In Absentia: Designing the absent city within the American domestic interior

The deep connection between architecture and the city has long been explored by architects and scholars, from Alberti and Palladio’s concept of the city as a large house, house as a small city to Aldo Rossi and Aldo Van Eyck, who grounded their theories and designs in this analogy. Beyond theory, urban fragments or entire urban facts have often been transformed into houses or housing systems. The Diocletian Palace in Split exemplifies this shift in scale, use, and meaning, while the theatre type originated as an architectural interior reimagining urban spaces like piazzas and surrounding buildings. In such cases, the presence, literal or metaphorical, of the city in the architectural interior is central.
This study examines how this analogy persists even in absentia, where the urban element in the city-architecture equation is missing and must be reinvented, evoking its memory through spatial devices, composition, and lived experience. Drawing from architectural theory, historical analysis, and spatial interpretation, I investigate how this memory is integrated into architectural interiors. In particular, I focus on domestic interiors as sites where memory, as Gaston Bachelard argues, dreams, and thoughts shape lived experience, and where the interior, as the urban space, becomes the stage and backdrop for the everyday performances of life inside the house, and metaphor of the public-private relationship of the city environment.
The case studies analyzed belong to a rural or semi-rural American context, far removed from urban centres, where the city is missing, forgotten, or even rejected. These houses were designed between the 1950s and 1990s by architects with strong ties to European architectural and urban culture, subtly responding to that contexts and sites and even to the modernist orthodoxy that often dismissed historical memory.
The Miller House (late 1950s, Indiana), designed by Eero Saarinen, is conceived as a village (as Kevin Roche recalls), with rooms arranged around a central piazza, the sunken conversation pit, reminiscent of an urban public gathering space. Its structured garden, designed by Dan Kiley, further reinforces the idea of an ordered, gridded urban plaza. The Miller House (1990s, Kentucky) by José Oubrerie reimagines the absent city as a vertical citadel, enclosed by a protective wall and composed of layered spatial sequences that evoke the complexity of an urban microcosm. Lastly, George Ranalli’s 1980s renovation of the Callender School (Rhode Island) transforms the existing structure into a domestic setting that metaphorically reconstructs the city. Through analogy and architectural montage, the architect assembles inhabited façades and interior piazzas, a domestic reinvention of theatrical spaces that allude, in absentia, to the essence of the city.
These projects do not merely reference urban forms; they act as mnemonic devices, where the architect reconstructs a lost urban experience, demonstrating how architecture can preserve and evoke the city even when it is physically absent.