The Outside and the Inside

Presenting a critical analytical approach to public interiors, the essays in this book address the connections between the ideas of utopia and some of the means used to imagine and construct them. The development of the American west in the nineteenth century established an 'American space' that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries became the scene that defined the full spectrum of buildings, both private and public, drawn upon and adapted from European models. Today, these models are being returned to Europe, affecting European public spaces and, in particular, interior public spaces. As such, these essays are independent studies of specific places but are also interrelated in the authors' examination of the development of interiors.