In normal contexts the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within; like the body its walls put boundaries around the self preventing undifferentiated contact with the world yet in in its windows and doors, crude versions of the senses, it enables the self to move into that world and allows the world to enter.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985) p. 38