BRICK BY BRICK

THE ARCHITECTURE OF UNEASE

HENRIETTE FOUCAULT

September 3, 2025

Architecture is not neutral—it choreographs human behavior. Rooms, corridors, and thresholds silently instruct us on how to act, move, and even feel. A room, by its geometry, can encourage intimacy, surveillance, fear, or performance.

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There’s a line in Fritz Lang’s 1947 film Secret Beyond the Door that lingers in the mind long after the plot dissolves. The architect Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave), who has filled his isolated mansion with meticulously reconstructed rooms where infamous murders once occurred, turns to his new wife and says, “The way a place is built determines what happens in it.” Even murder! It’s not a metaphor. It’s his thesis. He believes the geometry of a space—the dimensions, the proportions, the fall of light—can provoke violence. His collection becomes a kind of museum of violence. The architecture of a room doesn’t just witness murder; it wants it.

The film, a strange hybrid of gothic noir and dark surrealism caught in the postwar American hype over psychoanalysis, is obsessed with space. It isn’t just set in a house—it is about the house. The mansion that Celia, Mark’s new wife, enters is less a residence than a mind. Celia (played by Joan Bennett) is our way into this labyrinth: a young, independent woman whose marriage to Mark begins as a romantic leap and quickly becomes a descent into something darker. What she discovers is not just a house filled with replicas of murder rooms, but a husband whose psyche is as carefully constructed—and as perilous—as the architecture he studies.

Doors open into memory. The main room, No. 7, is locked and pulses with repression. Celia is not allowed to enter it, but she moves through the other spaces with a mixture of curiosity and fear, as though testing the limits of her understanding. She traverses a theory of the self, mapped out in wood and stone—a Freudian house where every hallway is a repressed thought, every locked door a trauma. The film’s tension rests on her gradual realization that to unlock the house is to unlock her husband’s mind, and that some rooms are sealed for reasons that go far beyond ordinary privacy. In this sense, Celia becomes both wife and analyst, probing the architecture of Mark’s mind as though the entire marriage were a surreal therapy session built of walls, keys, and forbidden rooms.

     Rope, 1948 A Manhattan apartment becomes both stage and tomb—an experiment in spatial suffocation, where the room conspires in the crime.

Lang gives us an architectural thriller, but also something more enduring: a question. What do rooms do to us? And what do we leave in them? In the film, space has memory. Trauma resists minimalism. The locked room stays shut. We often think of rooms as shelters, sanctuaries, but some rooms are built for seeing. In Secret Beyond the Door, the murder rooms are staged for observation, not living. They’re spatial performances: perfect re-creations, frozen tableaux. Mark studies them not for comfort, but for control.

Sigmund Freud described the mind as a kind of structure: layered, compartmentalized, filled with passages and doors, thresholds and sealed chambers. Dreams, he wrote, move like a person through a house. There is the surface of consciousness, the visible ground floor. Then there is the cellar, containing the repressed, the hidden, the buried. Lang’s house follows this diagram exactly. The mansion is the unconscious made legible. The locked room is not a narrative gimmick but the spatialized trauma at the center of Mark’s character. The murder rooms are his compulsions, repeated and aestheticized.

Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space (1958), took Freud’s metaphor further. He suggested that rooms shape us in childhood, that we return again and again in dreams to the attics and corners of our early life. Houses don’t just shelter us; they author us. They become the architecture of daydreams and dread. “The house,” he writes, “is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind.”

Funny Games, 1997 The holiday home as trap. Its banality makes the violence inside all the more unbearable: comfort weaponized into confinement.

But not all houses are cozy symbols. Modernist architecture, with its stripped lines and open plans, promised transparency, sanity, even moral improvement. Le Corbusier’s radiant cities and the Bauhaus insistence on clean functionality sought to clear away the clutter of the Victorian unconscious. In theory, a white wall could cleanse the soul. But architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina argues that modern architecture has always been voyeuristic. The open plan, the glass wall, the rooftop terrace—these were not just about light and space. They were about visibility. To be modern is to be seen. The modernist house is not private. It is a stage. Its occupants are actors, constantly visible to one another and, more recently, to the camera.

Today’s interiors—Instagram bedrooms, Airbnb kitchens, Zoom backdrops—continue this logic. Rooms are arranged for the gaze. They perform comfort and identity. They are not necessarily lived in; they are published. The rise of “aesthetic rooms”—bland minimalism, exposed wood, soft linens—suggests that we no longer design to feel, but to project. A mirror in a bedroom used to be private. Now it’s a device. We take selfies, we watch ourselves, we calibrate presence. The room watches back. What does this do to the self? What happens when the interior becomes a site of constant externalization?

Not all rooms are arranged for comfort or self-expression. Some are assigned. Prisons, hospitals, waiting rooms—the architecture of these spaces is built not to hold the self, but to flatten it. The Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century design, was more than just a prison blueprint—it was an idea. Its circular structure with a central watchtower allowed a single guard to observe every prisoner simultaneously, while the prisoners, unable to see the guard, could never know when they were being watched. The brilliance, and cruelty, of this design lay in its psychological effect: The uncertainty itself enforced obedience. A prisoner behaved as though under constant scrutiny, even when the watchtower was empty.

The Night House, 2020 The mirrored house: architecture as psyche, doubling itself until the familiar becomes uninhabitable.

Although Bentham’s Panopticon was never built in its purest form, its influence far outlived the original design. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), seized on it as the perfect metaphor for modern systems of control. The Panopticon, he argued, was a model for schools, hospitals, factories, and even open-plan offices—spaces where architecture disciplines the body as much as the mind. Space itself becomes a mechanism of power.

The room, in this sense, does not merely hold the self—it erodes it, compressing individuality under the constant possibility of surveillance. The architecture is active, shaping behavior through fear, visibility, and the pressure of never being unseen. The Panopticon teaches us that the most oppressive rooms are those that colonize perception, the walls themselves instruments of watchfulness.

This carries into more mundane places: social housing with no privacy, refugee centers with fluorescent lighting, classrooms designed like boxes. These are spaces where the architecture does not reflect the inhabitants’ needs. It reflects policy. It reflects budget. It reflects intimidation.

One of the most literal expressions of psychic distress made into architecture is the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California—a sprawling Victorian mansion filled with staircases that lead nowhere, doors that open onto walls, and hallways that loop endlessly. Built continuously over nearly four decades by Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, the house is often described as a monument to guilt or madness. According to popular legend, Winchester feared the ghosts of those killed by her family’s weapons, and believed that as long as construction never stopped, the spirits could never catch her. Whether true or not, the result was a house designed like a fugue state—unstable, recursive, filled with architectural misdirection.

Parasite, 2019 A modernist promise of transparency, turned into a geometry of exclusion. Architecture as class barrier, polished and pitiless.

But it’s not unique. Consider the Amityville House in New York, a seemingly ordinary suburban home that became infamous after the Lutz family’s alleged hauntings and violent events. Its ordinary exterior masks decades of tragedy and mystery inside, illustrating how spaces imbibe trauma through the lives they shelter.

Survivalist bunkers and fallout shelters—spaces designed to protect bodies, but often at the cost of psychological confinement—constitute another side of hostile architecture. Here, the self is compressed into claustrophobic rooms, anticipation of disaster shaping the very walls.

Each of these examples reveals something essential: Architecture is never neutral. Whether sprawling and labyrinthine like Winchester’s mansion, eerily ordinary yet haunted like Amityville, or designed for survival yet psychologically suffocating like a bunker, rooms carry the imprint of their makers’ fears, obsessions, and histories. They are physical manifestations of internal states—sometimes fragile, sometimes impenetrable, sometimes wildly unstable.

For many, rooms are not memory capsules but sites of alienation. Judith Butler has written about the politics of precarity—how a lack of stable shelter becomes a kind of existential unhousing. Without a room, one becomes a ghost in the city. Without a room, the self begins to fray.

Panic Room, 2002 (production blueprint) Even in draft, the plan reveals its paradox: a room designed for safety, yet claustrophobic by intent. Security here is indistinguishable from imprisonment.

Still, some rooms stay with us. The bedroom where you first felt safe. The kitchen where your mother stood, back to the light. The closet you hid in. These rooms form the infrastructure of our psychic lives. We carry them not just as memories, but as internal architecture. Bachelard called this the “topography of our intimate being.” Even years later, we reenter those spaces—sometimes physically, more often mentally. They become reference points, inner chambers we retreat to or recoil from. Just as some rooms haunt us, others shelter us long after we’ve left them.

We talk about being “in the right head space,” as though the mind were a room—something with corners and thresholds, windows we can open or close at will. We “move on,” but really we move through, drifting from one interior to another, carrying the faint smell of old rooms on our clothes. Spaces change us. They don’t just hold our lives; they press against us, shaping our thoughts the way a ceiling shapes the echo of a voice. Some rooms become grief, their air heavy and unbreathable, as if every surface has absorbed our sorrow. Others turn into echo chambers, amplifying the same thoughts until we can’t tell if they are ours or merely the walls speaking back.

Halloween, 1978

The Myers house: ordinary suburban timber turned mythic. A domestic facade that proves houses can incubate terror as surely as they shelter family.

And occasionally, a room becomes a self—a structure we build not to live in, but to live through. We decorate it with memories, with fears, with the particular furniture of our private obsessions. Some people never leave these inner rooms, but keep on repainting them, shifting the furniture, hoping the space will feel different. It never does. It is not just that the mind resembles a room. It is that, at times, we feel as if we are the room, its walls, its locked doors, its solitary window looking out onto something we cannot name.

Lang’s film ends not with a death, but with a confession. The locked room opens; the trauma finally speaks. For once, the architecture releases rather than traps.

In life, rooms don’t yield so easily. We drag our memories across their thresholds, and they absorb what we leave behind—arguments, silences, celebrations, grief. Rooms are never empty. They hold us in ways we rarely notice, shaping our gestures, our moods, even our sense of time. Some will outlive us, carrying the faint residue of our lives long after we’re gone.

The House That Jack Built, 2018 Von Trier’s ruin in the field: a house collapsing under the weight of its own compulsions, architecture as pathology exposed to the weather.

Mark Lamphere’s theory lingers like a whisper: Some rooms are built for murder. Perhaps. But others are built for memory, or performance, or punishment, or forgetting. The most truthful rooms, though, resist purpose. They simply exist—mute, unyielding, waiting for us to fill them. We enter these rooms, and if we stay long enough, they enter us.

Henriette Foucault (b. 1982 in Antananarivo, Madagascar) is a cultural theorist and psycho-spatial analyst whose work explores the hidden instructions of architecture. Raised between Madagascar and France, she developed an early fascination with how private and public spaces shape behavior. After studying philosophy and urban anthropology at the Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” in El Salvador, she turned her field research into a broader investigation of desire, surveillance, and architecture.

Cover image: The House That Screamed, 1969 The boarding school as prison: corridors of discipline where the architecture of education shades into the architecture of repression.