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proach to interior design and home decor that turned against
the plush, upholstered interiors and stuffy atmosphere of
the overheated bourgeois parlours of the nineteenth century.
The concrete physical and synaesthetic impact of the with-
drawal of warmth through the rejection of cladding and the
introduction of naked walls, expansive glazing, the exposure
of light sources, and the ‘exposure of functional elements’
(Lethen 1994), as well as through the thermal conductivity
of tubular steel furniture and glass, was to make coldness
accessible to both sensory and emotional experience. Thus,
coldness was associated with veracity, realism and intellectual
asceticism.
The fascination for coldness stood in opposition to widely
diffused notions of architecture as providing security and
warmth. But today, even our requirement for warmth has no
absolute validity, but must be regarded in a differentiated way.
Aside from the fact that there are times when the individual
requires cooling down, we prize warmth when it is required,
not continuously and everywhere to the same degree. Just as a
warm room is perceived as pleasanter when it is cold outside,
the warmer rooms or islands of warmth within a home re-
ceive their special value in relation to cooler zones. The fire in
the hearth can only serve as a focused source of warmth when
it is a contrast to the rest of the room; only in a cool room can
we enjoy snuggling near the stove. Areas of a room where one
sits before sunlit wall surfaces that radiate warmth exploit the
effects offered by islands of warmth and light simultaneously.
Just as architecture requires the differentiated distribution
of bright and dark zones, only graduated temperature zones
provide the appropriate conditions for various activities and
intensities of movement.
We perceive warmth and cold in particular through
the skin (through warmth and cold receptors). In the cold,
we often shrink into ourselves, reducing the surface area of
our bodies, or huddle against others, thereby occupying less
space. Under such circumstances, a small room suffices. When