Bodies. Between Space and Design

THE BODY THAT
OFFERS ITSELF AS
ENTERTAINMENT
54
The body is the being‐exposed
of the being.
Nancy, 2014 1
THE BODY THAT OFFERS ITSELF AS ENTERTAINMENT
The New American City
The interior is a classic subject in architecture. Normally discussed in relation
to the architectural artefact or to inhabited spaces, the interior has
not ventured far into the field of urban planning. Charles Rice is one of
the few who have tackled the urban dimension of the interior. In his book
Interior Urbanism, he repositions the subject within the American experience
of the sixties and seventies. 2 Rice’s approach is typological, applied to
a specific kind of interior: the lobby of big tertiary complexes, particularly
those designed by John Portman & Associates in the two final decades of the
Golden Age. His theory is that the lobbies of big urban buildings best represent
the new consumer society of the sixties. This theory differs little from
the traditional approach, which considers interiors as microcosms typical of
the period during which administrative, judicial, educational, cultural, and
consumer buildings were constructed in the modern city. The idea of the
interior is established as the materialisation of the public domain. Or, rather,
as the idea of a re-location of public life into big, built spaces: a process of
“interiorisation of the public” that continued in the contemporary city as a
result of more sophisticated functional and climatic systems. 3 In this chapter
I would like to propose a different concept of the urban interior, starting
with Rice’s study.
Interior Urbanism opens with a splendid, grey-toned photograph of the
Renaissance Centre in Detroit, which was designed by John Portman in 1977.