Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-169) and index.

Introduction :the primacy of interior experience in architecture -- The space within as the origin of architecture -- The nearness of interior experience and the distance of exterior form -- Three early modern conceptions of interior space -- The separate paths of the eye and the body in experience -- The shape of interior space and the boundary of place -- The society of spaces and the emplacement of encounters -- The nesting of places at once intimate and immense -- Making room for experience and memory -- Interior experience of the exterior environment -- Conclusion : interior experience as initiation and evaluation of architecture.

Alvar Aalto once argued that what mattered in architecture wasn't what a building looks like on the day it opens but what it is like to live inside it thirty years later. In this book, architect and critic Robert McCarter persuasively argues that interior spatial experience is the necessary starting point for design, and the quality of that experience is the only appropriate means of evaluating a work after it has been built. McCarter reveals that we can't really know a piece of architecture without inhabiting its spaces, and we need to counter our contemporary obsession with exterior views and forms with a renewed appreciation for interiors.