Corridor Spaces

In 1789, an English visitor to Germany noted with some astonishment that at five in the afternoon the emperor goes to the Corridor just near his own apartment, where poor and rich, small and great, have access to his person at pleasure, and often get him to arbitrate their lawsuits. The use of the word corridor might not strike a modern reader as particularly unusual. But the word was not all that common in English, and most certainly no English king at that time would have had such a corridor in his palace. Here, Jarzombek discusses what a corridor is about and addresses how the corridor came into the broader cultural parlance. He argues that in the fourteenth century, in both Spanish and Italian contexts, a corridor referred not to a space but to a courier, someone who as the word's Latin root suggests could run fast. He points out that the emergence of the corridor into architectural daylight begins in the seventeenth century. A 1644 sketch for a palace by Felice Della Greca, a prominent architect practicing in Rome, shows a coritore leading--and quite astonishingly--straight from the building's entrata to the giardino in the rear.