkelsteinH. (Ed.). (1998). The collected writings of Salvador Dali (p. 496). Cambridge University Press.
18.
FinkelpearlT. (2013). What we made: Conversations on art and social cooperation. Duke University Press.
19.
FranckK. A.LeporiB. R. (Eds.). (2007). Architecture from the inside out. Wiley Academy.
20.
HeikinheimoM. (2018). Paimio sanatorium under construction. Arts, 7(78), 1–19.
21.
HessA.WeintraubA. (2006). Organic architecture: The other modernism. Gibbs Smith.
IrigarayL. (1985). This sex which is not one. Cornell University Press.
24.
JacksonS. (2011). Social works: Performing art, supporting publics. Routledge.
25.
KimH.-S. (2009). Alvar Aalto and the Humanising of Architecture. Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 8(8), 9–16.
26.
LavinS. (1999). Open the box: Richard neutra and the psychology of the domestic environment. Assemblage, 40, 7–25.
27.
Lindsay-PerezM. (2020). Beyond feminism: The egg as a symbol of the Brazilian dictatorship in the work of Anna Maria Maiolino. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(1), 192–203.
28.
LoughreyJ. (2002). Sexual violence: Baroque to surrealist [Review of Winter Exhibitions in New York and Washington D.C.]. The Hudson Review, 55(2), 293–300.
29.
MartinB.SmithP. (Eds.). (2006). Women’s places: Architecture and design 1860-1960. Routledge.
30.
MaudlinD. (2010). Habitations of the labourer: Improvement, reform and the neoclassical cottage in Eighteenth-century Britain. Journal of Design History, 23(1), 7–20.
31.
McQuireS. (2008). The media city: Media, architecture and urban space. SAGE.
32.
PericoloL. (2015). What is metapainting? The self-aware image twenty years later (Introduction). In StochitaV. (Ed.), The self-aware image. A revised and updated edition (pp. 11–31). Brepols.
33.
RiceC. (2004). The emergence of the interior: Architecture, modernity, domesticity. Routledge.
34.
RojasC. (1993). Salvador Dali, or the art of spitting on your mother’s portrait. The Pennsylvania State University Press.
35.
RothmanR. (2012). Tiny surrealism: Salvador Dali and the aesthetics of the small. University of Nebraska Press.
36.
SchultzD. P.SchultzS. (2011). A history of modern psychology (10th ed.). Wadsworth.
37.
SpurrD. (2015). Architecture and modern literature. University of Michigan Press.
38.
StoichitaV. (1997). The self-aware image: An insight into early modern meta-painting (GlasheenAnne-Marie, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
39.
VidlerA. (2003). Fantasy. The uncanny and surrealist theories of architecture. Papers of Surrealism, 1, 1–12.
40.
WelterV. M. (2013). The tremaine house in Santa Barbara. Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism, 1, 171–187.
