Corridor Spaces

Author(s): Mark Jarzombek

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer 2010), pp. 728-770
Published by: University of Chicago Press
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Corridor Spaces
Mark Jarzombek

In 1789, an English visitor to Germany noted with some astonishment

that at five in the afternoon the emperor goes “to the Corridor just near his
own apartment, where poor and rich, small and great, have access to his
person at pleasure, and often get him to arbitrate their law-suits.”1 The use
of the word corridor might not strike a modern reader as particularly un-
usual. But the word was not all that common in English, and most certainly
no English king at that time would have had such a corridor in his palace.
Today, of course, corridors are so ubiquitous in our public buildings—and
the word so casually used as metaphor—that one can hardly imagine that
they played anything other than a relatively trivial part in the history of
architecture. But that turns out to not be the case. John Soane’s Bank of
England (begun 1788) had no corridors, and even the enormous Somerset
House (1776 – 86), England’s first large-scale government building, made
only limited use of them. The architect of Somerset House, William
Chambers, defined corridors in his dictionary of architectural terms as an
element of domestic architecture, no doubt creating the illusion—and to
some degree the error—that corridors are primarily a feature of houses.2 If
corridors were being built in English-speaking countries in the late eigh-
teenth century, they were in prisons, as in the formidable Kilmainham
Gaol in Dublin (fig. 1). But even in that context they were considered a
novelty.
The resistance to corridors in the public architecture of early

1. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through
France, Italy, and Germany, 2 vols. (London, 1789), 2:296.
2. See William Chambers, A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture (London,
1862), p. 330.

Critical Inquiry 36 (Summer 2010)

© 2010 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/10/3604-0005$10.00. All rights reserved.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 729

FIGURE 1. Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, Ireland (1796). Photo by author.

M A R K J A R Z O M B E K is professor of the history and theory of architecture and

associate dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. He has published on a wide range of historical topics
from the Renaissance to the modern. He is the author of The Psychologizing of
Modernity (2000). His email is [email protected]

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730 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
nineteenth-century England was reinforced by their image as dark and
lonely, sometimes even haunted. Charlotte Brontë visualized them as
places for restless souls; Charles Robert Maturin in Melmoth the Wanderer
(1820) made them into places of spectral encounter; for Lord Byron they
were convenient props for the romantic soul. “But glimmering through
the dusky corridor,” he wrote in 1814 in The Corsair, “Another [lamp]
chequers o’er the shadow’d floor.”3 By 1877, however, when Henry James
wrote The American, the perspective on the corridor had changed consid-
erably. The main character of the book, the successful businessman Chris-
topher Newman,
passed his arm into that of his companion, and the two walked for
some time up and down one of the less frequented corridors. New-
man’s imagination began to glow with the idea of converting his
bright, impracticable friend into a first-class man of business.4
The difference between the old and new is clearly manifest in the difference
between the Royal Exchange in London (1844) and St. George’s Hall in
Liverpool (1841–54) (figs. 2–3). On the outside both buildings, with their
imposing, columnar porticoes, look equally classical. But their plans tell a
different story. The former, in good Georgian tradition, has no corridors,
whereas the latter has parallel corridors stretching along its entire 150-
meter length. Though St. George’s Hall is almost always discussed as an
example of the neo-Grecian style and was seen by Nikolaus Pevsner, the
don of English architectural history, as the finest example of that style in
the world, it should instead be celebrated as a fully modern building.5 It
was modern not because its corridors were “functional.” They were much
more than that. Tall, airy, and with marble floors, they constituted the
organizing structure of the plan. Compared to the haphazard arrangement
of the spaces of the Royal Exchange, where, for example, the window of a
toilet faces out onto the grand entrance loggia, the plan of St. George’s Hall
is methodical, clear, and purposeful, organized in a way that has obviously
much to do with the rise of the professional class and the creation in the
Victorian era of large national bureaucracies, law courts, and government
ministries. But this is the end— or almost the end— of the story rather
than its beginning. The question before us is not only, What is a corridor,
but also, How did the corridor come into the broader cultural parlance? As

3. George Gordon Byron, “The Corsair,” “The Bride of Abydos,” “The Corsair,” “Lara”
(Paris, 1832), p. 82.
4. Henry James, The American (Boston, 1877), p. 301.
5. See Joseph Sharples and Richard Pollard, Liverpool (New Haven, Conn., 2004), p. 247.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 731

F I G U R E 2 . Royal Exchange, William Tite, London (1844). From Francis Salmon, Building
on Ruins (Aldershot, 2000), p. 202.

these preliminary sentences indicate, the answer is by no means as straight-

forward as it might seem.

The First Corridors

In the fourteenth century, in both Spanish and Italian contexts, a corri-
dor referred not to a space but to a courier, someone who as the word’s
Latin root suggests could run fast. A corridor might have been a scout sent
behind enemy lines, a governmental messenger, a carrier of money, or
even a negotiator arranging mercantile deals and marriages.6 He could also
have served on the battlefield, sending reports between commanders and
officers.7 This was the meaning of the word as used by Dante in the line,
“Corridor vidi per la terra vostra”:

6. See Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua Castellana o Española (1611),

ed. Martı́n de Riquer (Barcelona, 1943), p. 363. See also Domenico Milco, Il proprinomio
historico geografico e poetico (Venice, 1676), p. 59, and a document dating from 1574 that read,
“Li Octo proposti et ellecti per la Coritore e Priore sianno confirmati all voce delli fratelli
balontandoli” [the Eight (council members) proposed and elected by the coritore and priors
were confirmed by voice by the balontandoli brothers] (quoted in Francesco Molinari, Gli
Istituti Pii della citta e dell’antico Ducato Della Mirandola: Memorie e documenti [Mirandola,
1882], p. 91).
7. See La obsidione di Padua del MDIX (1509), rpt. in Giousè Carducci, Scelta di curioistà
letterari inedite or rare dall secolo XIII al XVII, ed. Antonio Medin (Bologna, 1892), p. 98. In the

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732 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces

F I G U R E 3 . St. George’s Hall, Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, Liverpool (1841–54). From Salmon,
Building on Ruins, p. 217.

I have erewhile seen horsemen moving camp,

Begin the storming, and their muster make,
And sometimes starting off for their escape;

Corridors have I seen upon your land,

O Aretines, and foragers go forth,
Tournaments stricken, and the joustings run,8
By the seventeenth century because of the increasing dominance of French
culture the word had become obsolete and was replaced by courier. But by
then the imprint of the word corridor on architectural language had been
irrevocably set, primarily as a military term referring to spaces in fortifi-
cations that enabled rapid communication with troops.9 Giovanni Villani’s
treatise on the history of Florence, the Cronica universale (1324), refers to
such a corridoio on the city walls of Florence.10 A corridoio could also serve

fifteenth century, corridor could also refer to a speedy horse; see Angelo Poliziano, The Stanze of
Angelo Poliziano, trans. David Quint (University Park, Penn., 1993), pp. 14, 20.
8. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, canto 22, ll. 1– 6,
www.divinecomedy.org/divine_comedy.html; trans. mod. I have replaced “vaunt-couriers”
with corridors.
9. See Adam Fritach [Adam Freitag], L’architecture militaire ou la fortification nouvelle
(Leide, 1635), p. 37, and Antoine de Ville, Les Fortifications du Chevalier (Paris, 1666), p. 144.
There are various spellings including corrredor, corridojo, corridoio, corritoio, corridore, coritore,
and corritore.
10. Giovanni Villani (1275–1348) was a historian of Florence and a Florentine government
functionary who authored this twelve-volume history of the city. “Ma aggiunsevi per ammenda
gli arconcelli al corridoio di sopra” (Giovanni Villani, Cronica, 8 vols. [Florence, 1823], 4:227). I

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 733

F I G U R E 4 . Vasari’s Corridor, Giorgio Vasari, Florence (1565). From www.flickr.com/

photos/19178753@N04/3538079877/

as a secret way in and out of a castle or palace, such as the one that was built
connecting the Vatican and Castello S. Angello, which the pope could use
in times of trouble.11 Equally famous is the corridoio in Florence (1565) built
by the Medici to connect the Palazzo Pitti on one side of the Arno River
with the Palazzo Vecchio on the other side. It was placed at the level of the
upper floors so no one could see into it as it crossed over streets and along
the Arno River Bridge (fig. 4).12 At its entrance, an ingeniously designed
room with several fake doors was used to slow down anyone who might

would like to thank David Friedman for this citation. It is possible that the corridoio originated
with the crusaders, who, often fighting against great odds, needed to move soldiers rapidly
about the fortifications.
11. See Rodolfo Lanciani, Storia degli scavi di Roma e notizie intorno le collezioni romane di
antichità, 4 vols. (Rome, 1902–12), 1:91.
12. The French king Francis I had an underground corridor built between his palace and
the residence of the aged Leonardo da Vinci. William Garrard in his book The Art of Warre
(1591) writes, “there shall be an Allie of 6, foote large, to receive the Souldiours which shall passe
the great Ditch, to mount upon the Corridor of [the] Counterscarpe” (quoted in Charles
Augustus Maude Fennell, The Stanford Dictionary of Anglicised Words and Phrases [Cambridge,
1892], p. 285).

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734 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
have gained surreptitious access. Similar corridoios were built in Parma
(1550s), Vigevano (1490s), Urbino, (1490s), and other places.13
The point to take away from this is that corridors were not found in the
inside of palaces or villas. A palazzo was entered by means of an andito,
which derives, of course, from the word andare, “to go” or “to walk.” One
would never have “run” into a palazzo. The andito usually led to a cammi-
nata,14 a “walking place” or to a passaggio, which, if it was placed along a
courtyard might have been called, from the fifteenth century onward, a
portico and sometimes a loggia. In Venice the central hallway of a palace
was known as a portego, which, like portico, comes from the Latin root
portare. One was expected to “carry oneself” with dignity. Another word
for an entry that came into fashion in the fifteenth century is vestibulo.15
Neither Andrea Palladio nor Sebastiano Serlio used the word corridor in
any significant way (fig. 5).16 In fact, they rarely even had anything akin to
hallways in their designs given that villas were always composed of tightly
interlocked rooms. Even the radically enlarged Pitti Palace (1550s) built for
the grand duke Cosimo Medici had no internal corridor. If corridors ex-
isted they were secret and for the most part not drawn into published plan.
Such was the case of the coritore at the Palazzo Barbarini (1627–33) that, as
documents indicate, went through the kitchen to the piano nobile.17
The emergence of the corridor into architectural daylight begins in the
seventeenth century. A 1644 sketch for a palace by Felice Della Greca, a

13. A corridor—mentioned as such in the contemporary literature—was built in Parma to

connect Palazzo della Pilota with a late medieval castle that was incorporated by the new
Farnese rulers into a single palace complex. Though clearly not public, it was more than just an
escape route, as it was “nobilissimo e capacissimo.” Designed by Francesco Paciotto, it was built
for Ottavio Farnese, duke of Parma, who gained control of the city in 1551. It was completed
around 1598. A visitor wrote that the “corridore . . . è una parte del palazzo, che si è disegnato di
fare, che sara nobilissimo e capacissimo, di qui abbiamo veduto il modello” (quoted in Helge
Gamrath, Farnese: Pomp, Power, and Politics in Renaissance Italy [Rome, 2007], p. 138).
14. “Non era camminata di palagio / là ’v’eravam, ma natural burella / ch’avea mal suolo e
di lume disagio.” [It was not any palace corridor / There where we were, but a natural dungeon,
/ With floor uneven and unease of light.] (Dante, Inferno, canto 34, ll. 97–99; trans. mod.).
15. See Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Die römische Palastbau der Hochrenaissance, 3 vols.
(Tübingen, 1973), 3:184, illustration a; p. 189, illustration b.
16. Palladio used the word once, but only to describe external, upper-level connecting
balconies. See Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architetttura (Venice, 1601), p. 16 and The
Four Books of Architecture, trans. pub. (1738; New York, 1965), p. 40.
17. A document from 1678 states, “Coritore nuovo sotteranio che dalla cocina segreta passa
all’Appartamento nobile” (quoted in Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces
[Cambridge, Mass., 1990], p. 399 n. 373). In the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), a
corridor is defined as a “termes de fortification” and also as “espece de gallerie estroite qui sert
de passage pour aller à plusieurs appartements” (Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, s.v.
“corridor,” portail.atilf.fr/cgi-bin/dico1look.pl?strippedhw⫽corridor&dicoid⫽ACAD1694&
headword⫽&dicoid⫽ACAD1694).

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 735

F I G U R E 5 . A villa design, Andrea Palladio (1560s). From Andrea Palladio, The Four Books
of Architecture (1738; New York, 1965), plate 45.

prominent architect practicing in Rome, shows a coritore leading—and

quite astonishingly—straight from the building’s entrata to the giardino in
the rear.18 Taking the place of what would have been an andito, it had no
overtly recognizable military purpose. Instead, it was clearly used as a sta-
tus symbol, emphasizing the importance of an owner who wanted to make
the impression of needing to be kept abreast of world events by fleet-footed
messengers.
The epitome of this was the false corridor that Francesco Borromini
built in 1635 in the Palazzo Spada in Rome (fig. 6). Bernardino Spada, who
was made a cardinal in 1626 and served as an important papal negotiator,
had bought the palace in 1632 and hired Borromini to bring the building up
to date, which he did by adding the corridor. Since only 8.5 meters of space
was available for it, Borromini designed it with an optical illusion to make
it appear significantly longer. Often discussed in the scholarly literature as
a “witty entertainment,” the most basic fact is overlooked, namely, that it

18. For an image of the plan, see David R. Coffin, Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome
(Princeton, N.J., 1991), p. 161.

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F I G U R E 6 . Borromini’s corridor at the Spada Palace, Francesco Borromini, Rome (1635).
From www.flickr.com/photos/royreed/2865511707

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 737

F I G U R E 7 . Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, Francesco Borromini, Rome (1637–50). From

Francesco Borromoni, Opera del Francesco Boromino (Rome, 1964), p. 27.

is a corridor, and all that it implied, that is being portrayed.19 Placed on

cross axis to Cardinal Spada’s reception room, it is lined with Doric col-
umns and vaulted in a Roman, coffered style; it has all the appearance of a
grand—and one has to add, modern— entranceway into the palace even
though it is all illusion. Clearly Cardinal Spada wanted to have the proper
attributes of power, and in this case the illusion served just as nicely as the
real thing. Bernini’s corridor that led from his famous colonnade in front
of the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome to the Scala Regia (1663– 66) would
become the ultimate example of corridic display.20
These early palace corridors were show pieces and not an integrated
aspect of palace design. So the question arises, When was the corridor
integrated into the architectural program? When was it no longer some-
thing grafted onto an older building but part of the working nomenclature
of the architect? It was Francesco Borromini who made this transition by
designing the first example of what one could call a corridic building,
namely, the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri (1637–50) (fig. 7). The corridors
form a large rectangle with a chapel clamped in the center and the rooms of
the institution lined up along the perimeter. The length of one of the
corridors was extended to link to the entrance and as a result cut across the
entire site. It separates the Oratorio from—yet connects it to—the preex-
isting church and its associated rooms next door. Borromini brought cor-
ridic logic to perfection at Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza (1642–50) where the

19. Jake Morrissey, The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the Rivalry That
Transformed Rome (New York, 2005), p. 256.
20. The use of the word corridor to describe these spaces is a modern convention. The
documents relating to Bernini’s designs talk of bracciao (arm). This according to Tod Marder
who has worked extensively on Bernini’s architeture.

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738 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
U-shaped corridor system with its three entrances and coordinated stair-
case determined everything about the building, form, circulation, and pro-
gram (fig. 8). One could compare it with the design for the Collegio
Romano, the center of Jesuit education in Rome that was begun just a few
decades earlier in the 1620s under the direction of Giovanni Tristano.21 The
contrast is striking. Whereas the Collegio consists of a series of
Renaissance-style courtyards linked relatively arbitrarily to each other and
placed in awkward relationships to the church, Sant’Ivo’s courtyard and
church are subservient to the corridor system around which everything is
organized.
The corridic revolution had now begun, but it was by no means wide-
spread. Its first consistent articulations are in the context of the Counter-
Reformation as Borromini’s commissions for the Oratory of Saint Philip
Neri and Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza might actually indicate. But it was during
the massive building campaign of the Jesuits who built churches and col-
leges throughout Europe and in the New World that we see the corridor as
an integrated—and labeled—part of the architecture. From the middle of
the seventeenth century onward, we consistently find corridors running
from a guarded street entrance into the depth of the college and its apart-
ments.22 Significant is that they are labeled in the official plans.23 Not to be
confused with a conventional cloister passageway, these spaces encode the
building with the terminology of couriered messages, international power
brokerage, and, by implication, Counter-Reformation alliances with
Rome. They link the institution to the outside world in both real and
symbolic terms. The shift in emphasis is real. In the old medieval and
Renaissance system, one entered basically through the andito into a court-
yard and from there into the building. In the new system, one enters di-
rectly into the building; the courtyard is still there for light, air, and
tranquility, as at the Jesuit college at Dubrovnik (fig. 9), but it is no longer
a primary circulation space. This corridic revolution—and the creation of
a circulatory system distinct from the courtyard—spread to much of the
new monastic construction, especially in Austria and Germany, such as the
Abbey of St. Florian (1686 –1751) in Linz.
In an almost magical moment of transliteration, from walking to run-
ning, and from local politics to world politics, a new architectural element
was born. The corridor emphasized not the dignified pace along an andito

21. Giovanni Tristano (active 1555–75) was a leading Jesuit architect of the time who also
worked for a period on the design of the Gesú, the Roman mother church of the Jesuit Order.
22. See the plan published in Richard Bösel, Jesuitenarchitektur in Italien (1540 –1773)
(Vienna, 1985), illustrations 23, 29, 292.
23. See Pietro Pirri, L’interdetto di Venezia del 1606 e i Gesuiti (Rome, 1959), p. 159.

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F I G U R E 8 . Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, Francesco Borromini, Rome (1642–50). From Anthony
Blunt, Borromini (Cambridge, 1979), p. 113.

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740 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces

F I G U R E 9 . Collegium Ragusinum, Dubrovnik (ca. 1690). From Richard Bösel,

Jesuitenarchitektur in Italien (1540 –1773), 2 vols. (Vienna, 1985), 2:29.

but a pace that was much more purposeful, a pace, one has to add, that was
of a modern dimension.
In seventeenth-century Italy, the corridor, therefore, had two identities:
a virtual one that could be appendaged to a palace, as at the Spada, and a
real one in the Counter-Reformation colleges and monasteries. Image and
form were not yet conjoined. But it was only a matter of time. One of the
most spectacular examples was the corridor painted by Andrea Pozzo be-
ginning in 1680s in the Collegio Romano. As at the Spada Palace this was an
addition, but it was also the first attempt to elevate the corridor into high
architecture. Linking the Church of the Gesù to the rooms where St. Igna-
tius had lived, the walls and ceiling of the previously unadorned passage-
way were decorated with trompe l’oeil frescoes of classical architecture that
framed pictorial dramatizations of the saint’s life and times. This was one
of the earliest examples of the decorated corridor.24

24. Another example where the corridor served as a space of representation was at the
Palazzo Corsini (1736) by Ferdinando Fuga. It was commissioned by Bishop Neri Corsini (1685–
1770) on behalf of his uncle Lorenzo Corsini, who had became Pope Clement XII in 1730.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 741
The English Corridoor
About the middle of this staircase there was a corridor leading directly to the King’s
room. Gudden placed some of his keepers on the steps above leading to the tower, and
himself stayed with the rest below, so that no one could be seen from the corridor.…
“Suddenly,” writes Müller, “we heard quick footsteps, and a man of imposing height
appeared from the door of the corridor, and spoke in short, broken sentences with a
servant who stood near, bowing low.25

The shift from an andito to a coritore, and then from a military term to an
architectural one, might have been too subtle or perhaps even too regional
to have had any lasting effect had the word not been carried to England.26
Even so, it was not adopted in any wholesale manner. Instead it was used
only in elevated commissions such as the huge Castle Howard (1698) built
for Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle.27 Designed by John Vanbrugh, it
has a great square hall with the principal apartments directly behind it.
One stretch of space, labeled corridoor in the plan, cut across the front of
the hall and curved around toward the side wings (fig. 10). A second cor-
ridoor ran behind the hall to connect to the residential wing. It might seem
that long thin buildings by necessity required corridors, but this was not
the case at the time as is easily proved if one looks at any number of other
houses and palaces of that age. Petworth House, for example, despite its
vast frontage, had no corridors apart from the usual cramped passageways
in the servant’s quarters.28 People moved, as was typical of the age, from
room to room or along enfilade doorways.
So why do corridoors appear in this building? It could be explained
circumstantially by the fact that the English in Vanbrugh’s generation had
a fascination for things Spanish. The English translation of Don Quixote
and the culinary dish “Spanish olio,” a mixture of meat and vegetables, had
become all the rage in London.29 Vanbrugh even wrote a play set in Spain,
The False Friend (1709). Perhaps more significantly, he was well trained in
the military arts and rose, according to our sketchy knowledge of his life,

25. William W. Ireland, “The Insanity of King Louis II of Bavaria,” Through the Ivory Gate:
Studies in Psychology and History (Edinburgh, 1889), p. 152.
26. “Corridor, in Fortification, a Road or Way along the edge of the Ditch, without side;
encompassing the whole Fortification. The word comes from the Italian corridore, or the
Spanish coridor” (Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and
Sciences, 2 vols. [London, 1728], 1:332).
27. Robin Evans discusses Coleshill House, Berkshire (circa 1650 – 67) as a corridor design.
Even though the house has something akin to a corridor, the hallway is not labeled. The house
was designed by Roger Pratt for his cousin Henry Pratt, alderman of the City of London.
28. One could also compare Castle Howard with Burlington House (1665– 68) by James
Gibbs, which was, of course, modeled on Palladian villas where there were no corridors.
29. Edna Healey, The Queen’s House: A Social History of Buckingham Palace (New York,
1997), p. 10.

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742 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces

F I G U R E 1 0 . Castle Howard, John Vanbrugh, York (1698). From James Lees-Milne, English
Country Houses: Baroque, 1685–1715 (London, 1970), p. 159.

to the rank of captain.30 But the corridoors of Castle Howard have to be

understood within a more specific perspective.31 Howard was a prominent
figure in the politics of the age; he was a minister for William III (1650 –

30. See John Vanbrugh, Sir John Vanbrugh, ed. A. E. H. Swaen (London, 1896), p. 22.
31. One also has to take into consideration that in the late seventeenth-century military
terminology had begun to spread in common language; see Robert Williams, “Fortified

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 743
1702), member of the Privy Council, and also was briefly Lord of the Trea-
sury. William III, a Dutch aristocrat, ruled England together with Mary II
and allied himself with the Spanish against the French, who had invaded
Holland in 1672. He always maintained close relations with Spain, signing
the Treaty of Madrid in 1670 and the Treaty of Windsor in 1680 and an-
other in 1685, all aimed to rid the Caribbean of French buccaneers. The
treaties also formally launched the English Caribbean expansion with Brit-
ain taking formal control of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, thereby
establishing a strong foothold in the lucrative sugar industry. The warm
relations between England and Spain paid off with a victory for both in the
War of the Grand Alliance against France. The war came to an end in 1697,
one year before the commissioning of Castle Howard, which means that
the building served purposefully and ostentatiously as a proclamation of
England’s arrival on the world stage. One of the attributes of an empire was
a courier system or at least its nomenclature.32
The same is true for the even grander Blenheim Castle (1705–24), which
was also designed by Vanbrugh, though this time with the help of William
Hawksmoor (fig. 11).33 It was an unusual building as its construction was
mandated by Parliament to celebrate England’s victory over the French in
the gigantic, winner-take-all battle at Blenheim, Germany. The victory
cemented England’s global ambition, with the building a monument to
both the victory and to England’s imperial future. Fittingly, the building
had corridoors leading from its huge main hall to the residential chambers.
The drawings in Colen Campbell’s 1715 Vitruvius Britannicus prove that
these corridoors were unusual insofar as Blenheim Castle and Castle How-
ard were the only two buildings among the dozens featured in the book
that had them.34 With their combined military and the political symbol-
ism, the corridors demonstrated, in the language of architecture, England’s

Gardens,” in Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England, 1690 –1730, ed.
Christopher Ridgway and Williams (Gloucestershire, 2000), p. 55.
32. The word itself was so novel that during the design of Castle Howard, the Duchess of
Marlborough, the wife of the building’s patron, inquired about its meaning. Vanbrugh replied:
“The word Corridor, Madam, is foreign, and signifies in plain English, no more than a Passage,
it is now however generally us’d as an English Word” (quoted in Charles Saumarez Smith, The
Building of Castle Howard [London, 1990], p. 54). The casualness of the explanation should not
belie the implications of this innovation.
33. It is thought that Hawksmoor designed the Berwick Barracks between 1717 and 1721.
34. A similar and also innovative corridor was added to the state room section of the
Dublin Castle. It connected to the private rooms and was used as the ceremonial route for the
privy councilors to use on their way to the main entrance to the council chamber. It was badly
restored after a fire in 1941. See Edward McParland, Public Architecture in Ireland, 1680 –1760
(New Haven, Conn., 2001), p. 110.

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744 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces

F I G U R E 1 1 . Blenheim Castle, William Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh, Woodstock (1705–

24). From Kerry Downes, English Baroque Architecture (London, 1966), fig. 37.

usurpation of the technology associated with its new status as a colonial

empire, namely, speed and connectivity.
It was left to Robert Adam in a house now known as Luton Hoo (1772)
in Bedfordshire to tame the corridoor and coordinate it with the ideals of
Italian planning (fig. 12). The house was designed for John Stuart, third
Earl of Bute (1713–92). On the accession of George III in 1760, Stuart
became the king’s privy counselor and for a while even prime minister
(1762– 63). Reputed for having arranged the marriage between George
III and the German Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz,
he was also called upon in 1763 to negotiate a peace treaty between
England and France that ended the Seven Years’ War and established
England as the world’s chief colonial empire. Stuart was, in the old
sense of the word, a corridor.
Luton Hoo, which served as Stuart’s retirement estate, was meant to
commemorate his international career. A wide corridor—now spelled

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 745

F I G U R E 1 2 . Luton Hoo, Robert Adam, Luton (1772). From Damie Stillman, English Neo-
Classical Architecture, 2 vols. (London, 1988), 1:145.

with one o in the plans— cuts across the central axis and cleaves the house
into two. It terminates at both ends in grand staircases.35 The integration of
the staircases with the placement of bathrooms, powdering rooms, and
service stairs was innovative, but as modern as it looks today it would be a
combination that would not be seen again at any level of frequency until
the nineteenth century. To remind ourselves of the unusualness of the
design we can compare it to John Carr and Robert Adam’s Harwood
House (1759 –71). Though not unsimilar in layout, the passages around the
two courtyards are not meant to be traversed by the house owners but only
by the servants.
John Stuart was considered one of England’s leading botanists, and his
extensive library with some 30,000 volumes— one of the most complete
scientific libraries in Europe— dominates the entire right flank of the de-
sign. This was more than just a personal passion. Botany had not only risen
to a science but was also an element of national discourse; the study of
plants, seeds, and climate had become an essential element of colonial
agriculture.36 The other side of the house contained a suite of reception and
dining rooms, so that we have the social on the one side and the epistemolog-

35. The building was transformed by Robert Smirke in the 1830s.

36. For discussion, see Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain,
and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, Conn., 2000).

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746 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
ical on the other, connected by the wide corridor.37 The corridor, in other
words, does not bring one into the depth of the building as at Castle Howard,
but serves as a type of internal walkway. Unlike the earlier generation of cor-
ridors that led from the outside to the inside—whether in real or figural
terms—this corridor connects two different insides to each other. Set
apart from the rough and tumble world of politics, it was a protected
space for restricted social interaction; it was a within in the within, a
place where polite society could exercise its colonial dreams.

The Dark Corridor

The eighteenth-century English flirtation with the corridoor was not
matched in France, where one rarely sees the word anywhere on a plan
other than in the servant’s quarters, in theaters, in hospitals, or, as we have
seen, in religious establishments. As a 1769 dictionary states, “les corridors
sont particulièrement en usage dans les Communauté religieuses.”38 In
domestic situations, they were a rarity. The primary circulation in a bour-
geois hôtel went either along courtyards or through rooms. The bigger the
hôtel, the more courtyards were needed. A project for a grande maison
(circa 1780), designed by France’s leading architect, Claude Nicholas Le-
doux, maintained this convention (fig. 13). The principal rooms were ar-
ranged in the form of an H around two large courtyards. It would have
been anathema for Ledoux to have a corridor in the residence given that
the spatial alignment of rooms was less important than the degree of inti-
macy that was created by the succession of antechambers.39 For this reason,
the definition of the corridor in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond
d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751– 65) was far from neutral. It was not only
inappropriate for a residence but was also a “source of noise for the rooms
opening off of it and, therefore, no longer in use except in upper stories of

37. Another precedent, evoking the still very distant uses of the corridor in the twentieth
century, was the Gloucester Infirmary (1761), where we see the emergent institutional culture
adopt the manner of the grand house, radically simplified and modified, of course. Here the
corridor links the two wards; the central hall has become the chapel with the operating room
above it on the first floor. It was designed, so it has been argued, by Luke Singleton. The design
was made around 1756. Patients were admitted in 1761. See www.british-history.ac.uk/
report.asp?compid⫽42309
38. Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, “Corridor,” in Le Grand Vocabulaire François, 30
vols. (Paris, 1767–74), 7:73.
39. Another comparison can be made with the Palazzo Corsini (begun in 1736) in Rome,
which has galleries connecting important spaces and serving to define the structure’s overall
geometry. Though here too there is a corridor, it is little more than a service ally squeezed into
the fabric of the building.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 747

F I G U R E 1 3 . Une grande maison, Claude Nicholas Ledoux (ca. 1780). From Claude Nicholas
Ledoux, Architecture de C. N. Ledoux (Paris, 1847), plate 169.

buildings meant for storage or in convents.”40 As a result, the French made

no significant contribution to corridic modernity. But they did contribute

40. Jacques-François Blondel, “Corridor,” in Encyclopédie, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le
Rond D’Alembert, 17 vols. (Paris, 1751– 65), 4:274.

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748 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
to the emergence of what we today would call privacy. It is often assumed that
the corridor played a part in this, but the situation in France proves this wrong.
What it shows instead is that the idea of the corridor and the idea of privacy
were in the eighteenth century two separate developing modernities.
The corridor as a significant design element was to remain rare in
France, even into the twentieth century. Beaux Arts architects held firm to
the Palladian courtyard tradition. They consistently used words like gal-
leries, colonnades, arcades, colonnades couvert, or dégagement, but never
corridors. The absence of the term is significant. Whereas a corridor could
have rooms on both sides and emphasizes speed and efficiency, a gallerie
always had rooms on only one side and a row of windows on the other. A
gallerie was a space for viewing the garden and later for viewing paintings,
for pleasant conversation, and, importantly, slow ambulation.41 Beginning
in the eighteenth century, the French would begin to translate corridor as
couloir, which was an old word meaning a water drain or sieve with clearly
very different—and not positive—implications.42
In England, meanwhile, in the throes of its own Palladian revival, the
corridic innovations at Castle Howard and Luton Hoo remained a rarity.43
In fact, by the turn of the nineteenth century the corridor came to be
equated not with the world of international power brokerage but, if any-
thing, with the nocturnal wanderings of old men in creaky mansions and
with anxious perambulations in the dark. Rarely used in architectural dis-
courses, the corridor seemed to be headed toward extinction.44 Jane Aus-
ten never mentioned corridors in the great houses that form the backdrops
of her novels, only galleries and passageways. The Carlton House (circa
1795) had a corridor, but it was out of sight in the residential suite. As late
as 1864, Robert Kerr, author of The Gentleman’s House, positioned the
corridor lower in status than the French-derived gallerie because of its
“utilitarian character.”45 The corridor did survive, however, as a curiosity in
a garden where it conveyed a military affectation; otherwise known as a

41. In German, the prevalent word was Gang, which like andito is related to walking.
42. See Nouveau Dictionaire François-Italien et Italien-François (Geneva, 1677), p. 197.
43. Walpole constructed in Strawberry Hill what today would be called a corridor, but he
called it a Passage.
44. Though today scholars claim that panoptic prisons have corridors, Jeremy Bentham
called them galleries. They were, however, no doubt corridor-like, but one has to remember
that they were not circulation spaces but optical spaces, in essence free of circulation.
45. Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (London, 1864), p. 169. An example would be the
Henry Latrobe designed Wyndham House, Salisbury, from the early 1790s. It had a servant’s
corridor on the second floor that was, however, remarkable in having skylights.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 749
pergola, it consisted of a long trellised space covered with vines that con-
nected the house to the gardens or stables.46
The corridor’s persistently negative—and still rather foreign—associations
hindered its progress into respectability even at a time when civic archi-
tecture in England was beginning to develop. Well into the 1820s, court-
houses did not have corridors or hallways. Lawyers and clients were
expected to meet in nearby inns or coffeehouses.47 Even grand buildings,
such as Schloss Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel, Germany (1792), the U.S. Capitol
(1793), the Massachusetts State House in Boston (completed 1798), the
Glyptothek in Munich (designed in 1815), and the English Post Office in
London (1823) had no corridors insofar as their prototypes were for the
most part French or Italian. The King Edward’s School (1838), designed by
Charles Barry, better known as the architect of the English Parliament
building, similarly had no corridors. With this in mind, the reemergence of
corridic space in the mid-nineteenth century is all the more remarkable.

The Return of the Corridor

[The barracks] are compact and well built, and are arranged on the corridor system, i.e.,
all the rooms open on to corridors, running the whole length of the building.48

To follow the story of how the corridor acquired architectural legitimacy we will
have to return to military history and go back to France where in the 1770s a new
building type emerged—barracks—constructed at first not for the common sol-
dier but for the elite cavalry regiments. An early example dates from 1770 at a
militarycampnearthetownofSaumur,whereaclearlylabeledcorridordefinesthe
form of the entire H-shaped building (fig. 14).49 Apart from a rather modest en-
trance element representing the administrative centrality of the regiment’s orga-
nization, there is no “space” in the building other than the corridor and its
associated rooms. Unlike earlier corridors, which stood in the shadow of a church
or of a suite of regal state rooms, this one was the all-defining and autonomous
element of the design. It is an antimetaphysical space that cuts soldiers out of the

46. It was used by Humphrey Repton (1752–1818); see John Claudius Loudon, The
Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphrey Repton, Esq. (London,
1840), p. 551.
47. Corridors could be found on the lower floor to connect offices, but this was driven by a
need for the rationalization of space rather than by civic purpose.
48. W. A. Mackinnon, “Appendix to Report for 1890,” Report of the Army Medical
Department, Great Britain 32 (1892): 347.
49. For a history of the building, see Éric Cron, “La caserne des Carabiniers: Une
Ambitieuse Realization de l’Ancien Régime,” in Saumur, L’École de cavalerie: Histoire
architecturale d’une cité du cheval militaire, ed. Pierre Garrigou Grandchamp (Paris, 2005), pp.
49 –73.

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750 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces

F I G U R E 1 4 . Saumur Barracks, Saumur, France (1763– 65). From Pierre Garrigou

Grandchamp, Saumur, L’École de cavalerie: Histoire architecturale d’une cité du cheval militaire
(Paris, 2005), p. 70.

natural order of life and family to reconstitute them into a new social order. This is,
in other words, the first purely corridic building in the history of architecture and
clearly the prototype for the modern corridor building.
Prior to the late eighteenth century, barracks were rarities. Soldiers biv-
ouacked in the field or requisitioned the houses of citizens, much to the
frustration of the Americans, for example, who listed this as a grievance in
their Declaration of Independence.50 During the American Revolutionary
War, the English did eventually build barracks, but this was due more to
the need to house large numbers of soldiers than because of any sort of
ideological intent.51 The idea of the barracks as an ideological statement

50. Sir William Blackstone, the noted lawyer and Parliamentarian, maintained in 1765 that
the soldiers should live “intermixed with the people” and that “no separate camp, no barracks,
no inland fortress, should be allowed” (quoted in William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of
England in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. [London, 1904], 2:147).
51. See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
(New York, 1999), p. 168.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 751
emerged only during the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic era when it was
tied in with the ideals of the nation state. The military vocation, which had
been linked previously to the very definition of aristocracy and its blood
lines, was no longer considered solely a privilege of birth but now an at-
tribute of citizenship. The definition of courage also went through a trans-
formation. It was seen increasingly as a personal attribute, something that
needed, however, to be organized in concordance with a larger purpose.52
The French, of course, had been on the forefront of this, but it was not long
before these ideas began to affect cultures elsewhere.53
Initially the English were generally skeptical about the value of barracks
since it appeared to some to lay the groundwork for military autonomy.
But the English were soon swept up in the transformations of the time, and
in 1792 George III obtained the consent of Parliament for setting up the
barracks as an institution in the military command structure.54 The
Fethard Military Barracks for a horse-mounted regiment (Fethard, Ire-
land, 1805) and the grand Waterloo Barracks (London, 1830s), built by the
Duke of Wellington, are only two of the more prominent examples. The
barrack idea soon filtered its way down into the infantry. Not all barracks
had inner corridors, but so many did that in Germany the term Baracken-
stil was used in the nineteenth century to refer to buildings— usually hos-
pitals and schools—with inner corridors.55
The corridors that defined these buildings were purpose-driven spaces,
every inch focusing on the task of bringing man, building, and nation into
a single optic. They were spaces in which the modern male citizen’s rela-
tionship to the state was being molded. In this context, the corridor be-
came quasipublic, stamping uniformity out of diversity and purging the
male of societal softness. G. W. F. Hegel seems to have given the perfect
description of this in his Philosophy of Right (1822) when he states “per-
sonal individuality and its particular interests . . . pass partly of their own

52. See Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in
Georgian England (Manchester, 2005). McCormack discusses the changing meanings of
independence from the British civil wars to the First Reform Act of 1832. The key shift was in
who was thought to be capable of independence; once a state accessible only to legislators and
those of rank, it came to consist of inner qualities considered critical for “the electoral citizenry,
and even the national repository of ‘manhood’ itself” (ibid., p. 56).
53. In the decades prior to the French Revolution, the world in France was divided between
aristocrats, the clergy, and everyone else, the latter group known collectively as the Fifth Estate.
In the Napoleonic era, the term Fifth Estate disappeared, and people came to be known as
citizens tied conceptually to the state and to its successes and failures. Each citizen was
potentially a member of the corps, a piece of the body of the state.
54. See Chambers’s Encyclopedia, 10 vols. (London, 1886), 1:708.
55. See, for example, Moritz Pistor, Anstalten und Einrichtungen des öffentlichen
Gesundheitswesens in Preussen (Berlin, 1890), p. 228.

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752 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
accord into the interest of the universal. . . . The individuals recognize by
their own knowledge and will the universal as their own substantive spirit,
and work for it as their own end.”56

The Corridic Episteme

On the other side of the corridor, we have Courts without end—half-a-score of them, that is,
withasmuchdifferencebetweenthemasinthesamequantityofoysters:somealittlebiggerthan
others, and differently marked on the shell; but very much alike in tout ensemble after all.57

By the 1820s, the elements of the modern corridor were beginning to come
together as a spatial extension of the nation-state and its ideals. Added to
this was the development of the decorated corridor that made the corridor
no longer just a passage but a destination in its own right. The corridor’s
transition into the secular world took place, however, in England with two
of the most celebrated commissions of the time, the redesigning of Wind-
sor Castle and the construction of the Parliament Building.58 As to the first,
it was begun in 1824 (finished around 1840) under the architect Jeffry
Wyatville, who unified the disparate elements of the building by means of
a 170-meter-long Grand Corridor; it was so richly ornamented with fur-
nishings and paintings that “a day or two might be spent pleasantly” in this
space, according to one nineteenth-century description.59
If this corridor, used for private occasions as well as public receptions,
whetted the appetite for such spaces among the English, it was the new
Parliament Building in London that was the true watershed (fig. 15). Begun
in 1834 and worked on for the next thirty years, it contains not one but
several well-furnished, named corridors: the Commons Corridor, the
Chancellors Corridor, the Lords Corridor, and so forth.60 Though these
corridors were planimetrically linked, they were each a discrete element with
staircases at the ends that allowed monitors to control entry and exit. It was a
brilliant solution to an important and emerging problem in mid-nineteenth

56. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (London, 1896),
p. 248.
57. Charles Dickens, “The Halls of Themis,” All the Year Round 31 (6 Jan. 1883–9 June 1883): 9.
58. The pronunciation of the word was debated, namely, whether the accent was on the
first or last syllable. See “Corridor,” in A Vocabulary of Such Words in the English Language as
Are of Dubious or Unsettled Accentuation (London, 1797). The house for the fifth Duke of Argyll,
designed in 1803, was a rare exception, but its owner was a field marshal and commander in the
English army. For an image, see John Harris, The Architect and the British Country House, 1620 –
1920 (Washington, D.C., 1985), p. 176.
59. “The Queen’s Private Apartments at Windsor,” Appletons’ Journal 7, n.s. (July–Dec.
1879): 83.
60. It was designed by Charles Barry and August Welby Pugin. The inspiration for the
corridors most certainly came from Barry.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 753

F I G U R E 1 5 . English Houses of Parliament, Charles Barry, and Augustus Welby Pugin,

London (1840 – 60).

century English society, how to allow different classes to spatially coexist in the
same institution. The building, of course, in the Gothic style is often discussed
as the epitome of the English attempt to redefine its center of gravity through
its historical associations. But if the outside of the building is purposefully
historicist, the spatial planning of the interior is all modern. If anything, the
corridor was an imprint of the increasingly complex social structure of Victo-
rian society, introducing social stability and, very importantly, enforcing a
sense of decorum in the insides of a public building. It guaranteed that every-
one was in their proper position; awkward contacts with people outside of
one’s peerage were kept to a minimum. The corridor organized the world into
different, but parallel corridic universes.61
The building that best represents the new episteme is the Royal Courts of
Justice, designed by George Edmund Street (1870) (figs. 16 –17). On the out-
side, the building has all the appearance of a hulking medieval castle,
and most history books emphasize this aspect of its design. The inside
is a different matter all together. There are not one but four different
corridic systems. A private corridor for the bar circled the building

61. Prestige corridors were soon to be found in the grand houses of the Victorian elites,
mimicking the new corridic institution. Barry began to use corridors in some of his house
designs, such as in Walton for the earl of Tankerville (1837) and Bridgewater House (1846) for
Francis Egerton (1800 –57), who was a patron of the arts and a politician with alliance to the
Conservative Party. In 1847 he was elevated to the peerage as Earl of Ellesmere.

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754 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces

F I G U R E 1 6 . The Royal Courts of Justice, George Edmund Street, London (1870). From
John Summerson, Victorian Architecture (New York, 1970), p. 108.

between the courts and the central hall. Judges were provided with their
own corridor, one half level higher than that of the bar that gave direct
access to the raised daises on which the judges sat in the courts. The
judge’s corridor could be accessed from their carriages and entered via
a magnificent staircase, paneled in wainscot.62 Another corridor ac-
commodated attorneys. The public had its own corridor, which con-

62. See, “The New Law Courts,” The Law Times 74 (Nov. 1882–Apr. 1883): 189.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 755

F I G U R E 1 7 . The Royal Courts of Justice, London. From www.flickr.com/photos/

barbararich/367426387/in/set-72157603241576039

nected to the upper galleries of the courtroom. Each corridic element

had its own set of entrances, staircase, and monitors. This building, in
short, was a corridic machine.
Its design has to be seen in the context of the Reform Bill of 1832, which
began the modernization of English society, as well as the 1846 County
Courts Act and the Judicature Acts of 1873, all of which tried to make the
court system more streamlined and more easily understood while at the
same time expanding its reach. The old system of church courts was closed

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756 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
down and replaced by divorce and probate courts. The new court system
also administered the increasingly voluminous legislation dealing with
property, bankruptcy, succession, copyrights, patents, and taxation. The
design of the building also reflects the rise of the legal profession as a social
subset with its own “circulation system.” As to the public, it too now began
to take on a degree of importance and was no longer viewed merely as a
bothersome horde. The word civilian, brought over from France in the
early nineteenth century, entered English parlance by the mid century. The
civilian, one could say, was that part of society that was outside the corridor
and its culture of expertise but that was, nonetheless, impacted by the
decisions that took place within the corridic institution. It is thus not
incidental that the use of the word expert changed during this time as well.
Prior to mid-nineteenth century, a person was, generally speaking, “an
expert in” a particular field. By the midcentury, we have the first recorded
use of the word as a noun.63 The corridor was the space of expertise just as
it was an instrument of surveillance, channeling and defining people into
its spatial regimes.
Corridors soon became standard in town and city halls, in state houses
and in governmental ministry buildings in both the U.S. and Europe. Typ-
ical was the new United States Mint Building built in Philadelphia in the
late 1890s under William Martin Aiken, the designer of dozens of govern-
ment buildings. According to one description: “The vestibule is highly
ornate, the corridor extending through the cross-section from east to west
is finished in richly variegated marble. . . . The floors are of messanine
[marble], the symbolic panels in the vestibule of glass mosaic. The ceilings
are finished in white and gold.”64 Even the U.S. Capitol Building was
outfitted—retrofitted—with a set of grand corridors with marble
floors, custom-designed Corinthian columns, and vaulted ceilings
painted with themes of law and governance (fig. 18).65 The space linked the
congressional library, the diplomatic reception rooms, and various gov-
ernmental offices. The Italian artist Constantino Brumidi, who established

63. This astonishing fact is from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. “expert.”
64. John H. Landis, “Coin,” in The Encyclopedia Americana, ed. Frederick Converse Beach,
16 vols. (New York, 1904).
65. In 1852 construction began on the ornately decorated Brumidi Corridors on the first floor of the
Senate wing in the U.S. Capitol. They were part of a new wing constructed by Thomas U. Walter. They
are named after Constantino Brumidi, who created the paintings on its interior. Another example is the
Town Hall of Leeds, England (1858). On the outside, the building has many of the conventions of
historicism. We see grand columnar screens with Roman Corinthian columns. Its tower is a reference to
the Hellenistic monument of Halicarnassus. But inside there was a new phenomenon, the corridor that
allowed—or at least hoped to indicate—the swift communication between the lawyers and the
courtrooms.

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F I G U R E 1 8 . The Brumidi Corridors of the U.S. Capitol Building, Constantino Brumidi,
Washington, D.C. (begun 1852). From www.flickr.com/photos/mr_mayer/2881719250

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758 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces

F I G U R E 1 9 . Rhode Island State Capitol, McKim, Mead and White, Providence (1895–1903).
From McKim, Mead, and White, Monograph of the work of McKim, Mead & White, 1879 –1915
(New York, 1977), p. 183.

his reputation painting for the Vatican, was called in to make the frescoes
on the walls and vaults. It took him twenty-five years. One of the purest
corridic buildings of that era was the Rhode Island State Capitol (1895–
1903), designed by the firm McKim, Mead, and White, where there are two
vaulted corridors flanking the central hall (fig. 19). These corridors—and
they are labeled corridors and not galleries—are intersected by two cross-
corridors that as an ensemble define the shape and program of the entire
building. The central domed hall is clamped into place by these corridors.
In these corridors, which served as an in-between space in the modern
political system with qualities that intermixed the private and public, a
new breed of individuals was born, the “lobbyists,” who inhabited and
animated this corridic world. A contemporary wrote:
In the Latin lobby signifies a covered portico-pit for walking, and in
the Capitol at Washington the lobbies are long, lofty, and lighted cor-
ridors completely enclosing both halls of legislation. One of the four
sides of this Lobby is guarded by doorkeepers who can generally be
seduced by good treatment or a douceur to admit people to its pri-
vacy, and in this darkened corridor the lobbyists call out their mem-
bers and make their solicitations.66

66. George Alfred Townsend, Washington, Outside and Inside: A Picture and a Narrative of

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 759
Needless to say, the lobbyists exploited corridic ambiguity for both
good and bad. John Beattie Crozier wrote disparagingly in 1901 of “the
necessity of lubricants and persuasives to smooth the way [of politics]; and
[thus] the appearance in due time on the scene, of the Lobbyist, stalking up
and down the corridors of Congress and the State Legislatures with bags of
gold on which to draw at will.”67 C. P. Snow’s famous Corridors of Power
(1964), which traces the attempts of an English MP to influence the coun-
try’s nuclear weapon’s policy, could serve as a coda, expanding the corri-
dor’s metaphorical reach into the popular imagination.68
It was, of course, not only civic buildings that had sumptuous corridors but
the new generation of corporate headquarters that borrowed the corridor el-
ement to add the building’s prestige. Such was the great corridor of the Cunard
Building in Liverpool (1915).69 The ground floor was divided by a skylit corri-
dor six meters wide and sixty meters long, all in a Doric marble motif.
The corridors in these various buildings served several purposes. They
defined the aspirations of a civic society under the presumptive enlight-
ened leadership of its elites. They represented the epistemological revolu-
tion that was taking place revolving around office work and governmental
organization. But they also represented the growth of the private sector
and of bourgeois culture in general. Corridors often posed questions of
etiquette and in particular about men and women, leading Emily Post in
1923 to write, “a gentleman takes off his hat and holds it in his hand when
a lady enters the elevator in which he is a passenger, but he puts it on again
in the corridor. A public corridor is like a street, but an elevator is sugges-
tive of a room, and a gentleman does not keep his hat on in the presence of
ladies in a house.”70

Das Korridor
Despite the development in England and the United States of the dec-
orated corridor as a space of political and professional socializing and

the Origin, Growth, Excellences, Abuses, Beauties, and Personages of Our Governing City
(Hartford, Conn., 1874), p. 75.
67. John Beattie Crozier, History of Intellectual Development: On the Lines of Modern
Evolution, 3 vols. (London, 1897–1901), 3:303.
68. It has become a widely popular metaphor. See, for instance, Alexandra Smith, “More
Women Walk Corridors of Academia,” The Guardian, 12 July 2006, www.guardian.co.uk/
education/2006/jul/12/highereducation.uk1, and “Clinton Will Stay out of Corridors of Power
During Trip to Africa,” The Mercury, 4 Aug. 2009, www.themercury.co.za/index.php
?fArticleId⫽5111331
69. It was designed by the firm Willink and Thicknesse.
70. Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (New York, 1923), p. 22.

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760 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
representation, it was not adopted for schools and universities that con-
tinued to be built around large rooms and halls, usually on a so-called
pavilion model. A recent scholarly book on English schools built in the
colonies prior to 1900 shows not a single plan with a corridor.71 Needless to
say, the French would never have put a corridor in a school. The schools
deigned around 1900 by Roger Bouvard (1875–1961) had long school rooms
facing onto courtyards.
In Germany, however, where the word Korridor was assimilated into its
language in the second half of the eighteenth century, the reception was
unambiguously positive, so much so that at the end of the nineteenth
century the corridic episteme underwent a major expansion of its signifi-
cance. Why in Germany? Perhaps the fascination with England played a
role. Another factor was the distant relationship to the Beaux Arts and its
antipathy to the corridor. At any rate the Korridor became a key design
element in Germany’s new generation of universities. Karl Friedrich
Schinkel’s Bauakademie building in Berlin (1832–36) serves as a convenient
datum. Though it had a circulation hall around a courtyard, one would be
hard pressed to call it a corridic building. The circulation hall is in the style of an
enclosed courtyard loggia and wraps itself so tightly around the courtyard
as to leave it as little more than a vestige. But beginning in the 1860s almost
all of the major universities and research institutes—and there were
many— had long, generously scaled Korridoren that quickly became an
essential aspect of the institutional framework of German academe for
decades.72 The Berlin Poliklinik (1870) and the Physikalische Institute
(1880) are particularly elegant examples. The latter is a U-shaped building
with the operating room at its center opposite the entrance. The corridors
that emanate from the lobbies of these buildings tie all the spaces together.
There is another aspect about these corridors that is important. Though
clearly within the purview of the upper classes, these spaces were cele-
brated as social mixers.73 “When a visitor walks through the corridors of
the two universities [in Zurich], he could, at least from the speech that he
hears, not know in what country he is.”74

71. See Lawrence Burchell, Victorian Schools: A Study in Colonial Government Architecture,
1837–1900 (Melbourne, 1980).
72. See Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, ed. Johannes Conrad et al., 7 vols. (Jena,
1898 –1901), 4:589 –90.
73. See, for example, the Chemical Institute, built around 1866 in Berlin by Gustav Konrad,
Heinrich von Gossler, and Albert Guttstadt. For the plan, see Die Naturwissenschsaftlichen und
medicinischen Staatsanstalten Berlins (Berlin, 1886), p. 161.
74. “Wenn ein Fremder durch die Korride der beiden Hochschulen [in Zurich] geht, so
könnte er an den Sprachen, die er dort hört, wohl schwerlish erkennen, in welschem Lande er
sich befindet” (“Hochschul–Nachrichten,” Academische Revue 1 [May 1895]: 500).

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 761
This was a modernity of a brand new type, democratizing to some
degree the more restricted corridors of the English and Americans. No
similar corridic revolution took place in English universities, and in France
the first academic corridor—la galerie Richelieu—was built at the Sor-
bonne only in the last years of the nineteenth century. The grand academic
corridor was also quite alien to the university culture of the United States.
Admittedly, McKim, Mead, and White designed a sumptuous, marble clad
Ambulatory Corridor for the Loeb Library of Columbia University (1896).
But it was no Korridor in that it circled around the main hall. McKim,
Mead, and White did use the corridor in some of the university buildings
that they designed, but because these buildings were basically conceived as
pavilions, which was the popular form of university building in the United
States at the time, they cannot compare to the grand German Korridoren.
The notable exception among U.S. universities was the 1913 design of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which—modeled specifically on
the German university—featured a wide corridor that soon was nick-
named “the infinite corridor,” which ran through the entire building.75 For
decades, until the construction of the Pentagon (begun in 1941), it was the
largest corridic building in the world. The Lomonosov Moscow State Uni-
versity (1948 –53) designed by Lev Vladimirovich Rudnev brought the tra-
dition of the sumptuous academic corridor to a close.

The Modern, Ventilated Corridor

The problem with all corridors, regardless of how grand, was ventila-
tion. “There is,” according to a report on the Hounslow Barracks, “a nar-
row corridor running from end to end down the centre, while from it, on
each side, open the men’s rooms. . . . To a person unused to them, and
entering such rooms from the fresh air, the smell is unbearable.”76
Throughout the nineteenth century, studies were made of ventilation with
doctors decrying the increasingly common use of corridors in hospitals
and prisons. “The corridor,” according to one researcher, “ by communi-
cating directly with two or more wards having deficient ventilation, al-
lowed one ward to ventilate itself into another, and thus they became the

75. Though the building was designed by the Beaux Arts–trained architect William Welles
Bosworth, the corridor was the product of the engineer John Freeman, one of the country’s
leading civil engineers, who traveled to Germany to study their academic buildings before
proposing his design for MIT. See Mark Jarzombek, Designing MIT: Bosworth’s New Tech
(Boston, 2004), p. 33.
76. “Our Soldiers’ Homes,” Examples of the Architecture of the Victorian Age (London,
1862), p. 109.

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762 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
means of a general contamination” of the whole building.77 “The evils con-
nected with corridors may be seen . . . in almost every hospital in London.”78
The common solution was to use staircases as the lungs of the system.
An 1899 injunction by the leading designers of schools also wanted corri-
dors to be “of liberal dimensions” and “have an abundance of light and be
cheerful in aspect,” adding that “it is also desirable to give to them such
decorative features and large proportions that they may express the noble
purpose for which the school building stands.”79 This was certainly the aim
of the airy Korridoren that appeared in German universities with broad
staircases that brought air up and light down. To avoid the build-up of foul
air, the ceilings were usually made an extraordinary five and a half meters
high.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the large-scale ventilation ma-
chines that were beginning to be developed were a natural fit with the
corridor building. The engineer of the seventeen-story Manhattan Life
Insurance Building (1894) set the example by creating a system with base-
ment fans that pumped air through large metal ducts that ran up along the
elevator shaft and then branched off into the floors along the corridor.80
The totally enclosed corridor was finally possible and its advantages were
immediately applied to a wide range of buildings.81 Techniques were ad-
vanced so rapidly that in The American Scene (1904 –5) Henry James is
greatly comforted by walking the “long, cool corridors” of the Presbyterian
Hospital in New York, even if they are “halls of pain.” He admired “the
exquisite art with which, in such a medium, it had so managed to invest
itself with stillness.”82 A leading physician in Germany could now argue
unambiguously in favor of a corridor plan since it allowed for better ven-
tilation and also for more personal treatment with two patients to a room
than the standard pavilion model with its jumble of interior spaces.83 The

77. “Sixth Report of the Medical Officers of the Privy Council, with Appendix, 1863,”
quoted in “Hospital and Hospital Construction,” American Journal of Medical Sciences 56, n.s.
(1868): 198. See also Walker Gill Wylie, Hospitals: Their History, Organization, and Construction
(New York, 1877), p. 205.
78. Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals (London, 1859), p. 14.
79. Severance Burrage and Henry Turner Bailey, School Sanitation and Decoration: A
Practical Study of Health and Beauty in their Relation to the Public Schools (Boston, 1899), p. 21.
80. See “Power and Heating Plant, Manhattan Life Insurance Building,” American Steam
and Hot-Water Heating Practice (New York, 1895), pp. 212–17. The architects were Kimball and
Thompson and the engineer Charles Sooysmith. It was demolished in 1930.
81. For attempts to solve this, see Transactions of the American Society of Heating and
Ventilating Engineers 18 (1912): 398 – 400. The society was formed in 1895. Ducting in building
came on gradually. Even the fifty-seven-story Woolworth Building (1910 –13) in New York had
ceiling heights between twelve and twenty feet and had no ducting.
82. James, The American Scene (London, 1907), pp. 140 – 41.
83. See Ernst Beyer, “Die Heilstättenbehandlung der Nervenkranken,” Zentralblatt für

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 763
Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast (1903) was one of the largest ventilated
hospitals in the world to that date. Giant ducts worked their way in the
basement along the corridor to the various wards. The mission of the
system was not only to warm and humidify the air but also to clean it of the soot in
the outside air.84
George Widdows, a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects
and county architect of Derbyshire (1905–36), used the new ideas of ven-
tilation and hygiene to create a novel form of school that instead of having
big halls, as was typical, had instead long “marching corridors” which
allowed for indoor exercise when outdoor space was unavailable or during
periods of inclement weather. One of the first schools of the new type was
the Durnsford Elementary School at Wilbeldon.85 The corridor, as its
name implied, was not used for exercises in the contemporary sense but for
drill practices and synchronized motion. “At the end of the course the
graduate should, with a little special training, be able to execute with
ease most of the marching orders regularly performed by the infantry
company. . . . [These gymnastics taught] good discipline, quick response
to command, better carriage; and also to make the pupil feel that he was
one unit of a group and must act in harmony and unison with his class-
mates in order to secure success.”86 Hundreds of such schools were built
across England.87 The “marching corridor” made it to the U.S., of course.
But for William Butts Ittner, who designed dozens of schools across the
United States, it had the added advantage that it served as a social space
(fig. 20). In 1922 he wrote:
It is a delight to linger in the corridor, since on the second floor it
is a veritable art gallery. . . . Altogether the school is a miniature
democracy; high school students and primary pupils mingle in the
most natural manner about the building and grounds. If training

Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie 31 (1908): 715. For a discussion about the corridor, see
Hermann Lenhartz, Der moderne Krankenhausbau vom hygienischen und wirtschaftlich-
technischen Standpunkte (Braunschweig, 1908), pp. 46 – 47.
84. For a discussion, see Raynar Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered
Environment (1969; Chicago, 1984), pp. 80 – 82.
85. “George Widdows’ Schooldays (with Apologies to Tom Brown!),” www.about
derbyshire.co.uk/cms/people/george-widdows-schooldays.shtml
86. L. Norman Zarfos, “The Place of Tactics in Public School Gymnastics,” American
Physical Education Review 21 (Oct. 1916): 411.
87. “A new Board[ing] school has been opened in Central-road, Blackpool. . . . The
building is of two floors, with a marching corridor 12 ft. wide in the centre of each floor, having
the classrooms grouped round it and entering directly from it” (“General Building News,” The
Builder 82 [1902]: 401).

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764 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces

F I G U R E 2 0 . John Milledge High School, Augusta, Georgia (ca. 1910). From Fletcher B.
Dresslar, American Schoolhouses (Washington D.C., 1911), plate 23.

for the citizenship is a fundamental in education, the training, al-

though to a certain extent incidental, is certainly in evidence.88
By the mid-1930s the corridic revolution was in full swing, reaching its
apotheosis in the 1960s in schools, apartment buildings, and office build-
ings, where its former importance as a space of prestige and social differ-
entiation gave way to generic linear spaces that facilitated the easy
distribution of people and mechanical systems through the building. Its
reception was still positive. According to one researcher, the corridor
“helped reduce social stress because it gave a wider choice of spaces that
were better defined as to ownership.”89 Furthermore, unlike the more for-
mal encounters in the state house corridors, in the context of the corporate
office, a new type of corridic socializing developed, namely, “corridor con-
versations.” They were routinely praised. In 1971 a scholar noted that “im-
portant occasions for listening, apparently, are corridor conversations,
exchanges of ideas over lunch, chats at cocktail parties . . . where senior

88. William B. Ittner, “The School Plant in Present-Day Education,” Architectural Forum 37
(Aug. 1922): 50. Ittner (1864 –36) was an architect practicing in St. Louis and commissioner of
school buildings for the Board of Education. Ittner served in that position until his resignation
in 1910. He continued as consulting architect to the board until October 1914. In addition to the
fifty school buildings in St. Louis that Ittner’s firm produced, there are hundreds of school
buildings in over twenty-five other states.
89. Craig Zimring, “The Built Environment as a Source of Environmental Stress: Impacts
of Buildings and Cities on Satisfaction and Behavior,” in Environmental Stress, ed. Gary W.
Evans (Cambridge, 1982), p 159.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 765
men in the department get together with those whose work is being
evaluated.”90

The Anticorridic Movement

Modern materials, abstract detailing, and the low ceilings of the post-
World War II corridors put an end to the idea of corridic grandeur.
Stripped of its vaults, frescoes, paintings, statues, and marble floors, the
corridor, despite various claims still in its favor, slowly become a flash-
point— one of many, of course— of what was wrong with modernism.
Hospital designers instead of seeing a space of hygiene and order now
complained that corridors “interfere with normal verbal communication
due to their characteristic acoustical properties.”91 Educators, instead of
praising the corridor’s regimenting and democratizing potential, now
complained that corridors were a symptom of mechanized learning. En-
vironmental studies instead of proving a corridor’s social effectiveness
now proved that they were isolating and stressful and that students who
lived in corridor buildings “tended to withdraw socially” and “frequent
mental health clinics.”92 Sociologists, instead of seeing a tradition of per-
sonal interaction, saw only dark strips of wasted space that brought out the
worst in people. Long narrow corridors and secluded stairwells were to be
shunned, so one psychologist advised, since they elevated the levels “of
crime, drug use, vandalism and rape.”93
The first generation of anticorridic buildings came, however, not from
England or the United States but from Germany, where architects in the
anxious post-World War II era were looking for a socially open approach
to office design in opposition to the American corporate model. The
Bürolandschaft (office landscape), as it was called, aimed to create a non-
hierarchical environment that, so it was hoped, would allow for an increase
in communication and collaboration. The floor plan of the Osram Offices
in Munich designed by Walter Henn in 1963 featured a vast open floor with
a chaotic jumble of desks. A few years later, the Dutch architect Herman
Hertzberger designed the innovative Centraal Beheer office building Apel-
doorn, Netherlands (1972) also without any halls and corridors. The build-
ing consisted of a series of interlocking blocks around open courtyards that

90. Richard Leslie Larson, The Evaluation of Teaching College English (New York, 1971), p. 56.
91. Mayer Spivack, “Sensory Distortion in Tunnels and Corridors”; quoted in Christopher
Alexander, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York, 1977), p. 634.
92. Dennis Coon and John O. Mitterer, Introduction to Psychology: Gateways to Mind and
Behavior (Andover, Md., 2009), p. 600.
93. Grahame Hill, A Level Psychology through Diagrams (Oxford, 2001), p. 277. The book
that stated this critique was Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban
Design (New York, 1973).

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766 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
made it impossible to walk in a straight line for very long. Instead of en-
closed hallways one had to walk near to or even around desks. Walls were
at a minimum, allowing one to see people in a variety of activities. The
office workers, so it was hoped, would always be in touch with the pulse of
human activities.
The critique of the corridor quickly expanded into mainstream archi-
tectural practice. The 1972 book titled significantly New Schools shows a
consistent aversion to corridors and halls. The “open plan” school, “com-
posed of broad expanses of enclosed space unbroken by walls,” became all
the rage. Instead of spending money on “walls and doors,” so it was argued,
the emphasis should be on furniture and carpeting (fig. 21).94 Old-
fashioned schools that did not fit this profile had their corridors and
schoolroom walls removed. The Austrian-born theorist and educator
Christopher Alexander added grist to the mill. In A Pattern Language
(1977), which was—and still is—required reading in many schools of ar-
chitecture, he argued that the rationalism of the modern age has “so far
infected the word ‘corridor’ that it is hard to imagine that a corridor could
ever be a place of beauty, a moment in your passage from room to room,
which means as much as all the moments you spend in the rooms them-
selves.”95 In 2002 professionals were still warning architects that “spaces
should be designed as streets, squares and buildings as opposed to corri-
dors, foyers and rooms.”96
The corridor received its most devastating critique from the English
historian Robin Evans, who in 1978 argued that the corridor was instru-
mental in the nineteenth century in changing England from a society that
had esteemed social interaction to a society built around the principles of
privacy and personal segregation. It played a significant role he argued in
“obliterating vast areas of social experience.”97 More appealing to him was
the Italian Renaissance villa, which he felt was a place where people had
once intermixed in the interior spaces. Evans begins his argument by dis-
cussing an altarpiece of the Virgin with the saints clustered around her,
presumably to show us— by means of her maternal gentleness—just how
far we have deviated from the principle of human interaction. As to the
origin of the corridor, he attributes it mistakenly to the ascent of Puritan-
ism. Evans’s pietistic and Italianate leanings are unmistakable.
But the damage was done, and the corridor came to be associated with
the shallowness of modernity rather than its grandeur. Today many archi-

94. Places and Things for Experimental Schools (New York, 1972), pp. 32, 44.
95. Alexander, A Pattern Language, p. 633.
96. Brian Edwards, Libraries and Learning Resource Centers (Oxford, 2002), p. 46.
97. Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors, and Passages,” Architectural Design 4 (1978): 267–78.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 767

F I G U R E 2 1 . Birch School Addition, Caudill Rowlett Scott, Merrick, New York (1970). From
James J. Morisseau, The New Schools (New York, 1972), p. 11.

tects will still try their best to avoid corridic space. At the new Scottish
Parliament Building hardly any two office doors line up. Nonetheless,
though the ideological supremacy of the corridor is no longer intact, it is
certainly far from dead, and may one day even find an advocate.

Corridic Imaginaries
In this essay I have shown the corridor’s broad historical arc, from its
initial obscurity into the mainstream and from its seventeenth-century
position in the world of global empire to its twentieth-century position in
the world of the global workplace while bringing to light the corridor’s

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768 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
complex cultural migrations and transformations. I have also hoped to
show that the corridor from its inception was an instrument of modernity,
relating first to speed, then to power, then to the regimentation of mascu-
linity, then to emerging Victorian social structures, and finally, in the
twentieth century, to hygiene, industrialization, and the corporatization of
life.
I would now like to address the issue of interiority and modernity, for
the subtext of my argument is that the corridor is the site where these two
concepts begin to overlap. But first we have to turn to Hegel, who defined
interiority (Innerlichkeit) as the essential aspect of civilizational progress.
Unfortunately for architectural historians, he never specified what that
interiority in the modern age was to look like architecturally since he ar-
gued that the resolution was mainly in the discipline of poetry.98 This did
not stop those interested in architectural theory from attempting to ex-
trapolate the Hegelian argument into contemporary terms. Adding to the
confusion was the tendency—latent within Hegel’s romanticism—to as-
sume that interiority had to have psychological valences. Evans, for exam-
ple, argued that because architectural space and psychological space are
parallel they need to reinforce each other. Rational modernism and the
corridor, so he felt, made that impossible. Sigfried Giedion, also heavily
influenced by Hegel, was more optimistic about modernism but this was
because the modernists used glass and large openings to obliterate the
corridor and open up the building to the outside world both physically
and, so he hoped, sociologically.99 More recently, Henri Lefebvre pointed
to windows and thresholds as the key to architectural-philosophical mean-
ings.100 Following Gaston Bachelard, it is not the civic or corporate build-
ings that he sees as holding the promise for fruitful interaction between
humans but the conventional house, to be more specific, with windows,
doors, attic, and basement. In all of these examples the corridor is either
absent or a negative, and yet it is hard to discuss architecture’s modern
interiority—in its alliance with the changing social and political realities
from the seventeenth century onward—without it.
Let me state the problem somewhat differently. There are two ways to

98. For more on this, see Jarzombek, “The Cunning of Architecture’s Reason,” Footprint 1
(Autumn 2007): 31– 46.
99. Sigfried Giedion, who derives his argument very clearly from Hegel, sees the history of
interiority as beginning with the Romans and then, after the Middle Ages, descending rapidly,
ending in “the tragic history of the nineteenth century” (Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and
Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition [Cambridge, Mass., 1941], p. 562). Interiority was
redeemed only with the likes of Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.
100. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford,
1991), p. 210.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2010 769
address the disparity between the philosophical insistence on interiority
(as a trope of romantic philosophy) and interiority as a topic in the context
of architectural history. The first way, deriving from Hegel and reinforced
by Evans and others, is that the corridor is a symptom of architecture’s
failure as a philosophical project and that it is an evacuation of meaning
that brought about the inglorious end to the humanistic ideal as embodied
in the Palladian (aristocratic) prototype.
The alternative argument, which I am trying to make, attempts to decouple
the history of the interior from these Hegelianist assumptions. This allows us
to recognize that the corridor created meanings through its attachments to the
flows of our modernity that are distinctly antielitist, antimetaphysical, and
above all public. The seemingly persistent philosophical yearning for
thresholds, windows, and views is, from the perspective of this alternative
argument, an atavism lurking within the modern philosophical project.
Philosophy wants to think antimetaphysically, but live metaphysically.
Admittedly, the corridor did not always rise to the level of a particularly
“noble” revolution, allied as it was with the world of malodorous barracks,
mindless bureaucracies, bourgeois politics, and the white-collar world of
corporate management, but it stood, nonetheless, in dialectical relation-
ship to the great halls of an earlier, aristocratic mindset. The corridor may
not always have been on par with the great domes of old nor have de-
manded the same type of architectural detail as other types of spaces, but
once it had been freed from religious and princely metaphysics it made
possible a disparate array of structures: parliament buildings, state houses,
school buildings, hotels, and office buildings that became the core—
almost literally—of modern bourgeois, professional society.101 And at the
moment of its greatness, in the elegant and imposing corridors of the late
nineteenth century, it was the intellectual and political space par excel-
lence. The interiority of the corridic institution was not a sanctum or
retreat from the outside world. There is no ounce of domesticity in the
corridor. For that one has to look elsewhere. The corridor was a social
place—and a socially defining place—that in its post-Victorian incarna-
tions beamed its efforts out into the world at large in the form of codes,
management procedures, bureaucracies, and scholarly publications.
Clearly the fracturing of the social fabric and the rise of individualism—
the issues that concern Evans and so many others—needs to be explained

101. If there was one type of work that was suited to corridic modernity from the late
nineteenth century onward, it was the office worker and later the women in the secretarial
pool—what we now call white collar. The term was first used by Upton Sinclair in 1919, but
research in it only developed in subsequent decades. See C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The
American Middle Classes (Oxford, 1951).

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770 Mark Jarzombek / Corridor Spaces
in the context of architectural history, but the corridor despite the prob-
lems of 1960s is hardly the culprit. In fact, until its demise, it created pow-
erful cohesions that defined the modern world. The problem is that these
cohesions were implicitly and explicitly opposite to those sought out by
conservative forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Corridic
cohesions were, in other words, not the family units that in the Victorian
and post-Victorian age came to be so heartily championed but purely
modern ones, built around the nation-state, class identities, bureaucracies,
universities, corporations, hospitals, and travel. Each developed its own
profile in terms of belonging, enforcement, monitoring, and surveillance,
profiles that we today may want to challenge, but our critique has to start
with the premise that the corridor was an armature around which a mod-
ern society could take shape beginning already with the first, pace-
quickening coritore. There is a way to critique the corridor as an
instrument of social surveillance, but to run back into the embrace of
domesticity is not the answer.

Corridic Futures
Today we talk of corridors of power and of urban corridors, rail corri-
dors, and pipeline corridors. In all this the meaning of the word—with its
emphasis on speed— has managed to survive. What has also survived from
its early associations with the Spanish Empire is the association of the word
with modernity and the connection to the horizon. The word corridor
manages to update itself with each escalation of reality, moving from body
to building to pipelines. And it is also fitting that the word has left the field
of architecture where it exists only as a residual to now enter the realm of
the geopolitical, where, in fact, it was born. In the late nineteenth century,
a corridor in a state house was the locus of the geopolitical. Architecture
today can no longer contain or adequately represent the corridic energies
of our age, which have moved into the landscapes of the city, industry, and
global capital. We speak now of development corridors and migration
corridors. The purpose of the corridor already back in the days of its in-
ception, however, was to put power in the hands of those who control it. In
the global world, where new centers and new peripheries are continually
being constructed, new types of corridors are sure to develop. What had
been locked into the interior of the building—the building serving as an
expression of corridic mastery—works now at a megascale and perhaps
outside the bounds of representation.

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