Walter Benjamin has observed that it was against the ornamented nineteenth-century domestic interior that the ideals and aesthetics of modernism formed. The nineteenth-century domestic interior was inextricably linked to the expansion and intensification of urban experience under industrialization. The industrial city not only delivered new freedoms but also previously unknown levels of fragmentation and stimulation. In this context living space became distinguished from the space of work as never before. The home offered a discrete and private space, which served as a refuge from the busy-ness outside [1].  And theconsumption of domestic goods offered new opportunities for individual expression and identification [2]. The home, and the commodities within it, became part of a contradictory arrangement of defensive display. On the one hand, furnishings, finishings and ornaments were increasingly asked to carry meaning as objects of self expression. On the other, the display style was one in which domestic objects were secreted away through the use of ‘coverlets and cases’, ‘étuis, dust covers and sheaths’, ‘antimacassars…and containers’ [3]. This ‘fortified’ interior depended upon a nested spatiality wherein one space – be it a room, a cabinet, a receptacle, a pouch or pocket – always seemed to contain another, in a refining and miniaturising sequence. Bourgeois homemakers fabricated scenes, moods and atmospheres of the ‘far away and the long ago’ such that the living room itself was ‘a box in the theatre of the world’ [4].

In this domestic scene the bourgeois urban subject and the consumer object were entangled in an ever more intricate co-production of selfhood. That intimacy left its trace in the very fabric of the home, often enough velour or plush fabrics, which readily ‘preserve[d] the imprint of all contact’ [5]. Such surfaces acted as clues to, and cues for, the pattern of daily life. In Benjamin’s view, the nineteenth century dwelling operated like a shell or a compass case in which shelter and the occupant were so ‘moulded’ to one another that they were mutually defining [6]. Benjamin was critical of this fit, which he thought produced a ‘nihilistic cosiness’, a dream-like ‘satanic calm’ from which one might never stir [7].  Although these interior worlds operated quite literally as escapes and retreats from the capitalist competition animating the industrial city, their production depended upon new practices of consumption. As Holland [8] suggests, the home became the ‘altar’ of a new private religion of industrial capitalism, ‘and its idol… [was] the fetish called “Commodity”’ [9].

Benjamin’s critique of this commodified and phantasmagorical mode of dwelling, drew upon modernist models of living, as articulated in Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme [10] [translated as The city of tomorrow and its planning]. The transparency, airiness and openness of Le Corbusier’s vision ‘put an end to dwelling in the old sense’ [11]. Modern architecture had little interest in sustaining the interior as a personal retreat serving individual expression. The smoothness of materials used in modern architecture and the flatness of its forms was inimical to the traces of its inhabitants and sought to hide nothing. ‘Glass’, as Benjamin notes, ‘is such a hard and flat material that nothing settles on it …. It is above all the enemy of secrets. It is the enemy of possessions’ [12].

As this illustration by Le Corbusier testifies [image_1], opening up domestic living to air to light (and to a view) was central to the vision of the modernist highrise. Beatrice Colomina [13] has written on the Corbusian window and comments specifically upon the view that it offers. For Colomina, the emphasis of the Corbusian window was precisely in producing or ‘framing’ a view and one which, because of its height, might enable a sense of ‘dominion over the exterior world’. For Corbusier the house was ‘a system for taking pictures. What determines the nature of the picture is the window’.