Inhabiting leftovers
Architectural incursions in negative space
Abstract
The question of the cultural and physical articulation of interior and exterior is far from recent. If modern Western philosophy had identified time with interiority and the spirit, leaving space in a secondary position as the realm of mutability and imperfection, almost two hundred years later this dichotomy continues to evolve. Still, as Sloterdijk recalls, we are immersed in the ‘World Interior of Capital’, which emerges as a hypertrophic system of immunity against the erratic and unreliable exterior.
With regard to architecture, this division between interior and exterior has run parallel to the relation between public and private, city and home, façade and interior architecture. However during and after the so-called spatial turn, architecture as a discipline has experienced how one of its main and almost exclusive instruments has become a transversal element shared and studied from diverse fields and perspectives. Thus, a worth exploring theoretical gap is open within the critical relation between space and architecture, and more specifically within the cultural and spatial readings of the inside and the outside.
This research paper aims at exploring the contemporary understanding of the leftover, which forms the counterpart to hegemonic spatiality, in order to suggest a transfer from the formal dichotomy interior/exterior to a multidimensional comprehension of space, following the philosophical notion of negativity. This contemporary fascination with leftovers is manifest in the work of several authors and artists, such as Slavoj Žižek’s interest in Gould and Lewontin’s ‘spandrels’, the Chapuisat Brothers’ Intra Muros, or Gregor Schneider’s Haus u r. However, these reflections also appeared almost forty years ago when the architect Steven Peterson coined the term ‘negative space’ to designate the hybrid realm in between geometrical constraints and the neutral transparency of modern space. This unmapped, but suggestive lineage suggest a transfer from the formal dichotomy interior/exterior to a multidimensional comprehension of space.
Author/s and or their institutions retain copyright ownership in the works submitted to the IDEA Journal, and provide the IDEA Journal of the Interior Design Interior Architecture Educators Association with a non–exclusive license to use the work for the purposes listed below:
- Made available/published electronically on the IDEA JOURNAL website
- Published as part of the IDEA JOURNAL online open access publication
- Stored in the electronic database, website, CD/DVD, which comprises post publication articles to be used for publishing of the Interior Design Interior Architecture Educators Association.
Reproduction is prohibited without written permission of the publisher, the authors or their nominated university. The work submitted for review should not have been published or be in the process of being reviewed by another publisher. Authors should ensure that any images used on the paper have copyright clearance.