Function of Inhabiting

Definition

The function of inhabiting is Bachelard's term — from the "Shells" chapter of The Poetics of Space — for the living force of dwelling that a form must carry to be an image of habitation, as distinct from the mere "will to shell-form." Bachelard's interest, as Goulthorpe frames it, is "to experience the image of the function of inhabiting," contrasted with "the simple will to shell-form, which he derides" (Goulthorpe 2002/2006, p. 134). The doctrine's positive form is the mollusc's motto: "The mollusc's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in!" (Bachelard, quoted p. 134) — living precedes building; the house is the product of an inhabited life, not its container. Goulthorpe's gloss: the shell's essential force is "that it is exuded from within, the secretion of an organism; it is not fabricated from without as an idealised form" — an "expansive mental shell-emptiness," an "inversion of ideological tendency" (p. 134).

Goulthorpe extends the term from the shell to architecture at large: "an evolutionary architecture, if it is to crystallise a new 'function of inhabiting,' needs to cup its ear to the whispering shell, attaining in its creative imagining a felicity that separates it from an aborted genetic process, and the means of deploying its algorithmic and parametric (digital) propensity to material effect" (p. 135). The function of inhabiting is thus the criterion a digitally generative architecture must meet — not a program ("function" in the functionalist sense) but a felicitous force of dwelling that the generated form either carries or lacks. The empty shell and empty nest are the concept's negative proofs: "forms of absence, as images of the function of habitation" (p. 136) — the function survives the occupant as an image.

The concept sits between the wiki's dwelling (the Heideggerian-Bachelardian phenomenology of dwelling-place) and its evolutionary-architecture cluster: it is the test term that lets a poetics of dwelling interrogate a computational praxis. Bachelard "insists on accounting for the effect of the work, which is in marked contrast to Frazer's apparent disinterest in the result of an essentially automatic praxis" (p. 136) — the function of inhabiting is what "effect" means when the work is a form for dwelling.

Key Thinkers

• Gaston Bachelard — the concept's author: "to experience the image of the function of inhabiting" (the "Shells" chapter of The Poetics of Space, 1958); the mollusc's motto as its doctrine; the derision of the "simple will to shell-form."
• Mark Goulthorpe — the concept's redeployer: the function of inhabiting as the criterion for an evolutionary architecture's "creative imagining"; the demand for "a felicity that separates it from an aborted genetic process" (2002/2006).
• John Frazer — the concept's counter-case: An Evolutionary Architecture as the praxis that generates forms with no "image… adequate to Bachelard's appellation" (1995). Not yet paged (see log).

Related Concepts

• Forms of Absence — the concept's images: the empty shell and empty nest as "images of the function of habitation" (p. 136).
• Dwelling — the concept's parent register: Bachelard's function of inhabiting names the force within the dwelling-phenomenology the wiki holds under Heidegger and Bachelard.
• Poetic Image — the concept's standard: an image "adequate to Bachelard's appellation" is one that carries the function of inhabiting; the abridged evolution "never attain[s] the force of image."
• Felicitous Space — the concept's tonality: the "felicity" the generated form must attain is the felicity of Bachelard's intimate spaces — "its secretions are unselfconscious and 'felicitous,' obeying an internal law" (p. 134).
• Evolutionary Architecture — the concept's contemporary addressee: the praxis that must "crystallise a new 'function of inhabiting'" (p. 135).
• Alloplastic Space — the concept's relational form: the function of inhabiting as the malleable, reciprocal self–environment relation (the nest's imprint) rather than containment in fixed form.
• House-Body Equation — the concept's anthropological shadow: "live to build one's house" versus "build one's house to live in" is the equation's two directions, and Gilbert & Gubar's critique shows who pays for the second.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Notes on Digital Nesting: A Poetics of Evolutionary Form (Goulthorpe 2002/2006) — the concept's source: "to experience the image of the function of inhabiting" vs "the simple will to shell-form" (p. 134); the mollusc's motto (quoted p. 134); the "new 'function of inhabiting'" the evolutionary architecture must crystallise (p. 135); the "images of the function of habitation" carried by the forms of absence (p. 136).

Open Questions

• Is the function of inhabiting translatable into design criteria at all — or is it, like the poetic image, precisely what a criteria-driven (parametric, performative, evidence-based) practice cannot specify without destroying?
• Goulthorpe demands a new function of inhabiting for the digital era — does the nest's spectre (an environment "adapting to our bodies and continually recalibrated") describe that new function, or only its machinery?
• The mollusc's motto ("live to build one's house") is unbuildable literally — architecture is always already "building one's house to live in." Is the motto a regulative ideal (measure the gap), an irony, or does the shell's "temporal crustation" suggest built form can record a life after the fact (the alteration tradition, the house museum)?
• Can a generated form "obey an internal law" and still be felicitous — or does felicity require the law to be an organism's own, making the whole genetic programme a category mistake Bachelard's processual sensibility exposes?