Reveries of the contemporary corner Study of the concavity as the origin of the room, from Ikea to the spoon woman

Abstract

The Nordic furniture brand Ikea is known worldwide for its labyrinthine stores, although its real sales strategy is not so much a labyrinth of corridors as it is of corners. The verification of this phenomenon works as a starting point to discover that the corners are the origin of the place of the reverie of a primordial dwelling forgotten for a long time. Precisely this anthropological and psychological dimension of the corner is highlighted in the text to constitute the first quality of any elementary shelter. A speculative text is built around the validity of the corner and its current presence. Even though the corner adapts to the scale of its inhabitants, offering us an alternative contact with the matter of the room, we can verify its absence in the discourse of modernity, except for the occasional answers offered by figures such as Jacobsen, Go Hasegawa, or the metaphor that Giacometti's sculpture “Spoon woman” offers us. This paper updates the topic of the corner from the conceptual approaches of the Annales School, the support in the New History methodology and the study of the structures of the subjective experience of phenomenology and the history of mentalities