175ple, one is not only enveloped by external light from multi-
ple sides; one’s private affairs are also ‘exhibited’, displayed
to view from various directions. From an entry pavilion that
is thrust outward like an extension, arrivals are courteously
gathered together, fetched, and guided into the building. A re-
tracted front court helps visitors to overcome fears of crossing
the threshold. As an external space, and although it actually
lies inside, it acts as a delaying intermediate step that proceeds
the ultimate entrance into the building. In such instances, in-
version produces > intermediate spaces.
The interweaving of interior and exterior has been re-
ferred to by Aldo van Eyck as ‘reciprocity’. In a way analo-
gous to Leon Battista Alberti’s celebrated comparison, his or-
phanage in Amsterdam was meant to be ‘a city like a house,
a house like a city’. (1960/2003, 38) As accesses, some inte-
rior spaces are given a street character, their lighting designed
to approximate street illumination. Patios were designed to
resemble urban squares, their outside character – in con-
trast to the white inner walls of the group rooms – displayed
through dark, rough wall surfaces. The early Christian basili-
ca – with its colonnades and gateways – was already legible as
a Roman urban street that had been inverted inward.
A reversal of character from outer to inner may occur in
the opposite direction, when for example the inner space of a
rotunda becomes an outer space, as in James Stirling’s Staats-
galerie in Stuttgart. The building type of the shopping mall, in
turn, was characterized by Walter Benjamin (1982/2002) as
resembling a street that had become an intérieur, an ‘apart-
ment of the collective’. But ‘arcades are houses or corridors
that have no exteriors – like dreams’. Just as the ‘ambiguity of
the arcade is ambiguity of space’, spatial inversion is charac-
terized by an ambiguity of the relationship between > inside
and outside, one that can lead to the confusion of equivocal
perception, so that one may come to doubt whether one is
inside looking out, or the other way around.
Literature: Van Eyck 1960/2003