America, (1988), and historian William Leach's Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993).

Loos privileges the bodily experience of space over its mental construction: the architect first senses the space, then he visualizes it. . . . Loos's critique of the photography of architecture and its dissemination through architectural journals was based on the same principle, that it is impossible to represent a spatial effect or a sensation.

Colomina uses the "theater box" to explain Loos's interiors:

It is no longer the house that is a theater box; there is a theater box inside the house, overlooking the internal social spaces. The inhabitants of Loos's houses are both actors in and spectators of the family scene - involved in, yet detached from, their own space. The classical distinction between inside and outside, private and public, object and subject, becomes convoluted.





Actually, the technique, to nest one level of perception within another, equally describes the 1894 play Interior by Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, of which Colomina is apparently unaware. In the discussion of interiors, the topic of fashion and architecture is introduced, and one cannot help but reach for Mark Wigley's essay "White Out: Fashioning the Modern" in Architecture in Fashion (1994). The chapter "Window" contrasts Loos with Le Corbusier. Loos's houses turn inward: windows are covered with curtains and the focus is toward the interior. Le Corbusier's houses, by contrast, "throw the subject toward the periphery of the house." Here again one could refer to the chapter on "Photography" or "Interior." The vertical window located versus the horizontal screen window, the house strategically placed for a view. Much of the chapter is also given over to a discussion of looking at "the gaze" and implications of gender for the two architects with relation to architectural spaces and fashion. It is clear that Colomina finds the attitudes of Loos and Le Corbusier towards women and fashion, and women and architecture, "troubling."

Colomina's examination of architectural theory, describes and reveals shifts in her examination of the public and private configurations that dramatically mark the twentieth century. It is a topic that seems to attract a specific generation - those who live in a telematic world but who were not born into it. Straddling these two worlds, that of the self-contained modern typewriter and the "postmodern," on-line computer, there is a need to describe a phenomenon that fundamentally resists closure, which is precisely what Privacy and Publicity does.