Corridors

Passages of Modernity

Roger Luckhurst

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789141030
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Transport et navigation

We spend our lives moving through passages, hallways, corridors, and gangways, yet these channeling spaces do not feature in architectural histories, monographs, or guidebooks. They are overlooked, undervalued, and unregarded, seen as unlovely parts of a building's infrastructure rather than architecture.This book is the first definitive history of the corridor, from its origins in country houses and utopian communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through reformist Victorian prisons, hospitals, and asylums, to the "corridors of power, " bureaucratic labyrinths, and housing estates of the twentieth century. Taking in a wide range of sources, from architectural history to fiction, film, and TV, Corridors explores how the corridor went from a utopian ideal to a place of unease: the archetypal stuff of nightmares.

1

Origins

In 1716 the architect Sir John Vanbrugh wrote to the Duchess of Marlborough to explain aspects of his design for Blenheim Palace, over which she had expressed many doubts: ‘The word Corridor, Madam, is foreign, and signifies in plain English, no more than a passage.’ She remained sceptical about this detail, but Vanbrugh bragged to another friend that Castle Howard, his first Baroque triumph (which had been started in 1699), had surely proved the worth of his innovative design.

For my Lord Carlisle was pretty much under the same Apprehensions with her, about long passages, High Rooms, etc. But he finds what I told him to be true. That those Passages would be so far from gathering & drawing wind as he fancied, that a Candle wou’d not flare in them of this he has lately had the proof, by bitter stormy nights in which not one Candle wanted to be put into a Lanthorn, not even in the Hall.¹

In both houses Vanbrugh designed very dramatic entrances with sweeping staircases, but strikingly pushed access to the wings behind them, distributing the saloon and main public rooms along a long, lateral corridor. This had the deliberate effect of extending the already imposing mass of the building, and internally created a recessive effect. ‘Vanbrugh used the corridors to great effect’, Charles Saumarez Smith judges: ‘they permitted independent access to the cabinets at either end of the arcade . . . and they created an extended and architecturally impressive vista.’²

The word ‘corridoors’ only began to appear on architectural plans, as in Colen Campbell’s survey of grand buildings, Vitruvius Britannicus, in 1715. This technical term was rarely used over the next century, however, and it only entered everyday language in the 1820s (Byron’s 1814 poem The Corsair – ‘He pass’d the portal, cross’d the corridor/And reach’d the chamber’ – is the first literary instance).

Quite how Vanbrugh, a former trader with the East India Company, soldier and playwright, received the commissions to build these houses remains unclear. He was a member of the aristocratic Kit-Cat Club in London, whose membership included his two clients, Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle, and John Churchill, the war hero and first Duke of Marlborough, for whom Blenheim was built. Aristocrats enjoyed Vanbrugh’s conversational wit, yet he had no prior architectural experience. Vanbrugh worked on both of these grand projects with the professional architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, who was key to completing both designs (he continued with Blenheim after Vanbrugh had been fired from the project).

Perhaps Vanbrugh’s lack of deference to architectural norms in England left him open to new influences. He had travelled in India, been imprisoned by the French in Paris at a time when the city was largely closed to English travellers, and had learnt about spectacular theatrical space when writing comedies for the Drury Lane theatre in the 1690s. This interest later led to designing the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket. His patron at Castle Howard had also spent three years travelling in Italy, absorbing influences.

Yet modern aristocratic houses across Europe tended in the seventeenth century to announce their grandness not with corridors but receding vistas of rooms that opened onto each other through a procession of aligned doorways. This arrangement was known as an enfilade, as in the royal apartments at the Palace of Versailles (1682). These might have had narrow passageways hidden alongside, but those parallel structures were only for use by servants. Vanbrugh moved the passageway from the hidden margin to become a central part of the design of the house.

The word ‘corridor’ derives from the Italian verb currere, to run, and thus shares the same root as courier. The messenger who speeds along was a corridore in Italian. Corridoio was first used in the fourteenth century as an architectural term to describe the unobstructed path built immediately behind defensive fortifications to ensure that messages could be conveyed quickly to the commanders of defence forces. These developed over the centuries into military structures like the covered way that afforded, according to one 1830 definition, ‘a safe communication around all the works, facilitates sallies and retreats, and the reception of auxiliaries . . . and its parapet protects the fortifications in its rear’.³ Corridoio could also be used to describe secret passages in and out of palaces, such as the one built in 1565 for the Medicis over the Arno river in Florence to connect the Palazzo Pitti and the Palazzo Vecchio.

The corridor then shifts to become an internal architectural device in ducal palaces in Italy. Francesco Borromini built one in his redesign of the Palazzo Spada in Rome in 1653, the famous Galleria Prospettica that used a trick of forced perspective to extend a short colonnade in the courtyard into the optical illusion of a much deeper receding arcade. The first plans to be marked with a coritore leading straight through the building date from 1644.⁴

This direct new route through the palazzo was designed to provide the fastest passage to the cabinet of the ruler, avoiding cluttered manoeuvring through successive rooms. It was a way to avoid the lobby, too, that anteroom to power associated with rituals of gossip and the longueurs of waiting for an audience. Although the phrase ‘corridors of power’ was not coined until the 1960s, from the beginning a corridor thus announced a certain importance of the resident, a need for connection to networks of information. Across Europe, Renaissance kings and aristocrats used architecture as an articulation of their political power. If ‘political rule is a spatial reality’, then the corridor is an embodied metaphor of communication and mediation, designed to transport bodies and circulate information at speed.⁵

This makes some sense of the gesture made by the corridors at Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, since both were intended as expressions of the political power of their owners. Charles Howard inherited his title and twice served as First Lord of the Treasury in crucial administrations that consolidated Britain’s imperial ambitions. Blenheim was built on land donated by Queen Anne to John Churchill, the soldier who had led the British forces to victory over the French at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, which effectively secured Britain’s dominance in Europe as an imperial power. The palace for the newly ennobled Duke of Marlborough was to be paid for by the public purse, although, this being England, the Treasury soon began to drag its heels on payment for Blenheim, particularly after the political climate shifted against the Whigs in the years after the commission.

In fact, Vanbrugh’s houses became emblems of the English Baroque that quickly fell out of fashion for their overwrought style. Robert Adams decried buildings ‘crowded with barbarisms and absurdities’, a mark that Neoclassicism had begun its long tenure as the architectural norm for civic and political buildings.⁶ Vanbrugh’s houses did not find favour again until a revival of interest in the 1890s.

Vanbrugh is one of the key moments marking the arrival of the tangential corridor in British architecture, a new kind of distribution of rooms opened into along a central axis. Still, I need to step back for a while to give some account of the prehistory of this space. Confusingly, architectural historians sometimes retroactively apply the term ‘corridor’ to plans of buildings from eras when no such structure existed. While there is possibly nothing worse than the prospect of pedantry about how to classify different genres of passageway, it is necessary to sketch out a quick genealogy of this space to get a grip on the distinction between some adjacent or overlapping terms and to convey a sense of the symbolic importance of what might be called more generally corridic spaces.

Before the Corridor: The Ancient World

Ancient antecedents are best divided into religious, civic and domestic forms. Many ancient temple structures can be described as being organized along transversal corridor plans. As Stephan Trüby helpfully explains:

In most temple and palace architecture, the main tower or building is located in the centre of a void surrounded by courtyard-corridor type buildings. Constructed as a complex and not as a single interior space, individual buildings are connected by diverse types of corridors such as courtyard corridors, roofed walkways, sky-bridges and perimeter corridors – all of them wrapping or penetrating a void: this is the transversal corridor, a line that can cut through a system of lines (or spaces).⁷

The angle and alignment of these transversal pathways often had astronomical import given the worship of heavenly bodies in many cultures, a mapping of birth and death in the trajectory of the Sun or Moon. Egyptian and Greek temples were simple rectangular enclosures, sanctuaries for a sacred sculpture of the god. Yet the approach to this space was complex, constituting a series of symbolic transitions from the mundane to the sacred, a procession of increasingly restricted pathways. At the temple complex of Edfu in Upper Egypt, for example, the supplicant passed through an avenue of sphinxes, then entered a peristylar forecourt, open to the sky but laterally restricted, then into a roofed portico, before crossing a threshold into an anteroom, and finally facing the last threshold of the inner sanctuary. This cella or sanctum was, R. D. Martienssen says, ‘dark, narrow and low, completely insulated from the outside world, and only approachable through a succession of ever greater restricting volumes: a cell which, within the limits imposed by human size, reflects a complete antithesis to the light and free space of the outer world’.⁸ The architecture becomes what Mircea Eliade calls ‘vehicles of passage’ or ‘images of an opening’ between heaven and earth, the sacred and the profane.⁹

Mystery cults in Greece and Rome typically exploited these successively restrictive spaces to create a path of disorientation, anticipation, fear and wonder, before the culminating unveiling of the god. Precisely what went on in these rituals was secret and passed on only between initiates. Plutarch’s essay on the Isis cult speaks vaguely of ‘walking in circles, some frightening paths in the darkness that lead nowhere . . . And some wonderful light comes to meet you . . . with sounds, and dances, and solemn sacred words.’ The sequence was a passing from the darkness into the light, a ritual unveiling of the embodied god.

Another version of this ritual space was the labyrinth. There are two famous ancient examples of these. The first was the Egyptian structure built at Medinet el-Fayum during the reign of pharaoh Amenemhet III (1839–1791 BCE). Long lost until the traces were rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, this place was described by the Greek traveller Herodotus in 440 BCE in very evocative terms as a vast complex of over 3,000 rooms that dwarfed the pyramids in their ingenuity and scope. Herodotus exclaimed: ‘The baffling and intricate passages from room to room and from court to court were an endless wonder to me, as we passed from a courtyard into rooms, from rooms into galleries, from galleries into more rooms, and from there into more courtyards.’¹⁰ He was not allowed to see the lower level, which was underground, and which he speculated was a sacred necropolis for the rulers of the region. Four centuries later the Greek geographer Strabo also travelled there and described ‘long and numerous covered ways with winding communicating passages, so that no stranger could find his own way into the courts or out of them without a guide’.¹¹

The more influential example was the labyrinth at Knossos on Crete. This Minoan structure (destroyed by fire in 1380 BCE) became wrapped in Greek legends and myths about the vengeful King Minos, who commands his engineer Daedalus to build a labyrinth in which is imprisoned the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull. The monster devours the sacrifice of Athenian youths and maidens sent every nine years as tribute, until Theseus slays the monster and finds his way out of the labyrinth by following the thread of Ariadne, the daughter of Minos. As Ovid retells a version of the story in the Metamorphoses, one translation reads:

The structure was designed by Daedalus,

That famous architect. Appearances

Were all confused; he led the eye astray

By a mazy multitude of winding ways . . .

So Daedalus in countless corridors

Built bafflement, and hardly could himself

Make his way out, so puzzling was the maze.¹²

This version smuggles in the modern corridor to translate the Latin ‘innumeras errore vias’ (countless false roads, or ways), but it is very suggestive of how we now consistently associate large corridor complexes with the ancient labyrinth. Perhaps this is because Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated the ruins at Knossos from 1900, was convinced that he was uncovering the palace of a king and rebuilt portions of the complex with reinforced concrete, giving names such as ‘The Corridor of the Procession’ to embed his speculative guesses about the function of the architectural spaces he was uncovering. The Knossos visited now is a ‘delirious’ interpretation of the ancient past constructed in the modern era by ‘the temple builders of an age of concrete’.¹³ Evans had already used labyrinth motifs throughout the corridors of the rambling house he had built at Youlbury in Oxfordshire in the 1890s.

The symbol of the maze or labyrinth is found in many of the earliest human cultures and has been interpreted as the journey into the land of the dead, or as the tortuous path of initiation: ‘the aspirant trod the winding paths of an intricate maze that signified our mortal life.’¹⁴ The symbol is also sometimes thought to be a trap designed to prevent malign spirits or demons from finding their way, which is why they are often drawn at doorways or thresholds. Turf mazes for ritual dances survived in England into the nineteenth century, and the menacing resonances of the tall hedge maze, designed to confound with its dead ends and multicursal branching pathways, is evoked in modern horror again in Stephen King’s The Shining as a clear adjunct to the corridors of the Overlook Hotel. It has become a metaphor for psychic convolutions of mental confusion, but this is underpinned by millennia of powerful associations. Beneath the corridor there lies the mythic resonances of the labyrinth.

Ancient initiation rites were therefore literalized as a series of passages and movements across thresholds. Often the doorway was the bearer of the heaviest symbolic load. Pylons marked the entry to sacred space in many ancient cultures, the sanctified ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Origins
• 2 The Utopia of Corridors, I: Charles Fourier’s Phalanstery
• 3 The Utopia of Corridors, II: Social Housing from Petrograd to the Barbican
• 4 Corridors of Commerce: The Arcade, the Exhibition Hall, the Mall
• 5 The Ecstasy of Communication: The Hotel Corridor
• 6 Corridors of Reform: Prison, Workhouse, Asylum, Hospital, School and University
• 7 Passages to Privacy: The English Gentleman’s House
• 8 The Dystopia of Corridors, I: Bureaucracy
• 9 The Dystopia of Corridors, II: Dread and the Gothic
• Conclusion: At the End of the Passage
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX