Corridors: Passages of Modernity

by Roger Luckhurst

We spend our lives moving through passages, hallways, corridors, and gangways, yet these channeling spaces do not feature in architectural histories, monographs, or guidebooks. They are overlooked, undervalued, and unregarded, seen as unlovely parts of a building’s infrastructure rather than architecture.

This book is the first definitive history of the corridor, from its origins in country houses and utopian communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through reformist Victorian prisons, hospitals, and asylums, to the “corridors of power,” bureaucratic labyrinths, and housing estates of the twentieth century. Taking in a wide range of sources, from architectural history to fiction, film, and TV, Corridors explores how the corridor went from a utopian ideal to a place of the archetypal stuff of nightmares.

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture, History

240 pages, Hardcover

Published May 1, 2019

About the author

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction.

Reviews

[RyeCather · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly brings into view the histories encoded in corridors across time and space as well as the potential for all sorts of explorations into specific existing corridors and those just over the horizon.

A book that changes the reader's existence in the world.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun stroll down the corridors of power and dread, utopian and dystopian, from Derrida to Disney, through Northanger Abbey and the Outlook Hotel, and back again.

[Jikan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[terese_utan_h]

DNF at 13 %