Spankie, Ro
Spankie, Ro
Bio Sketch
Ro Spankie is a British architect and academic, Principal Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the University of Westminster, where (as Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader of Interior Architecture, 2015) she has led interior architecture teaching and research on drawing, inhabitation, and the occupied interior. She is the author of Sigmund Freud's Desk: An Anecdoted Guide (Freud Museum London, 2015; 2nd ed.), the room-by-room and object-by-object study of the sixty-five objects on Freud's desk within his collection of over 2,000 antiquities, and her chapter "Lines of Enquiry" carries that research into interior-architecture theory: the founder of psychoanalysis as "the occupant as designer," whose arrangement of study and consulting room functioned as an integral part of the instrument of psychoanalysis.
Key Works
- *Lines of Enquiry: Drawing out Sigmund Freud's study and consulting room* (2018) — Chapter 22 of Marinic's The Interior Architecture Reader: the occupant as designer; the psychoanalytic setting as memory, method, and metaphor; the desk over the couch; Freud's mind-diagram as a model of how his interior functioned.
- Sigmund Freud's Desk: An Anecdoted Guide (Freud Museum London, 2015; 2nd ed.) — the guide to the sixty-five objects on the desk surface of Freud's study, from which the chapter draws (not yet ingested; cited throughout the chapter, notes 13, 15, 16).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- occupant-as-designer — the chapter's central figure: arranging as identity-establishing design
- psychoanalytic-setting — the portable, relational interior that can be "picked up and recreated"
- facilitating-environment — Winnicott's term, via Spankie, for what the desk arrangement created
- transitional-object — the psychoanalytic object-logic applied to the desk's sixty-five antiquities
- free-association — the atmosphere the couch arrangement was intended to create
- house-museum — the Vienna/London split; the desk behind the museum rope
Relevance to the Core Research
Spankie gives the wiki's Freud cluster its second, complementary room: where Fuss & Sanders read Berggasse 19's couch-room for vision, power and gender, Spankie reads the desk-room for writing, memory and creative facilitation — together they make Freud's study the richest single interior case in the wiki. Her "occupant as designer" argument also gives interior design theory its strongest formulation of the occupant's authorship (interiors as rearrangeable, identity-establishing, designer-uncontrolled), which directly bears on the wiki's everyday-interior and authorship clusters, and her topological account of the portable psychoanalytic setting (relationship of parts, not conventional drawings) is a representational challenge the representation page can build on.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
