The Anxiety of the Modern House
Abstract
The contemporary domestic interior is increasingly defined by openness, visibility, and exposure. While often framed as progressive and liberating, these spatial conditions have deeper cultural and psychological consequences that remain under examined in architectural discourse. Drawing on anthropological studies of domestic space, philosophical critiques of ritual loss, and cultural analyses of technic rationality, this essay argues that the modern house has shifted from a site of refuge to one of moral performance. Through an examination of thresholds, windows, ritual practices, and spatial hierarchies, the text traces how the erosion of domestic gradation contributes to anxiety, compulsive self-regulation, and fragmented identity. It concludes by positioning introspection as an architectural method, reframing the architect’s role as a mediator of visibility, dignity, and human vulnerability.
Obsessive cleaning in the home has rarely been about hygiene alone. It can be read as a craving for moral coherence, a way of making the self-appear correct, both to others and to oneself. Domestic etiquette such as cleanliness, dining rituals, hospitality, restraint, or excess has historically been interpreted as a moral portrait of a household. The house, in this sense, has never been a neutral container. It is a stage on which virtue, status, belonging, and identity are performed and assessed.
Older domestic arrangements made this performance legible through thresholds. Distinct rooms separated not just functions but emotional temperaments, degrees of intimacy, and modes of conduct. The deeper one moved into a house, the more privately one could exist. The bedroom, and more precisely the conjugal bed, operated as a final enclave where the self could soften, collapse, and become unperformed. Anthropological studies of domestic interiors consistently frame the home as a culturally constructed system in which spatial organisation regulates social relations, intimacy, and moral expectation (Cieraad, 1999).
But even the most private interior has always been threatened by the gaze. Windows have long been charged interfaces, granting the outside world a line of sight into domestic life. The heaviness of pleated curtains in Dutch society, their association with the marital bed, and the eroticised “knicker curtains” are not incidental details. They show that domestic privacy was culturally curated, defended, and stylised. Here, the window becomes less a simple opening and more a moral boundary, determining what may be seen, by whom, and under what conditions.
This moral boundary was never evenly distributed. The historical thread reveals that women’s visibility at windows was particularly policed. A woman seen at a window could be misconstrued as inviting attention, her presence interpreted as a signal rather than an ordinary posture of daily life. Later, when window cleaning became a predominantly male profession, the figure of the window cleaner ascending ladders to private windows entered popular humour precisely because the window had already been sexualised as an interface. What emerges is not simply exposure in general, but exposure as a gendered social mechanism. It determines who is allowed to be seen, who is judged when seen, and who controls the terms of visibility.
Thresholds do more than separate rooms. They mark transitions in status. Doors, corridors, and transitory spaces form the spatial grammar of becoming, crossings that change who we are allowed to be. This is why thresholds attract ritual. Removing shoes, exchanging greetings, pausing in an entrance hall, these gestures operate like symbolic spells that translate a person from one role to another. A resident shifts from worker to parent, from public self to private individual. A visitor shifts from stranger to acquaintance. Ritual, in this sense, functions as a spatial and symbolic technology that stabilises identity across transitions, a condition increasingly eroded in contemporary life (Han, 2020).
The intimacy of a relationship historically determined the depth of access. Most visitors were welcomed only as far as the entrance hall. Fewer were invited into the sitting room. Fewer still crossed into the kitchen. Only the most intimate entered the bedrooms. These were not merely spatial conventions. They were ethical agreements encoded in plan.
After the World Wars, this spatial order was disrupted. Open plan domestic arrangements gained popularity as an aspirational modern product, often framed as a rejection of social borders and hierarchies. The parlour, sitting room, dining room, and kitchen were absorbed into a single continuous field. The visitor who once transitioned through a sequence of thresholds now received immediate visual access to a large portion of domestic life, often including the kitchen, historically an intimate site of labour, care, and vulnerability.
A critique of open plan is necessary, but it must be careful. Open plan living is not inherently immoral, nor universally anxiety producing. For some households, openness enables care. It allows parents to supervise children, supports accessibility, distributes domestic labour more equitably, and reduces isolation where compartmentalisation might otherwise intensify it. In certain contexts, particularly where earlier thresholds enforced classed and gendered hierarchies, openness can feel liberating.
The problem is not openness itself. The problem arises when openness becomes compulsory, total, and unconsidered. When the house loses the ability to modulate visibility and intimacy, privacy becomes something that must be constantly defended rather than something quietly provided by the plan. Here, exposure should be understood not as a moral failure of inhabitants, but as a spatial condition produced through architectural decisions.
This modulation matters for memory. The traditional parlour, dense with photographs, books, inherited objects, and framed moments of lineage, did not merely display memorabilia. It concentrated identity. In many contemporary homes, memory is relegated to corner cabinets or dispersed across circulation spaces, diluted into background. At the same time, seating arrangements shift away from face-to-face conversation around a hearth and toward a television set. The television does not gather people around each other, but around a stream of external narratives. The domestic interior becomes a receiver through which distant events, images, and anxieties flow.
This condition can be understood symbolically through mythology, provided it is treated as tension rather than verdict. Hestia represents the hearth, home, comfort, and refuge. Hermes represents movement, trade, communication, travel, and exchange. In living rooms dominated by the television, the house can feel less like Hestia’s sanctuary and more like Hermes’s thoroughfare, with the outside world walking straight into the centre of domestic life.
Yet Hermes is not merely a corrupting force. Hermes enables livelihood, connection, diplomacy, and exchange. A house sealed entirely against the world risks becoming isolating or oppressive. The architectural task is not to expel Hermes and glorify Hestia, but to design spaces that can host both. The challenge is to allow connection without invasion, openness without exposure, and retreat without isolation.
Modern construction technologies intensified these tensions. Reinforced concrete and column and beam structures enabled larger spans and fewer internal partitions, accelerating the adoption of open plan layouts. Wider glazing spanning from floor to ceiling increased daylight and visual connection, but also intensified the politics of the window. Who can see in, what is unintentionally displayed, and how domestic life performs in public all become heightened concerns. At the same time, expansive glazing reduces wall surface available for memory, artwork, and symbolic objects. The inhabitants of the house may feel permanently visible, even when alone.
The response to this exposure is often technical and aesthetic. Roller blinds, slatted screens, and minimal finishes promise control, but they often lack emotional subtlety. Earlier layers of pleated curtains softened the boundary between inside and out, allowing partial visibility and ambiguity. What is lost in many contemporary interiors is not ornament, but gradation. The ability to be partially seen, gently concealed, and emotionally protected without being fully shut away.
Architecture does not cause obsessive compulsive disorder, and clinical conditions have complex origins. However, architecture can amplify anxiety by shaping how exposed daily life feels and how performative domestic routines become. In homes where visibility is constant and retreat is limited, inhabitants may feel pressure to curate themselves continuously. Tidying becomes presentation. Cleaning becomes moral performance. Organisation becomes a defence against judgement. Not because people are vain, but because the house offers too few places where disorder, rest, grief, or mess can exist without being witnessed.
This architectural condition collides with a broader cultural one. Social media, data extraction, targeted advertising, and the monetisation of personal behaviour expose individuals beyond the physical home. Exposure becomes economic, informational, and continuous. In response, people construct facades and wear masks. Identities fragment, sometimes overexposed, sometimes concealed, sometimes manipulated, sometimes fiercely protected.
If this is the condition, then the architect’s role must be reconsidered.
The architect’s responsibility is not to moralise domestic life or to nostalgically restore premodern spatial orders. It is to design spatial ethics. This means creating environments that protect dignity, enable belonging, and reduce the pressure of constant performance. This responsibility begins with introspection, but introspection must be operational rather than rhetorical. Introspection here is not a personal preference or reflective afterthought, but a design method that precedes briefing, planning, and formal resolution. Designing from the inside out is not an aesthetic stance. It is a disciplined process of understanding how people transition through roles, how they inhabit space emotionally across time, and where they require both connection and withdrawal.
In practice, this means designing for gradation rather than absolutes, creating sequences of privacy rather than binary openness, supporting rituals of arrival and departure rather than eliminating thresholds entirely, treating windows as negotiated interfaces rather than default spectacles, providing surfaces and moments where memory can gather rather than disperse, and offering multiple centres of domestic life so that no single device or external feed dominates the home.
Most importantly, it means understanding the house as a moral and emotional environment. A well-designed home does not demand constant performance. It allows its inhabitants to be unfinished, inconsistent, resting, grieving, joyful, and ordinary without fear of exposure.
The anxiety of the modern house is not simply that it is open. It is that it is insufficiently considerate of what openness does to daily life, relationships, memory, and selfhood. Architecture cannot resolve the entire culture of exposure, but it can refuse to intensify it. That refusal, quietly embedded in thresholds, interfaces, and the right to retreat, is one of the most meaningful forms of care an architect can offer.
Bibliography
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Carsten, J. and Hugh-Jones, S. eds., About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cieraad, I. ed., At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1999.
Han, B. C., The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, trans. D. Steuer, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2020.
Pallasmaa, J., The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Chichester, Wiley, 2012.