Appropriation

Definition

Appropriation names the process by which inhabitants make space their own — not by receiving a given structure but by thickening space through habitual rhythms, detours, and a relationship with things. In Spuybroek's formulation, "inhabitation viewed as appropriation reverses the idea that we inhabit space as a given structure." Appropriation is a double act: an opening (drawing things into a personal sphere, suspending them from their original meaning) and a closing (concentrating on the self, stabilizing its rhythms). It operates by detour — what Lefebvre calls détournement — and produces a "thickened" or "doubled" space (poché) where things flicker between presence and absence. The concept has roots in Stoic oikeiosis (making something one's own and making oneself part of something else) and connects to Lefebvre's "transfunctional" spaces of enjoyment and Bachelard's pocketed interiors.

A disciplinary register joins these in Markus Berger's chapter: the OED's primary meaning ("to make 'of a thing private property, whether another's or one's own; taking as one's own or to one's own use'") is "laden with both negative and positive meanings" — "privatization, theft, borrowing, copying, or adaptation" — and in cultural theory "adoption … without the consent of the originating culture" (Caceda). Lefebvre's definition anchors the political pole: appropriation as "a deliberate act to dissipate or replace feelings of domination" — "both an act of rebellion against authority and a way of negotiating the structures of inequality." Berger's transfer makes appropriation interior architecture's mode: conceived as architectural intervention, appropriation "must be self-conscious, rebellious, and creative in disposition," and the German Aneignung (aneignung) supplies its pedagogical depth. See death-of-the-author for the authorial frame and palimpsest for its textual figure.

An ontological-semiotic register joins these in Graeme Brooker's chapter (the Reader's companion to Berger's, ch. 41): "Reuse and appropriation form the basis of all aspects of the subject of interior architecture. That is, they are processes that signify the repurposing of an object, edifice, or idea, all of which have been removed from their traditional contexts and deliberately repositioned into a new one." The register supplies the concept's violence and power: Dale Kinney — "There is always violence implied in appropriation; and the violence of the cut is always accompanied by the aggravated wound of separation" (p. 9); "the charge is political… frequently determined by the direction of the appropriation in relation to perceived distributions of power" (p. 8) — with the interior architect as the manager of that charge ("it is the role of the interior architect to direct and manipulate this distribution of forces, maneuvering the power or the resonances of appropriation"). It also supplies the concept's cost: reuse is "discerning and choosy," and "whereas some elements are adopted and filled with a new significance, others get deprived and emptied of meaning or even destroyed" (Hegewald and Mitra). The concept's product is the composite construct — "spatial counterpoints… joined, stitched, or forced together" — whose recombination "of things that were never intended to be put together… can provoke a frisson," "a dynamic force that stimulates new value and hence significance." See change-of-use, spolia.

Key Thinkers

• lars spuybroek — develops the theory of inhabitation as appropriation across the ontological spectrum of things; appropriation thickens space into poché.
• henri lefebvre — the "porous space" of play and the "transfunctional"; appropriation turns spaces of domination into spaces of enjoyment via détournement.
• gaston bachelard — the "pocketed space" of drawers, chests, and wardrobes; appropriation as the daydreaming, meditative contraction of the interior.
• emanuele coccia — "homes do not exist per se. Only homemaking exists"; oikeiosis as the Stoic root of appropriation; "we occupy only things."
• friedrich nietzsche — "brief habits" and goodwill as an aesthetic alternative to the unconscious; style as dealing with things beforehand.
• Agnes Heller — the Marxist-anthropological ground: appropriation as the core activity of everyday life — "man must learn to 'use' the concrete things and custom patterns of the world into which he is born"; appropriation of the system of objects, habits and institutions is never concluded ("the more dynamic the society… the more sustained is the effort which the person is required to make throughout his life"); the appropriated world is then re-relayed: "when I 'convey' my world, I am at the same time objectivizing myself who once appropriated this world" (pp. 3–7).
• Pablo Meninato — the artistic limit-case: Duchamp's readymade as appropriation literalized. The displacement of the ordinary object — "removed from its expected function" — is appropriation's opening act ("drawing things into a personal sphere, suspending them from their original meaning") performed as art: "the artist is no longer the one who produces the work of art; instead, he chooses it." See readymade, tableau.
• Markus Berger — the disciplinary theorist (2018): appropriation as interior architecture's mode. The OED's double valence ("privatization, theft, borrowing, copying, or adaptation"); Lefebvre's definition ("a deliberate act to dissipate or replace feelings of domination"); the art lineage (collage, bricolage, montage, pastiche, assemblage; "Marcel Duchamp's 'ready-made' urinal"); Robert Nelson's formula — appropriation is "a distortion, not a negation of the prior semiotic assemblage"; the two views of habitation ("From the point of view of heroic architecture, these acts of living are unwelcome appropriations that distort their pure design. From the point of view of those who 'take over' the built environment, these are the very appropriations that give these places their identity, their soul"); and the transfer thesis — the architectural intervention as appropriation must be "self-conscious, rebellious, and creative in disposition," with the built environment holding "the potential of multiple authors, multiple pasts, and the formation of a multiplicity of futures." His two named strategies: "Appropriating the Everyday" (the resourceful "misuse" — "a coat over the handrail, a cafe mug on the windowsill" — making users "part of the (design) process") and "Appropriating the Appropriation" (design as "a continuation of possible further interventions in the future"). See aneignung, death-of-the-author, palimpsest.
• Graeme Brooker — the ontological theorist (2018): "Reuse and appropriation form the basis of all aspects of the subject of interior architecture"; the process defined as repurposing "removed from their traditional contexts and deliberately repositioned into a new one"; the frisson and resonance of recombined elements; the violence and political charge (via Kinney); the discerning-choosy destructiveness ("some elements… deprived and emptied of meaning or even destroyed"); and the composite construct as appropriation's product. See dialectics-of-appropriation, spolia, change-of-use.

Related Concepts

• dwelling — appropriation is the active process of dwelling; dwelling is the existential condition appropriation produces.
• everyday life — appropriation is the mode of everyday inhabitation; habit and play are its rhythms.
• habitus — the bodily dispositions that generate the habitual rhythms of appropriation.
• play — the trying and breaking with habits that is essential to appropriation as more than "distributing habits in space."
• poche — the architectural name for the thickened space that appropriation produces.
• Readymade — appropriation's artistic paradigm: the object "removed from its expected function," meaning renewed "without the involvement of a formal transformation" (Duchamp, via Meninato).
• Adaptive Reuse — the disciplinary transfer of the readymade's tactics: "strategies of redefining existing elements, assuming tactics such as collage, displacement, fragmentation, or ready-made" (Meninato).
• Aneignung — the German double meaning (to take away / to learn): appropriation's pedagogical register, copying as the first process and mastery as the requirement to add.
• Death of the Author — the authorial frame: the decentered architect makes appropriation the legitimate mode of intervention.
• Palimpsest — the layered building as appropriation's textual figure: "a new plot… composed out of the old words."
• Dialectics of Appropriation — appropriation's spatial product (Brooker): the counterpointed dualities (old/new, in/out, space/place) "joined, stitched, or forced together" as the composite construct.
• Change of Use — the process-concept (Guggenheim) whose sociological dominance ("the building is now largely defined by its uses") gives appropriation its user-side meaning.
• Spolia — the ancient archetype: the violence-of-the-cut and the political charge of the detached element (Kinney).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash (Spuybroek 2025) — the primary source; appropriation as the thickening of space across the spectrum of things.
• Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (Lefebvre 2014) — Lefebvre's "transfunctional" and porous space of play.
• Everyday Life (Heller 1970) — appropriation of objectivation 'in itself' (objects, customs, language) as the precondition of viability and the medium of self-objectivation; "appropriation of species-essential objectivation 'in itself' is therefore always pari passu the appropriation of signification systems" (p. 143).
• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — appropriation as the decorator's designed hand-over: the decorator completes colors, fabrics and arrangement, then instructs the owners to "go ahead and mess it up" — they buy and arrange paintings and objects, "move a chair to a place where it really is more comfortable," and "break up the hardness of the perfect look, and make the room their own" (pp. 27–28); the accumulated collection "gathered over the years kept right out in the open… where you can see them and touch them" against the bought-at-once collection as "an invasion of privacy" (p. 28); the fortune cookie kept "like a jewel" in the French glass box as appropriation's emblem — the personal token inside the precious thing (p. 28). Baldwin names the anti-appropriative pole: the room where "everything in it had to be an arrangement" (see sterility-of-perfection).
• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — appropriation at the urban edge, from below: the homeless of Holborn making Holy Trinity's portico "at once public domain and private to those seeking defensible space and their own appropriated form of illegal real estate," and "recompos[ing] a niche space from layers of clothes, cardboard and classical architecture" — classical architecture thickened into shelter. The owners' counter-move is anti-appropriation as design: the blue screen's 45° deviation leaving "only 150 millimetres clear in front," engineering the edge's inhabitable depth away. See thick-edge, hostile-architecture, poche.
• Swimming upstream (Satterfield & Swackhamer 2018) — the production-side twin of Baldwin's designed hand-over: where Baldwin finishes the room and hands it to the client ("Now go ahead and mess it up"), HouMinn's VarVac Wall "resituate[s] control, and consequently the hand of the designer" so the project "unfold[s] as a consequence of dynamic variables" — the finished form ceded to programmatic circumstance and material parameters rather than to the client's taste. Both plan the conditions and relinquish the outcome; in both, "relinquishing control… the designer can paradoxically seize greater control." The Silk Pavilion extends the cession to nonhuman takers: design authority given "to those doing the building" — "left in the hands (or spinnerets) of the silkworms" (see nonhumans).
• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — appropriation's artistic paradigm and its disciplinary transfer: Duchamp's readymade displaces the ordinary object ("the wheel appears unexpectedly installed upside-down and bolted to a stool, therefore removed from its expected function"), renewing meaning "without the involvement of a formal transformation"; the Étant donnés door brought from Cadaqués "was displaced into an unexpected context, where it was reassembled and perforated"; Osorio's Lonely Soul converts crutches into columns and a bicycle wheel into "a dysfunctional and ornamental element"; and the tactics — "displacement, rotation, fragmentation, or dislocation of ordinary objects" — are offered to interior architecture and adaptive reuse. See readymade, tableau, adaptive-reuse.
• Death of the architect (Berger 2018) — the disciplinary register and the chapter's frame: Barthes's death of the author transferred to the architect ("the lived experience of architecture (like Barthes's reader) to become more central to our understanding of the production of space"); the OED's double valence and Caceda's cultural-theory meaning; Lefebvre's Production of Space definition ("a deliberate act to dissipate or replace feelings of domination"); the photographic erasure of habitation (buildings represented as "pristine, untouched by any real human interaction"); the art lineage and Nelson's "distortion, not a negation of the prior semiotic assemblage" (p. 163); ancient spoils-reuse "to shape public memories and display power"; the double rejection of conservation's "singular mythological origin" and the developer's erasure; Aneignung (see aneignung), the palimpsest (see palimpsest), Copyshop and the "Supercopy as a new original"; the two strategies (Appropriating the Everyday / Appropriating the Appropriation); and the movement thesis — appropriation as "an active, subjective, and motivated strategy that emphasizes movement rather than stasis" (Sponsler, Mathews, Godard, Valéry).
• The dialectics of appropriation (Brooker 2018) — the ontological-semiotic register: "Reuse and appropriation form the basis of all aspects of the subject of interior architecture"; Hegewald and Mitra's reuse definition ("a deliberate and selective process… Reuse does not imitate and replicate; it is a creative combination of old and new elements"); the frisson ("the amalgamation of things that were never intended to be put together, can provoke a frisson"); Kinney's violence and power ("There is always violence implied in appropriation"; "the charge is political… determined by the direction of the appropriation in relation to perceived distributions of power"); the interior architect as force-manager; the discerning-choosy destructiveness ("deprived and emptied of meaning or even destroyed"); and the composite construct — appropriation's product as "spatial counterpoints… joined, stitched, or forced together."
• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the foreclosure register — the concept's limit-case and political counter-case: "People have agency and choose which aspects of their lives to change and how. In many cases, though, choices can be bounded by limitations brought forward by the built environment, and people may find themselves without the choice to appropriate their homes to support their way of life, facing undue stress and feelings of disconnect" (bounded-choices). Where Berger's inhabitation-appropriation and Brooker's composite construct assume an inhabitant able to thicken space, Hadjiyanni supplies the inhabitant who wants to appropriate and cannot — the veiled Somali woman, the Muslim resident whose bathroom materials defeat the washing ritual, the undocumented family whose home is "informed by absence, not presence." The register converts Kinney's power question into a design obligation: what built limitations bound the choice, and who designed them in? See capabilities-approach, culturally-sensitive-design, gender-and-the-interior.
• source-notes/csikszentmihalyi-1991-design-and-order-in-everyday-life
• source-notes/schneiderman-2018-inside-the-prefab-house

Open Questions

• Is appropriation fundamentally a spatial concept or a temporal one — does it structure space more than time, or time more than space?
• Can appropriation be operationalized as a critical/architectural concept, or does it remain phenomenological-poetic?
• How does appropriation relate to de Certeau's tactics — is appropriation a tactic, or does it precede the strategy/tactic distinction?
• Baldwin shows a designer planning for appropriation ("Now go ahead and mess it up") — can appropriation be designed for as a hand-over, or does designing its conditions already sterilize them (cf. his prohibition on bought wit: "No object should 'wink' at us")?
• Berger holds the concept's two poles together — Lefebvre's anti-domination rebellion and the cultural-theory critique of taking without consent — without settling when taking-over of a building becomes taking-from a culture. Is there a criterion (consent, restoration, memorial) that separates the Aneignung of inhabitation from appropriation's violence?
• Berger's appropriation demands "self-conscious" design; the everyday's appropriation (Spuybroek, de Certeau, Heller) is unselfconscious — habitual, tactical, improvised. Is the disciplinary appropriation (Berger) a reflexive second-order version of the everyday's first-order practice, or a different act wearing the same name?
• Brooker's interior architect "direct[s] and manipulate[s] this distribution of forces" — appropriation's power — while Kinney warns the charge is "determined by the direction of the appropriation in relation to perceived distributions of power." Does the discipline's constitutive process have a politics audit, or does the professional appropriation of the already-powerful building (the heritage warehouse, the landmark shell) silently repeat spolia's imperial direction?
• Hadjiyanni's bounded choices supplies the cluster's missing pole: the inhabitant "without the choice to appropriate their homes to support their way of life" (bounded-choices). If appropriation is interior architecture's mode (Berger) and its basis (Brooker), what is the discipline's obligation when the built environment forecloses it — is there a right to appropriate, and who owes it?