The hole in the stone. The diffuse limits of the interior space

Abstract

This work is the result of a recent visit to the Hill House designed by architect Rennie Mackintosh in Helensburgh, Scotland. Looking around the house evokes memories, ideas, and associations with other houses, other times, and other places. The work displays a way of inhabiting in which certain archetypal human behaviors also seem to find archetypal responses in the architecture of the house, which are paradigmatic spatial manifestations that still guide domestic projects today. From the ancient Hedingham Castle in Essex, England, to the small apartment designed by Christian Pottgiesser in Paris, the itinerary not only includes the Hill House’s rooms, but also other works of architecture, cinema, and painting that converge on the same way of living, feeling, and creating the domestic space. Through this itinerary, a historical argumentative path of spatial transformations is discovered, which could provisionally explain the persistence of certain domestic spatial types in contemporary architecture while also recalling its most remote and forgotten origins.

Keywords

• english isolated house
• equipment
• domestic space
• hill house
• interiority