the fragile interior

An interior is the most honest space that exists. It shows who you are, and that is precisely why it is so vulnerable. This research departs from the observation that the boundary protecting the private is not self-evident but fragile it exists as long as it is respected, and can disappear due to changing technology, norms, or social relations.

The central research question is: What makes private space fragile, and how does that fragility become visible when its boundary with the public shifts? The design question that follows from this: How can I make that fragility felt?

The theoretical framework draws on multiple disciplines. Witold Rybczynski shows that privacy is not a universal given but a historical achievement, since privacy and domesticity only emerged in seventeenth-century bourgeois society, when the home ceased to be a workplace and became a place for personal and intimate behavior (Rybczynski, 1986, pp. 48, 77). Henri Lefebvre argues that space is always the product of social activity — a room is only a room because we know what happens in it and who has access to it (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 16, cited in De Backer, 2024, p. 90). Susan Stewart formulates private space as "marked by an exterior material boundary and an interior surplus of signification" (Stewart, 1993, p. 159). The facade is legible to everyone, but what it protects is an abundance of personal meaning that remains invisible to outsiders.

That meaning is tied to context and body. Stewart's analysis of the souvenir shows how objects carry private memories that disappear once they are detached from context "its perception by hand taking precedence over its perception by eye" (Stewart, 1993, p. 139). When something private becomes visible, the tactile, bodily charge that made it private disappears. Erving Goffman makes this sociologically concrete: the private is the backstage space where the performance doesn't have to happen, when it becomes involuntarily visible, the shame arises of being seen at the moment you thought you weren't (Goffman, 1959). Sherry Turkle shows how digitalization has accelerated this, images circulate beyond the control of whoever made them (Turkle, 2011, p. 252). Hito Steyerl describes how the shared image is always a degraded copy, "a ghost of an image" (Steyerl, 2009). Walter Benjamin calls this the disappearance of the aura: "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art" (Benjamin, 1968, p. 221) a logic that applies directly to the private interior. Roland Barthes adds that the photograph neutralizes the symbolic layer of what it depicts: "the denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message" (Barthes, 1977, p. 159).

As an artistic reference, Sophie Calle is central. Her projects are constructed as a mise-en-scène in which the viewer inevitably ends up in the position of the uninvited onlooker, voyeurism is at its core (Saint, 2011, p. 125).

Private space is fragile because it exists only insofar as people protect it, and disappears when they no longer do so. My design makes that moment felt the moment you look at something that was never meant for you, and precisely in doing so, understand what was at stake.

https://go.fliplink.me/view/9803E4E1-51FC-4E5A-BA92-7D66A5F7883B