In 1716, the Duchess of Marlborough was not pleased with Sir John Vanbrugh’s design for her new home, Blenheim Palace. What the hell was he doing with this weird distribution of rooms? The architect scrambled to explain: “The word Corridoor, Madam, is foreign, and signifies in plain English, no more than a passage.”
Vanbrugh’s
design for Blenheim Palace was one of the first times the word “corridor”
appeared in English. His idea — novel at the time — was not to have grand rooms
opening into each other, but to align them along a central space with the sole
function of distributing rooms along each side of a receding vista. The
domestic corridor was born, later to be scaled down and adopted in more modest
houses.
Today we
knock corridors down, or design without them. We used to wait in hospital
corridors. Now we fret in glass atriums. Nothing screams “NHS winter crisis”
more than patients left on gurnies in a corridor for days. Open-plan offices
came in the 1960s. Giant asylums, built along endless corridors — some of the
longest ever built — started to be shut down in the 1960s. This is a profoundly
anti-corridic era.
They are
the overlooked parts — the boring conjunctions in a building’s grammar. We walk
through them quickly, anxious to get to a room with a view and a proper
purpose. They are merely serviceable, often windowless and oppressive. In
communal buildings they are neither public nor private but oddly in-between. In
large hotels, they unnerve us with the chorus of the anonymous, transient lives
we have chosen to join for a night. Bad things happen in corridors in horror
films — most notably to little Danny Torrance in The Shining, whose props are
currently on display at London’s Design Museum.
In
domestic spaces we have been knocking out hallways for a generation. The
corridor is a deep offence to open-plan design. In public buildings, corridors
cower as necessary bits of infrastructure behind ostentatious atriums. Shameful
service corridors and fire exit routes, built to purely functional international
codes, are tucked out of sight.
Its
history is full of fascinating details. Football’s off-side rule is said to
have been invented by Charterhouse pupils to make scoring a little harder in
one of the school’s connecting corridors. Many communal social housing projects
derive from the architectural plans of French utopian thinker Charles Fourier,
who in the early 19th century hoped to build a giant phalanstère which would
house thousands of people along a “street-gallery”, to better facilitate social
and sexual harmony. The communal corridor would smash the bourgeois family and
aid the circulation of partners: a swinger’s charter.
But
Vanbrugh’s corridors were not popular for over a century. The revolution came
when Jeffry Wyatville began his renovations of Windsor Castle for George IV in
the 1820s. Radically, Wyatville proposed to connect the ceremonial rooms of the
castle along “The Grand Corridor”, conceived as a processional pathway over 500
feet long. It was lined with treasures from the royal art collection and 41
identical marble pedestals to display busts that consolidated the genealogy of
the British throne. The Grand Corridor culminated in the Waterloo Room, a
celebration of the 1815 victory over the French and a mark of the renewed imperial
power of the British state. Lady Dover proclaimed in 1829 that the coup d’oeil
of the corridor “is the most strikingly beautiful thing you can conceive”. In
famous watercolours of the Grand Corridor by Joseph Nash, painted in 1846,
there is a glimpse of the corridor described as “sacred to the private life of
Queen Victoria”.
The
Victorians were enthusiastic adopters of the corridor — and this was a
precursor. The Grand Corridor divided the ceremonial rooms of Windsor from the
private apartments where Victoria and Albert retreated from view. When they
built Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, the house was organised around
corridors that separated family and guests, a long corridor that divided the
house from the servants’ block, and another that separated the house from the
ballroom.
The
Victorian domestic corridor was about guarding privacy. One of the leading
architects of the age, Robert Kerr, published The Gentleman’s House in 1864, a
book that is obsessed with getting corridors right. The most important
distinction was between family and servants. The principal aim was to ensure
that “the family have free passage without encountering servants unexpectedly”
and rather bluntly stated that “whatever may be their mutual regard as dwellers
under the same roof, each class is entitled to shut its door upon the other,
and be alone.”
In
Kerr’s ideal house, this principle of separation led to complex divisions of
function by corridor: corridors for family, servants and guests; for men and
women; for adults and children, with noisy nurseries placed at the far end. A
contradiction — of the need for servants to be kept away yet also nearby to
respond speedily to requests without circuitous routes — led to contortions.
The country retreat, Bearwood, which Kerr built between 1865 and 1874 for the
proprietor of The Times, John Walter, was a disaster. One survey of Victorian
country houses judged it “impossibly unwieldy”.
The most
extreme example of this mania for corridors was at Welbeck Abbey. Between 1854
and 1879, the eccentric Fifth Duke of Portland built miles of brick-lined and
paved tunnels under his house and grounds. His underground picture gallery was
the largest room in Britain, connected to other rooms with glass-roofed
corridors that stretched for thousands of feet. He built an underground railway
from the kitchens so that food had a chance of being hot when it arrived.
No one
is quite sure why the Duke built an elaborate underground maze, but he spurned
his family, refused guests, and servants were requested to turn away if he
appeared. The tunnels meant he could finally travel unseen.
If we
knock corridors down these days, it is partly in reaction to the Victorian
concept of privacy. But that is not the whole story. Modernists such as Le
Corbusier wanted to reorientate the corridor as a passage of light and
transparency, a pathway to a new kind of communal living. In his Unité building
in Marseille, Le Corbusier dreamt of a society built around open corridors. It
had influenced architects after 1945 who built Britain’s social housing, often
with explicitly socialist intentions.
In the
1980s, our perspective changed. Corridors became places of violence and threat.
Estates were neglected and starved of funds. Even the Barbican was mocked as a
labyrinth of concrete corridors where no one got out alive.
We may
now idealise open-plan living, but we also want 24-hour security and separate
entryways. We never dawdle in communal corridors, unless they are in the open
air, like the narrow promenades of New York’s High Line or Paris’s Coulée
Verte. We spend a lot of time in massive urban transport corridors and create
ecological corridors to help migrating animals avoid extinction on tarmac —
even as we banish passages from our buildings.
If the
present seems anti-corridic, what of the future? Universities favour corridors
and the headquarters of European businesses are often built around internal
galleries to encourage staff to talk to one another. All is not lost.
The next
time you walk through a corridor, consider the twists and turns of
architectural history that have shaped your steps.
From
Blenheim to Kubrick: the dark history of the corridor. By Roger Luckhurst. The Financial Times, June 21, 2019.
Jordan Peele’s Us, his eagerly anticipated follow-up to his paranoid conspiracy film Get Out, opened in March 2019 with the largest box-office revenue for a horror film ever recorded. The focus of early reviews has been on how the film is yet another Trump-era exploration of the toxic race politics of contemporary America.
Yes – of
course. But I was also interested in how Us imagined the architectural space of
the conspiracy. Without giving too much away, our protagonist eventually
descends under the city to find an infinite corridor stretching under the
world. There are lots of rabbits down there, and a lot more bad stuff.
Peele’s
Get Out introduced the idea of the mental trap of ‘the Sunken Place’ of an
individual thrown into a psychic dungeon in a small-scale, suburban Stepford
Wives plot of menacing white privilege. It’s fascinating that the more overtly
national vision of Us imagines bad things happening in ominous corridors. Why
should that be? Why do so many horror films use corridor spaces to fill us with
dread?
Cinematic
effect
A few
years ago, I was forced to think about this question when asked by the British
Film Institute to write a short book on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I learnt
then that the famous scenes of the little boy Danny pedalling through the
labyrinthine corridors of the Overlook Hotel had such a major effect in culture
because this was the first time the new device of the Steadicam had been used
in this way, Kubrick turning the camera cradle upside-down so that the boy was
followed in an eerie, smooth, subjectless glide just inches from the floor.
It
freaked a lot of us out, once we’d worked out that horror had a new kind of
machine-gaze. The smooth flow of those disorienting corridor plans were scarier
then descending into basements, attics or staircases. The vertical axis of the
old haunted house had been replaced by the horizontal dread of the hotel
corridor.
Yet once
I was alert to corridor camera creep, I saw it everywhere. David Lynch is good
at it. John Carpenter likes gliding around domestic hallways or hospital
corridors. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is basically about that blocked
corridor in Mia Farrow’s Dakota Building apartment. In Robert Wise’s brilliant
1963 version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, we see nothing in
those long vistas down the mansion’s corridors, yet still know they are
malevolently haunted.
Era of
optimism
This has
led me to pursue a longer history of corridors, and once I discovered that
these structures are relatively late additions to the architectural history of
buildings in the West I realised that here was a focus that could tell a larger
story about this history of the built spaces of the modern world.
Corridors
first appeared in the stately homes designed by Sir John Vanbrugh at Castle
Howard and Blenheim Palace at the very beginning of the eighteenth century. The
word was so new, that Vanbrugh had to explain to the Duchess of Marlborough
that ‘The word Corridor, Madam, is foreign, and signifies in plain English, no
more than a passage.’ The word did not get really taken up until about a
hundred years later, in the 1810s.
By then,
the corridor had actually become the principal device for utopian thinkers,
such as the splendidly eccentric Charles Fourier, who wanted to re-organize
society into ‘phalanxes’, huge buildings that housed people along
‘street-galleries’. This disrupted the neurotic family, corrected the evils of
capitalism, and introduced infinite sexual possibilities for combination and
recombination. You can see utopian thought in plans for social housing long
into the twentieth century, with Brutalist ‘streets in the sky’ offering a new
way of transforming lives.
Meanwhile,
optimistic reformers re-built prisons as ‘penitentiaries’, where the
incarcerated were housed along long galleries (first called Corridors in
Pentonville Model Prison). The new mental asylums were vast structures that
used wide corridors and tiny rooms to push inmates into the social world of the
passageways for ease of surveillance and a sincere belief that social pressure
would pull the mad back into reason.
Universities
turned to corridors to imagine an ideal where the disciplines would flow into
each other without interruption. The beautiful symmetry of the main building of
MIT in Boston was rebuilt in 1916 around ‘The Infinite Corridor’, which all the
sciences share. Another one, called ‘The Red Route’ in Leeds University, was
completed in the early 1970s.
Gothic
ruins
My sense
is that the era of optimism about corridors ends with the rupture of the 1960s.
Social housing begins to be condemned as a failed socialist experiment. Soviet
communist housing used the corridor as a coercive space to expose dissent. The
large asylums were declared failures and began to be abandoned, leaving
menacing Gothic ruins on the outskirts of towns in the UK and the US.
The term
‘corridors of power’ entered the language in 1964, and we begin to associate
corridors with faceless bureaucracy. Now, the most terrible thing is to be left
on a gurney in a hospital corridor – the defining experience of chronically
underfunded public care. Now, the vast hotel corridor is the symbol of our
anonymity, our being swallowed into identikit corporate spaces.
After
tracing out this trajectory, it’s no wonder, I think, that Jordan Peele
envisions the secret horror underneath American life taking place along the
vanishing perspectives of a bland, brightly-lit institutional corridor. This is
our condition of administered being; this is our favoured space of absolute
dread.
Chronicling
the Corridor. By Roger Luckhurst. Reaktion Books, April 8, 2019.
Why do
dark corridors fill us with a sense of unease?
Why was The Shining so successful at creating an escalating sense of
dread as Danny Torence explored the haunted corridors of The Overlook? Daniel J. Glenn has an eye-opening conversation with the worlds foremost expert on corridors Roger
Luckhurst. They discuss the history of
how corridors became the most feared passageway in cinema, but also discuss living in a pre-corridic era,
doppelgangers in hotels, how corridors are the path to utopia, and how Daniel is not cut out for communal living.
Fascinating Nouns, October 15, 2019. (podcast)
In the
original film noir, John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), private investigator
Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) visits criminal mastermind Kasper Gutman (Sydney
Greenstreet) in his San Francisco hotel room to discuss the delivery of a
mysterious ornament. The elevator attendant points him in the direction of Room
12c. After some cagey preliminaries, Spade delivers a ferocious ultimatum. Once
out in the corridor again, he unlocks a wolfish grin. He’s got Gutman where he
wants him. Or so he thinks. As he enters one elevator in order to descend to
the lobby, Gutman’s accomplice, Joel Cairo, whom Spade already has grounds to
distrust, exits from another. His failure to spot Cairo will very nearly prove
fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be
quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to
understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication
through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the
traffic.
Roger
Luckhurst’s ambitious and consistently informative cultural history of the
corridor makes brief mention of The Maltese Falcon in accounting for film
noir’s preoccupation with bleakly anonymous lobbies, passages and hallways. But
it’s not the skills and attitudes required to negotiate these spaces that
interest Luckhurst. In his view, corridors have a meaning rather than a
function. Film noir, he says, set out to ‘interpret’ lobbies, passages and
hallways as an index to modern alienation. This is emphatically a cultural
rather than an architectural history. Literature, film, TV and other media are
called on to elucidate meaning. One touchstone is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
(1980), in which the camera stalks young Danny at just above ground level as he
pedals his tricycle down the interminable featureless passageways of the
Overlook Hotel. ‘The Shining,’ Luckhurst concludes, ‘revealed something about
the emotional latency of corridors: a simple lesson in the social construction
of space.’
The
point of a corridor has always been to make it possible to get from one part of
a building to another without having to pass through a succession of
intervening rooms. Emerging into prominence in 17th-century Italy, corridors
found an early champion in John Vanbrugh, whose designs for Blenheim Palace and
Castle Howard modelled the new arrangement of a series of rooms opening off a
long central axis. The idea gained wide currency during the Enlightenment,
Luckhurst notes, as a ‘rational proposal’ for the redistribution of public and
private space. Where domestic interiors were concerned, the proposal’s aim was
in large measure defensive: a reinforcement of privacy. Luckhurst proves an
excellent guide to the distinctly mixed bag of ‘utopian conceptions’ and
‘dystopian results’ that was the outcome of this Enlightenment project.
The
first flower of the ‘utopia of corridors’ was the phalanstère (from the Greek
phalanx, a body of soldiers in tight formation), dreamed up by the philosopher
Charles Fourier and his disciple Victor Considerant as a solution to the social
and economic instabilities of post-revolutionary France: a settlement house or
estate for 1620 people organised around a street gallery that ran the full
length of the second floor. This public thoroughfare was the only way to get
from one domestic interior to another, or to gain access to an array of
facilities including canteens, nurseries and workshops. Fourier had it in mind
to dismantle the bourgeois family. ‘In utopia,’ Luckhurst notes, ‘the corridor
always promises radical social reassemblage.’ No phalansteries were ever built.
But the idea lived on in experiments ranging from the Oneida Community, founded
by John Humphrey Noyes in 1834 to promote the practice of ‘complex marriage’,
through the Soviet dom kommuna (communal house) of the 1920s and 1930s to Le
Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation or Cité radieuse, a housing block in Marseille
designed around lengthy ‘rues intérieures’ on every third floor. Luckhurst’s
trenchant survey of social engineering by means of ‘corridic horizontality’
reaches its conclusion in the City of London, which boasts the Golden Lane
Estate, constructed in the late 1950s with the Cité radieuse very much in mind;
and, of course, the Barbican. Community – ‘universal linkage’, in Fourier’s
phrase – has long been the corridor’s most charismatic meaning, its noblest
latent emotion.
The
modern state has also invested heavily in other less charismatic if not
necessarily ignoble ways to make or remake the citizen-subject. By far the
longest chapter in the book merits the longest title: ‘Corridors of Reform:
Prison, Workhouse, Asylum, Hospital, School and University’. And then there are
the passageways threading capitalism’s ‘immersive dream worlds’, from the
Parisian arcade through the vast iron and glass enclosures of 19th and
20th-century Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs to the postwar shopping mall.
The latest incitement to active consumption is surely the serpentine path that
seeks to detain us for as long as possible in the duty-free zone of an
international airport. Luckhurst remains as alert to the dystopian failure of
many such modernising projects as he is to the powerful allure they once cast.
‘Dystopia,’ he writes, ‘does not come after but inhabits the utopian impulse
from the beginning.’ Two final chapters aim to get to grips with the
‘windowless and oppressive’ corporate or bureaucratic corridor-system, and with
the nameless existential dread attributed by Gothic fiction and film to that or
any other proliferating, maze-like structure.
Given
his interest in social and political utopia, it’s curious that Luckhurst has
nothing at all to say about The West Wing, perhaps the most influential, and
certainly the most uplifting, recent exploration of ‘corridors of power’. The
show’s signature idea was the walk-and-talk: an elaborately choreographed
tracking shot which follows several characters at a time as they navigate the
corridors of the White House while engaged in multiple, overlapping
conversations. These quick-fire exchanges, a tribute to screwball comedy,
reveal the protagonists as perfectly matched in charm, bloody-mindedness and
fingertip command of breaking world news, as well as exemplary sangfroid concerning
personal mishap. There’s quite a lot of utopianism in the thought that the
government of the most powerful nation on earth might run on articulacy and
grace under pressure (George W. Bush entered the White House during the show’s
second season).
A more
serious problem with Luckhurst’s account concerns the crudity of meanings he
attributes to the less appealing aspects of corridors. He is certainly not
alone in describing the ‘annihilation of the self’ engendered by the modern
institutional labyrinth as ‘Kafkaesque’. His main example is a scene towards
the end of The Castle. Land-surveyor K., whose sole ambition has been to
establish the connection (Verbindung) with the castle that would secure his
status, presents himself for interview at the inn used by its emissaries whenever
they have business to conduct in the village. The summons to a meeting with an
official called Erlanger looks like his last chance to ingratiate himself with
those in power. He makes his way down to a basement corridor lined on both
sides with cubicles in which the emissaries work and sleep. Whatever ‘clear
purpose’ he might possess is ‘confounded and confused’, Luckhurst remarks, by
the unintelligibility of the space confronting him. It is true that K. is confused
enough to enter the wrong cubicle. The confusion, however, owes more to
tiredness, and the contents of a carafe of rum, than it does to nameless
existential dread. Far from confounding him, the mistake further reinforces the
‘clear purpose’ that has absorbed all his energies since his arrival in the
village, since the cubicle’s occupant, Bürgel, describes himself as a
‘communications secretary’ (Verbindungssekretär), and thus the ‘main line of
communication’ (stärkster Verbindung) with the castle. The wrong destination
may, after all, be the right one; and in another sense, too, since K. falls
asleep and dreams that he is wrestling with a naked castle official who
resembles a Greek god. It’s all to no avail. The next morning, Bürgel can’t
wait to get rid of him, and he is subsequently brushed off by Erlanger too. But
he decides to stick around anyway, for Kafka’s interest in the corridor as a
channel of communication has only just been ignited. There follows a lengthy
description of the work done by two servants who distribute files from a
trolley to the secretaries in their cubicles, with varying degrees of success.
The corridor Kafka has imagined is not in the least Kafkaesque. K., indeed,
feels ‘almost happy’ amid the stir and bustle. A role amid stir and bustle is
all he’s ever wanted. He has to learn not to want it; and since the novel
remains incomplete, we don’t know if he will.
The
corridor that so absorbs K. has nothing in common with the one Sam Spade
ignores except that each has been conceived in terms of its function rather
than its meaning. That should not debar them, and the many others like them,
from attention. Luckhurst acknowledges, but does not engage with, Kate
Marshall’s Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), which
shares his emphasis on modernity, as well as specific points of reference such
as Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s
House of Leaves (2000). Both draw substantially on a seminal essay by the
architectural historian Mark Jarzombek which demonstrates, from the 17th
century onwards, the way the corridor became the ‘organising structure’ of the
modern large-scale edifice, public or private. Jarzombek points out that in
14th-century Spain and Italy, the term referred ‘not to a space but to a
courier, someone who, as the word’s Latin root suggests, could run fast’. A
‘corridor’ was a messenger, a scout, a carrier of money, a negotiator: a person
in a hurry. The West Wing’s walk-and-talks are a hymn to speed without haste.
While Marshall develops this line of inquiry into a compelling account of a
variety of fictional corridors in which information flows either too freely or
not at all, Luckhurst shies away from it. Neither seems to want to take on
Jarzombek’s further intriguing suggestion that the corridor should be regarded
as a program rather than a structure, since it ‘encodes’ the building which
contains it with the ‘terminology of couriered messages’. We might say that
each opening off it constitutes an address, or even a URL. The sequence of
numbered rooms thus creates both the channel and the procedures by means of
which a person, thing or message is able to reach its destination. (K. notices
that the servants wheeling the trolley laden with files seem to negotiate as
much with the rooms along the corridor as with the officials who occupy them.)
We use these sequences in order to courier the things or messages we have been
charged with conveying as swiftly and securely as possible to a destination;
or, more often, we just courier ourselves. Corridors can be made to harbour
uncanniness, disclosing the unfamiliar within the familiar. But they’re canny
enough when they need to be, as writers have long understood.
Luckhurst
finds much to support his argument in 18th-century Gothic fiction, the genre
that, according to him, most fully articulates the ‘distinctly modern feeling’
of ‘spatial dread’. But there was no shortage of canny corridors in the
literature of the period. Novels of high-toned seduction such as Les Liaisons dangereuses
could scarcely have got by without them. My favourite corridor is the one which
simultaneously structures and programs the house of assignation in the
anonymous Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure (1751). ‘All the rooms were in a
corridor, or gallery, pretty like that of a convent, and all numbered.’ On
arrival, each couple is conducted to one of these rooms. ‘At the side of every
door there was a turning machine, by means whereof servant-maids, very
intelligent, served their guests with supper, if they thought proper.’ Anyone
who wants to leave their room for any reason must summon a maid, who then rings
a ‘great bell’ heard all over the house, which is ‘the signal for everyone to
keep in close quarters’. ‘The same formalities were observed on the arrival of
new guests, and thus people could go in and come out without being seen by one
another, though there was a continual flux and reflux in this palace of
pleasure.’ Mind the traffic.
The
Gothic persisted, and Luckhurst wrings plenty of ‘spatial dread’ from the
corridor of Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), where
Bertha Mason is held captive behind a small black door. More frightening, I’d
say, because a lot cannier, is the one on the upper floor of a village inn in
Mary E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The scheming protagonist
ventures along it in search of the room occupied by her husband’s nephew,
Robert, who is hot on her (bigamous) trail. ‘She stopped and looked at the
number on the door. The key was in the lock, and her hand dropped upon it as if
unconsciously.’ She stands for a few moments trembling, ‘then a horrible
expression came over her face, and she turned the key in the lock; she turned
it twice, double locking the door.’ No prizes for guessing that she’s about to
set fire to the place. The number on the door of Robert’s room has targeted him
as unerringly as the GPS lock that launches a drone strike.
Since
poetry turns as much on what words do, under particular circumstances, as on
what they mean, it’s not surprising that poets should have done a fair amount
to illuminate the functionality of corridors. Tennyson’s Merlin, for example,
defends a Knight of the Round Table, Sir Sagramore, from malicious gossip by
laying the ultimate blame for his indiscretion on a bug in the Camelot
room-booking system. One night, Sagramore stumbles in the dark into the suite
occupied by a complete stranger, and promptly falls asleep in the only
available bed. The next day he proposes marriage in order to avoid a scandal.
It was all an honest mistake, Merlin explains.
An angry gust of wind
Puffed
out his torch among the myriad- roomed
And many
corridor’d complexities
Of
Arthur’s palace: then he found a door,
And
darkling felt the sculptured ornament
That
wreathen round it made it seem his own;
And
wearied out made for the couch and slept,
A
stainless man beside a stainless maid
Tennyson
has had to work on the word ‘corridor’, buttressing its final syllable in order
to fit it smoothly into Merlin’s laconic account of a structure complex enough
to have earned Vanbrugh’s approval. But even the grandest of designs contains
the odd flaw. The ‘sculptured ornament’, which could indicate either of two
rooms equally (or several), fails as a URL. Like Kafka’s K., Sagramore has
mailed himself to the wrong destination, which turns out to be the right one
after all – or as good a one as any.
Browning,
like Tennyson, felt no qualms in supposing that modernity was nothing new. His
closet drama In a Balcony, set during the lifetime of Rubens (1577-1640),
associates the traffic in a palace corridor with an entire media ecology.
Norbert has served his queen faithfully for a year, while conducting a
clandestine affair with her young cousin, Constance. He wants to ask her for
Constance’s hand in marriage. Constance is not so sure, fearing the queen’s
jealousy, but also, it emerges, reluctant to abandon the thrill of the
clandestine. Married respectability – ‘To live like our five hundred happy
friends’ – would be scant recompense for the loss of what they now have. Does
he not recall the sharpness of the feeling that prompted him to abandon a political
assembly simply in order to ‘bring about/One minute’s meeting in the corridor’?
Mention of the corridor provokes a radiant description of the absurdly
intoxicating manoeuvres, at once public and private, shameless and hermetic,
which have sustained the affair:
And then the sudden sleights, long
secrecies,
The
plots inscrutable, deep telegraphs,
Long-planned
chance meetings, hazards of a look,
‘Does
she know? does she not know? saved or lost?’
A year
of this compression’s ecstasy
All goes
for nothing?
The
signalling does not require a corridor. But corridors are a constant reminder
of just how much of life is spent in the transmission and reception of ‘deep
telegraphs’ of one kind or another; or, just how much of life at its most
engrossing. Constance’s term for the excitement of deep telegraphing –
‘compression’s ecstasy’ – is as good a definition of the romance of
connectivity as anything that media theory has since come up with. We shouldn’t
overlook the fun Tennyson and Browning had with corridors. In literature as in
life, what a corridor does may in the end count for more than what it means.
Stir and
Bustle. By David Trotter. London Review of Books, December 19, 2019.
Exactly
40 years ago, Stanley Kubrick finished filming perhaps his most popular movie,
The Shining. Released in 1980, one of this celebrated horror movie’s most
unsettling scenes sees a five-year-old boy, Danny, ride his tricycle along a
corridor in the empty Overlook Hotel. The innocent boy cycles around a corner,
only to be faced with the unnerving apparition of two ghostly twin girls
standing side by side at the end of the hotel corridor.
It’s one
of the great moments in cinema – and one that has also helped cement an
association between corridors and dread in the popular imagination.
There
are good reasons why directors of horror films love the corridor. Its
dimensions have always suited the camera, which advances through its narrow
space, multiplying the anticipatory fear of what’s just off screen – the
doorways and voids it passes. But in the case of The Shining, there was
something more: Kubrick’s use of a new piece of gear, the Steadicam stabiliser,
allowed the camera to glide smoothly behind child actor Danny Lloyd, creating
the impression of a supranatural presence.
The
corridor has become a staple “dark place” in film and TV. From crime drama to
political thrillers, the camera sweeps, glides or creeps along the corridors of
schools, asylums, prisons, hotels, hospitals and offices. Moving through the
corridor’s horizontal confines, it induces emotions that range from low-level
anxiety to overwhelming dread.
A
corridor? That’s the narrow space where they keep you waiting, where you feel
nervous and jittery before an interview, or where your mind races into
nightmare mode as you await the outcome of a medical examination. In film and
TV, it’s the place where shadowy authority figures often lurk, conspiring.
Corridors
are indispensable spaces: we spend much of our time moving through them. Yet,
as the theorist Stephan Trüby has observed, the corridor is “an under-examined,
transitional non-space between places, an unregarded, unloved non-architecture”
relegated to the level of “infrastructure” rather than being considered
architecture.
It’s a
subject that fascinates the academic and writer Roger Luckhurst, whose
absorbing new study, Corridors – Passages of Modernity, provides a timely
reminder of the corridor’s overlooked place in the modern urban space and our
collective imagination. We live in an open-plan, “anti-corridic world”.
A key
turning point in the corridor’s fortunes, in Luckhurst’s view, came during the
1960s and early 1970s as the tide turned against the failed utopian vision of
modernism. Exit the corridor, enter the atrium, the open-plan office and the
yuppie heaven of loft living.
The
pattern that emerges in Luckhurst’s study is of initial utopian conceptions
that gradually curdle into dystopian disappointments. More subtly, Luckhurst
argues that “dystopia does not come after but inhabits the utopian impulse from
the beginning.”
From the
late 18th and into the 19th centuries, the long corridor that radiated off a
central hub was a notable feature of reformers’ enlightened new designs for
prisons and asylums. These had at their heart religiously based ideas of
prisoners as penitents ripe for reformation, who would reflect on their actions
through solitary confinement, free from contaminating contact with other
prisoners. Cells were distributed off corridors that provided clean sightlines
for surveillance. But, as Luckhurst notes, the relative failure of these
architectural mechanisms of reform, overtaken by a harsher view of humanity
that favoured punishment over redemption, is one of the influences that have
helped foment the dread that accompanies the thought of institutional
corridors.
The
pattern of utopian ideals going awry is marked in the public projects that
addressed the post-war shortage of housing. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation
in Marseille, widely regarded as a seminal creation of functionalist modernism,
had at the heart of its conception of the city within a city, “rues
intérieures” – internal double-loaded corridors on each of its seven floors.
These weren’t simply seen as circulation spaces but as communal spaces where
neighbours might gather and socialise.
Luckhurst
contrasts the Unité d’Habitation with subsequent serial failures of other
social housing projects that it inspired and influenced in the UK and the US.
Le
Corbusier’s double-loaded rues intérieures were transposed into single-loaded
service decks and interior corridors of housing estates which, while they may
have been designed under the influence of utopian, socialist ideals of communal
living, were often fatally hobbled by cost-cutting, lack of maintenance and
social deprivation. Service decks, imagined as “streets in the sky”, were often
blamed for providing useful escape routes for muggers.
By the
late 1960s the corridor space was being explicitly pinpointed by the likes of
US architect and city planner Oscar Newman, and later in the UK by Alice
Coleman, as “a netherworld of fear and crime”. The design itself was blamed,
rather than challenging social conditions, for the failure of estates.
The
souring of the utopian vision of institutional spaces and the backlash against
misfiring modernist schemes can perhaps be detected obliquely in another
Stanley Kubrick film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), which used the recently built
modernist Thamesmead estate in south London, notable for its elevated concrete
walkways, as a futuristic location for its scenes of ultraviolence.
Such
negative associations are mirrored by growing critiques in the latter half of
the 20th century that took aim at the soulless space of the corporate office
and the labyrinths of bureaucracy. Again, the corridor was in the firing line,
becoming symbolic of institutional fear.
As
Luckhurst observes: “Dystopia is often depicted as a windowless corporate
corridor where receding identical doors mark out the systematic destruction of
the individual by bureaucracy or an oppressive state administration.
In
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s seminal post-war portrayal of a
totalitarian society, Winston Smith, the rebellious worker who toils in the
Ministry of Truth, imagines execution by the Party: “One day they would decide
to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but a few seconds
beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking
down a corridor.”
Arguably,
the corridor as a feature reaches its apotheosis in the modern hotel, whose
double-loaded corridors are so richly represented in film. And so often, it’s
in a distinctly uneasy way.
An
interesting example is found in the classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944),
in which the scheming murderess Barbara Stanwyck hides from her lover’s work
colleague in the corridor – a space, Luckhurst observes, suggestive of illicit
plots and amoral anonymity.
Fast-forward
to our own age of global chain hotels with their replicated design features and
those vistas of identical doors receding infinitely down long corridors have
become a key trope of the alienating anonymity of modern urban life.
The
irony is that those seemingly infinite modern hotel corridors can induce a
sense of unease by their very blankness – that feeling of “corridor dread”.
These “unhistoried non-places”, as Luckhurst terms them, are an imaginative
vacuum that our angst inhabits. In literature and cinema, the feature-rich
spaces of the haunted house are joined by a new species of space: in a direct
inversion of the Gothic, it is the precisely the “bland, horizontal anonymity”
of the corridor that turns it into a place of unsettlement and unease.
To what
degree we should blame movie and TV directors for this? From Netflix’s American
Horror Story to Resident Evil computer games, directors and game creators just
love to lead us down corridors, and the outcome in these confined spaces is
rarely good.
Back in
the real world, we might wonder whether it is Game Over for the corridor? Not
necessarily. Corridors have played a happier role in the realm of education.
Take the so-called Infinite Corridor, the 250-metre-long hallway that traverses
the campus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Built in 1916, it was
designed to allow the scientific disciplines to flow into each other
seamlessly, encouraging cross-departmental connections and the sparking of
ideas. A hundred years later, it’s a much-loved feature of MIT that (still)
works.
Even in
the age of email and the internet, some forms of intellectual exchange benefit
from physical proximity. And that’s something, for better or worse, that the
corridor has always offered: it’s a space where you can bump into people by
chance and – just sometimes – make serendipitous connections.
Although
modern buildings may almost never have conventional-style corridors any more, a
new kind of corridor is possibly emerging that reflects the more open and
collaborative nature of society and the way work is now done. The corridor is
morphing into something wider, lighter, with areas where people can meet. As so
often, we can look to California for an example of this change. The software
company Autodesk’s headquarters in San Francisco, for instance, has numerous
“community tunnels” carved through the core of building, transforming corridors
and passageways into useful, productive spaces. There’s life in the corridor
yet.
. Who’s afraid of corridors? Why do film directors love these spaces so much? And why are hallways imbued with such creepy associations? By James Hadley. KvadratInterwoven , [September ?], 2019.
Roger
Luckhurst’s book travels through time and type via horror films, history and
architectural fashion
This
book goes off in all directions. At first glance a study of the corridor,
seemingly that most mundane of places, this is actually a romp through the
history of many different building types, all seen through the lens of the
corridor, in its various manifestations from humble service passage to toffs’
promenade.
It is
unexpectedly fascinating and informative, even if at times it feels like
several books in one, from architectural treatise to readings of the portrayal
of corridors in film and literature.
Perhaps
it’s this multiplicity that makes it such a good read. The author Roger
Luckhurst is a professor of modern literature at Birkbeck College and author of
books on films and zombies, and is clearly at home tackling the corridor as a
source of unease in popular culture. He also gets stuck into architectural
history and unearths all sorts of oddities. We hear about the Duke of Portland,
who built miles of underground corridors around his Welbeck Abbey estate so he
could get about without ever being seen and Joseph Paxton’s outlandish proposal
for a Great Victorian Way arcade to link all major London stations. There’s
discussion of the corridor as both a means of open socialization and closed
privacy, and as a source of efficiency but also alienation. He discusses the
negative feelings of unease that corridors have generated in popular culture.
There’s even a look at perhaps the final corridor – the journey to death –
through the testimonies of near death experience survivors.
According
to Luckhurst, we are living in an ‘anti-corridic world’ with most recent trends
in building types eliminating corridors, which are often seen as
‘un-architecture’. But it hasn’t always been this way. He takes us way back to
consider the role of passages in temples, labyrinths, the classical stoa,
cloisters, fortifications, before considering the role that corridors have
played in the evolution of building types such as prisons, shopping malls,
housing and workplaces.
Luckhurst
concludes that corridors open into ‘some of the major experiences of modernity
itself’ and certainly the corridor proves to be a rewarding focus for an
analysis of these various building types over time. We learn about Charles
Fourier’s utopian concept for a phalanstery in the 19th century, a mega-structure
that could house 1620 people organised around a street-corridor. A broad look
at housing takes in Soviet communal housing and the role of the corridor as a
place for social and personal transformation in this new collectivism before
moving onto Corbusier, drawing attention to the use of corridors at l’Unite
d’Habitation in Marseilles as a counterpoint to the lightness of the
apartments. Luckhurst looks at the ‘streets in the sky’ of post-war British
housing, taking in Robin Hood Gardens, Park Hill, and the Barbican before
considering the backlash to large housing estates. Far from the utopian
corridors of Fourier and post-war planners, these internalized spaces became
seen as ‘dark passages of menace and threat’.
The
retail chapter is fascinating, taking in 19th century British arcades and
grander versions in Brussels, St Petersburg and Milan. The latter, a
four-storey Galleria Vittoria Emmanuele II (1877) was to inspire the American
mall of the next century. This is a good yarn. Architect Victor Gruen designed
the first, Northland Shopping Center in Detroit in 1954, a development praised
by Jane Jacobs with buildings and landscaped squares tied together by long
colonnades and traffic banished to the peripheries. Two years later, he
designed the first fully enclosed air-conditioned mall in America, described by
Frank Lloyd Wright as ‘repulsive’. Gruen incorporated art, fountains, and
public spaces for events, even lectures. As well as effective retail spaces he
‘seemed genuinely to believe that he could create a cultured agora in the new
social spaces,’ says Luckhurst. A new mall was built in America every year
until 2008, but Gruen hated the legacy of malls which deviated from his vision
and in 1978 disclaimed his role in creating the building type, which he said
had ‘destroyed our cities’. I enjoyed the consideration of the ‘Zombie Effect’
– the semi-trance state that shoppers can find themselves in within shopping
malls. Now, one third of the 1200 malls in America are dead or dying, another
sign of how a corridor once associated with utopian ideals has developed what
Luckhurst calls a ‘darker, dystopian flavour’.
The
hotel corridor gets full consideration, including the extraordinary mega expo
hotels of EM Statler around the turn of the 20th century in America – at the St
Louis hotel, some corridors were almost half a mile long. There’s an account of
the curious story of Peacock Alley, a promenade for wealthy guests built
between the Waldorf and the Astoria in New York that attracted thousands of
gawpers a day in the early 20th century. Luckhurst enjoys exploring the idea of
corridor ‘dread’ – the sense of unease that long hotel corridors create in
films such as The Shining.
The
private home typology is also rich territory, with corridors used variously as
grand processional spaces or to achieve privacy by by-passing enfilade series
of public rooms. Circulation in grand houses could become highly complex, with
separate family, servant and public routes that were challenging to keep apart.
It’s all
hugely disparate and stimulating stuff, with the architectural narrative
greatly enlivened by the cultural references and analysis. But I’m surprised
that the author didn’t make more of what has in recent years been something of
a resurgence of the corridor as a social space, whether in the widening of
school corridors into learning areas, re-shaping of some hospital corridors to
include places to sit and chat and in today’s workspaces, a determined effort
to design circulation spaces as areas for serendipitous encounters where people
have space to pause and converse.
We pass
through passages and hallways everyday without pause. They're boring, empty,
uneventful dead-spaces unworthy of consideration - not so much architecture to
stop and appreciate, as infrastructure to quickly pass through. All they do is
channel things around buildings, moving us from one room to the next. But while
we so often take these in-between areas for granted, rushing down them in order
to reach places of real importance, they can also be incredibly evocative.
Corridors
are anxious, uneasy places, and horror has a history of using them to put us on
edge. They're rarely the site of explicit terror or violence, but they lead us
there. Zones of anticipatory fear, the corridor is conducive to horror through
its ability to heighten suspense and gesture to the unknown. What lies around
the corner, or beyond that door? Every hallway is a world of undetermined
possibility.
Roger
Luckhurst, a professor at the University of London and expert in all things
horror, recently penned a book about corridors. He's quick to mention the
Resident Evil series and the various facilities of the Umbrella Corporation,
where horror is sometimes confined and squeezed into a particularly pure form.
On many occasions the video game corridor is a gauntlet (in the Resident Evil
spinoffs for example). In these corridor shooters, the constrictive form of the
horror hallway becomes a condenser for an adrenaline-fuelled onslaught where
you're forced to hack or blast your way through a narrow, zombie-infested
space.
On the
more cognitive end of the scale we have the dreaded corridors of P.T. Kojima
and Del Toro's scrubbed-from-history playable teaser is the very definition of
a contained space. The short game offers players a minimalist loop: a single
domestic corridor split up by a 90 degree angle, out of which seems to arise
infinite opportunities. Gareth Damian Martin, in his article on P.T.'s
duplicating corridor and corner, identifies the source of architectural horror
in this bend. It's the player's inability to ever see the end of the hallway,
and the uncertainty that simmers in this absence, that makes the game such an
anxious experience.
The
corner isn't the only way corridors can build tension, tease the unknown, or
create shocks and twists. Take an endlessly horizontal corridor for example,
one that seems to lack a vanishing point - it simply stretches on until you can
no longer see what lies ahead. Luckhurst also points to the "dread of
anticipation that comes with every door the player passes". If the
corridor simply takes us from one room or event to the next, then each gateway
and threshold passed is an opportunity for a terrifying encounter. It's often stated
that horror is most effective when the true source is obscured.
The
majority of Luckhurst's book charts the long history of the corridor from
utopian beginnings to its modern dystopian associations. While I think the
spatial structure of the corridor is important, it's the historical context of
this much-maligned architectural form that really allows the dread to ferment.
Out of the associations leaps the ominous corridor-mood we're all so familiar
with.
In the
ancient world, temple complexes possessed what Luckhurst calls "imposing
corridor structures" - passages to anticipate an approaching godly
encounter. From the very beginning corridors seemed to be inherently
anticipatory and revelatory. They're also imbued with the "mythic
resonances of the labyrinth", alluding to ideas of lost souls and
wandering monsters. In the same way, games use corridors to isolate,
disorientate and - occasionally - assault.
The word
"corridor" can be traced back to the latin for "run", a
verb all players will be accustomed to. The original corridors, as Luckhurst
explores, were city perimeters made for couriers to sprint through in times of
crisis. Long before the corridor became the archetypal place for horror chase
scenes they were purpose-built to be run down.
In the
18th century the architect John Vanbrugh built Blenheim Palace, one of the
first buildings to use internal hallways to connect each and every room. The
baroque palace, with its organised, symmetrical layout, was built for the Duke
and Duchess of Marlborough. These names will be familiar to those who've seen
2018's film The Favourite, which depicts the feud between a Duchess and her
younger cousin, both of whom desire to become the Queen's court favourite.
While the film isn't set or filmed in Blenheim Palace, its long darkened
galleries and secret passageways seem to be imbued with the same qualities as
the modern corridor. "In the shadows... amoral anonymity, illicit plots
and sexual corruption" appear to flourish, writes Luckhurst.
As the
wealthy implemented the corridor in their grand houses and palaces in order to
distinguish between their own private space and servant areas, the corridor
also became a state tool for rational organisation. In the 18th century, in
newly designed prisons, hospitals and asylums, the corridor reigned supreme.
They became a way of logically distributing space, and beyond this, reformers
even began to believe they could "refashion subjectivity itself". In
asylums "taxonomies of insanity" were "ascribed in
architecture", as burgeoning states began to recognise the psychic power
of brick and mortar.
While
the corridor began as part of a utopian project to improve the health of
society, corridors of power and discipline were increasingly met with
suspicion. Luckhurst explains places like the asylum began to be "seen as
an environment that induces lunacy rather than cures it".
"The
limitless, faceless corridor is one of the foundational images of envisioning a
totalitarian condition, the individual swallowed up by the larger structures of
the state."
These
stark, dehumanising corridors are a potent source of dread. There's something
perceptibly eerie about the emptied halls of a school after dark or wandering
down endless, antiseptic hospital wards, but it's the "mental asylum"
that appears again and again in horror fiction. Outright horror titles like
Outlast and The Evil Within use the locale, but there are also stealth and
action games like Thief: Deadly Shadows and Batman: Arkham Asylum that thrive
in the oppressive atmospheres asylum corridors naturally conjure.
Resident
Evil 2, recently remade and re-released, does a great job at building stress
through its claustrophobic hallways, but it's the specific context of its
setting that makes it interesting. The original Resident Evil's Spencer
Mansion, as well as Resident Evil 7's Baker family residence, are homely spaces
that delve into the realm of the uncanny. While those buildings made the familiar
strange, lingering on the psychological drama of family life, Resident Evil 2
takes place in a cold, calculative municipal building. The Raccoon Police
Station is a bureaucratic maze in the same way as a 19th century prison or
hospital.
Based on
the Osaka City Central Public Hall built in 1918, Resident Evil 2's station is
a grand public building meant to highlight the power of the state and overwhelm
the individual. This is why when walking the station's halls something doesn't
sit right. We never feel at ease within its inhuman corridors. Unlike the
haunted returns and repeated temporality seen in the original game's basements
and attics, the sequel's corridors represent a bland and superficial modernity.
This is the difference between the traditional haunted house, with its
metaphors for the conscious and unconscious mind, and something like the
dreaded hallways of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
According
to Luckhurst, the Overlook Hotel's corridor plan is "an uninterrupted, unfolding
space that... limits the action but multiplies the threats of menace from
off-screen". The "anonymous and unhistoried" hotel corridor
perfectly captures our existential dread. It's an utterly alienating space
where all "individual lives are standardised" and identical doors,
bland wallpaper and patterned carpets stretch off into infinity. It's no wonder
we feel so anxious in these transient places.
Polish
game studio Bloober Team recreated these dreaded corridors in detail with its
most recent game, Layers of Fear 2. Heavily inspired by film history, the game
sees you play an actor in an unhinged director's bizarre new production. The
events take place on an Ocean Liner - essentially a floating hotel. The
developers bend and loop their corridors in the same manner as P.T., although
in much longer combinations. Here are a thousand different variations on the
creepy, angst-ridden hotel corridor! It's bewildering, twisted stuff, but to my
mind it's Bloober's earlier game, Observer, that crafts the more focussed
corridorscape.
Observer,
as much a sci-fi game as a horror one, is set in a large apartment complex in
future Kraków, Poland. According to Roger Luckhurst, we now live in an
"anti-corridic" world. In the last few decades we've shunned
corridors, turning instead to open-plan living, large glass atriums and office
cubicle work spaces. This isn't just a turn against overbearing institutional
spaces like asylums, but also public housing. In other words: it's political.
Past
Prime Minister and all-round bozo David Cameron once described "brutal
high-rise towers and dark alleyways" as being "a gift to criminals
and drug dealers". This perception isn't new. The architect Oscar Newman
described high-rises in his 1970s survey as a "nether world of fear and
crime". Instead of being an indictment of poor city planning or rising
poverty, the developing horrors were blamed on social and community living, and
even the architectural design of the corridor itself.
Like in
Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, where the new brutalist Southmere Estate in
Thamesmead acts as the dystopian backdrop for Alex and his rampaging street
gang, Observer's Krakow housing unit is a decrepit concretetopia filled with
illicit criminal activity. A mutated serial-killer wanders the hallways, and
the corridors themselves become a vacant anti-social no-man's-land.
Another
recent release to delve into the unnerving interiors of the public housing
block is Red Candle Games' Devotion. Set in 1980s Taiwan, the game sees you not
only explore the cramped confines of your old household, with an L-corridor
straight out of P.T., but also the longer, twisting corridors of the apartment
complex itself. Again and again you approach "home" from outside,
from the stairwell and from the dreaded, anonymous lobby corridor that seems to
shift around you.
Devotion's
housing complex is dark, dingy and derelict, but it's also the historical
context of oppressive state control, the classifying and compartmentalising of
human life on a mass scale, that makes us so restless when we traverse its
corridors. Red Candle Games now faces a different kind of suppression, its game
removed from storefronts in a state-sanctioned scrubbing, and its business
license revoked.
It's in
the institutional failures of the corridor and its slide from utopian to
dystopian we find the architecture's dreaded source. Game developers can do
wonders with the narrow, binding structure of the hallway, but it's the long
history of the corridor that makes these spaces so deeply unsettling. Scratch
beneath the surface of the bare walls and abstractly decorated carpets and
you'll reveal something dark and nasty.
The
creepy corridors of video games. By Ewan Wilson. Eurogamer. August 6, 2019
