Le Corbusier’s famous statement, “a house is a machine for living in…” (Rybczynski, P. 173) is a quintessential modernist call to break with the past. While during the 18th and 19th centuries there was rapid development of urban technologies, particularly with the introduction of electricity on a large scale to the urban environment, the appearance of the home didn’t change very much. The new technologies of the home were absorbed and assimilated into the interior design fashions of the day. By conceiving of the house as a machine and furniture as equipment, Corbu continued the scientistic agenda of increasing rationilization of the home with his designs emphasizing increasing the efficiency of the house: the appearance of domestic interiors would no longer be dictated by the fashions of decor. His focus was on standardizing the construction methods of building houses so as to be more efficient, although without a similar concern for the work of the housekeeper. US interior design on the other hand continued its concern with the customization of domestic interiors to suite the needs of the inhabitants, and particularly the homemaker. Ellen Richards wrote: “…the house as a home is merely outer clothing, which should fit as an overcoat should, without wrinkles and creases that show their ready-made character….” She saw the home as clothing, where individual need determined the structure, technology and layout of the home. The home as Bachelard’s ‘shell,’ conceived as an extension of the person who designs and manages it. The ‘touch’ of the homemaker determining personal standards rather than technological standards, or rather, the order and design of the home was imposed from within rather than without, or externally by manufacturing and economic concerns at the forefront. In Richards’ conception the home is adapted around the needs of its inhabitants, whereas Corbu saw “…the house as a mass-produced object…to which the individual should adapt…”(Rybczynski, P. 190)
Corbu’s rationalization was an ocular one: the eye was central to his notion of architecture and human experience. Continuing in the Enlightenment tradition he equated seeing with knowledge, creation, imagination and invention. Consequently the window was a prime concern of his. The house became a frame for an exterior view with the deployment of windows delineating the possibilities of seeing outward. The function of the window changed from one of providing light and ventilation, to being the equivalent of a lens, with the house becoming a camera (which etymologically means ‘chamber’). The home becomes a photographic apparatus and a “…system for taking pictures…[becoming] a mechanism for classification…. The view from the house is a categorical view. (Colomina, P. 311) The house as framing device ‘domesticates’ the exterior view through categorization. “To inhabit means to employ that system.” (Colomina, P. 323) The house has become a montage, a series of views ‘choreographed’ by the movement of its inhabitants. Each visitor to a house creates their own ‘storyboard’ in moving about the interior space. One can even see this bias in Corbu’s drawings where a disembodied eye dwarfs the ‘person’ in the landscape. This shows an ocularcentric and cinematic conception of architecture from a disembodied, omniscient viewpoint: the perspective of the ‘panorama,’ and De Certeau’s view of New York city from the top of a skyscraper. This is the moving crane shot in cinematography. This is a desensorializing of the home. Sight displaces site: the opposite of what Bachelard, Heidegger, Bourdieu, and De Certeau insist on when discussing our habitation of spaces of the home and city. Giordana Bruno, in her book Atlas of Emotion also insists on a move back from sight to the site as a lived experience, with the texture of the situated, the mundane, and the here and now.
The exterior view has become part of the interior design. Windows as frames interrogate the distinction between inside and outside, between private and public, and “…the relation between domestic space and spectacle.” (Colomina, P. 319) The view enters the home through the central frame of the picture window in Ethel Wilson’s short story Window. (P. 196) The view through the framing ‘screen’ of the picture window inscribes (as Colomina might say) the spectacle of the outside onto the interior: both the physical architectural interior and the psychological interior of Mr.Willy, the inhabitant. “The exterior world…becomes artifice; like the air, it has been conditioned, landscaped – it becomes a landscape.” (Colomina, P. 319) In an interesting transformation Wilson’s picture window with a view becomes a mirror at night: a reversal, a doubling, and a locus for the uncanny as the psychological interior of Mr. Willy is projected outward and backward onto the screen of the window/mirror. It reflects Willy’s interior state back to himself turning his home, his shell, into a temporary heterotopia. Willy is present in the real space of his home, but at the same time has his domestic and personal interiors reflected back. The familiar becomes strange,disembodied, and ultimately, unhomely. At the same time, Willy’s domestic space is projected outward through the picture window to the public, who, in the person of the patiently waiting burglar, gazes into Willy’s interior making him vulnerable. Public and private, outside and inside are comingled and indicate possible challenges to urban living.
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