there is an overwhelming amount of information in the physical evi-
dence we see, information about physics, economics, merchandising,
social classes and cultural habits. No city is a steady, complete or fully
controlled entity; at every turn we are presented with contrasts and
comparisons.

Between these extremes of wild nature and urbanity are all those
circumstances where the efforts of man and nature combine. The ear-
liest human environment, we are told, was a garden, and a garden is
still a particularly inviting and provocative place. Unenclosed as it
may be, it shares many features of habitable interiors. Its paths and
trees are--at once almost literally and quite metaphorically--corri-
dors and pieces of furniture, its lawns are carpets, its shrubs decor, its
terraces salons. Its principles of composition, too, are really the same:
axes, closures, destinations. Similar, too, the resultant effects: separa-
tion, discovery, transition, resolution.

There is also apparent in the garden a struggle for dominance of
effect that is parallel to the struggle in designed interiors: in the case
of the garden, competition between the will of man to impose a plan
and the efforts of nature to blur the edges, overgrow the boundaries,
obscure the order; in the case of the interior, competition between the
designer and the occupant, even when these are the same person.

The student of interior design can learn from gardens; sometimes
the indirect approach to a subject by way of reference and correspon-
dence reveals something a more straightforward encounter does not.
But the garden can teach us nothing about the most essential fact of
the interior, its unmatched power over our state of mind. For all its
delights and strengths, the garden, like the wilderness and the city, is
missing a key dimension--it has no cover--and thus it can never be
more than an echo of an interior.

Although many a history of architecture has been illustrated
solely with photographs of building exteriors, it is rare that great build-
ings of the past have lacked great interiors. The pyramids of Egypt are
the most obvious examples of those that do, yet even in those cases
their burial chambers, while physically insignificant, had a psycholog-
ical significance fully equal to that of their massive housings. In the
age of skyscrapers, admittedly, many towers are noteworthy only for
their profile and skin; inside, they are tray on tray of undistinguished,
indistinguishable office space. Yet, despite the relative poverty of
expression that marks the modern commercial interior, we know from
experience that interiors have a power over us that facades can never

-2-