The subtitle of interior designer Graeme Brooker’s new book riffs on Winston Churchill’s famous quote about buildings. With more than 500 photographs and illustrations of projects packed onto 400 pages, and with examples ranging from Lascaux Cave in France (around 18,000 years BCE) to Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in Japan (1972), the ways we shape and are shaped by rooms are as varied as they are profound. Separated into three essays, each of which is subdivided into specific categories of spaces, Brooker analyzes the “DNA of the interior” and, as he puts it, its material “facts” and cultural “fictions.” To tell this story, he effortlessly jumps between the history of ancient architecture and contemporary art, modernist interiors and vernacular dwellings, medieval manuscripts and futuristic renderings. The following is an excerpt from a chapter in the first section, titled “Atmospheres.”

The unforgettable images of people luxuriating underneath the acclaimed The weather project by Olafur Eliasson, a five-month installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London, showed how atmospheres affect us all. The light, smoke, and mirrors drew over 2 million viewers into the space to sit and watch the misty sun piercing through the reflective plane of the ceiling, a transcendental interior experience. Once enclosed, the story of an interior can be told through its surfaces and their materials—the generators of atmospheres. The qualities of atmosphere are epitomized by the word’s etymological roots: the Greek atmos is a vapor, a breath of air, while sphaira is a sphere. The conjoining of both words is literally used to describe the ether surrounding a planet, but when used figuratively in relation to the built environment it illustrates the resultant ambience of a room. It is what the Italian art critic Mario Praz referred to as the Stimmung, the particular and unique ambience of a space. In essence, “atmospheres” describes the intoxicating effects of materials and surfaces blended with the intangible qualities of light, character, and mood.

In some moments of history, surfaces have been stereotyped as insubstantial and one-dimensional. European Modernism contested them, particularly in relation to their ornamentation. The tone was set by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos in 1910 when he determined that to ornament was to commit “a crime.” One of the most well-known architects of the 20th century, Le Corbusier, expressed a similar distaste for decoration, calling it an “abominable perversion.” Modernists’ eschewing of ornamentation merely masked their closeted desires to embrace and utilize surface embellishments. Loos’s Villa Müller and Villa Moller (Prague and Vienna, respectively) were exalted precisely because of their elaborately decorated interiors. Conceived via his spatial system known as the Raumplan, both were highly detailed concoctions of stairs, landings, and rooms decorated in rich surfaces of oak, polished lemonwood, lacquered mahogany, Persian rugs, leather upholstery, and numerous planes of highly veined cipollino marble. Le Corbusier’s fondness for unadorned exterior and interior whiteness was in itself arguably a highly decorated surface. Their absurd position with regard to ornament was detrimental to the idea and story of the interior not only because it led to the downgrading of surface as an important intellectual consideration but also because, when at its most pernicious (and often misogynistic), it denigrated the status and agency of the interior designers and decorators undertaking it.