Occupant as Designer

Definition

The occupant as designer names the figure through which interior design's difference from architecture becomes a theory of authorship: because interiors are composed of movable elements — furniture and fittings — that the occupant "arranges and rearranges according to their needs, tastes, and customs," the interior is the one built field where the professional designer lacks "control over the end product," and the act of arranging itself becomes a design act. In Ro Spankie's formulation: "The act of arranging allows the occupant to establish their identity and create a personal interior architecture which challenges the traditional understanding of the role of the designer and the concerns of form, function, and style." The concept relocates design agency from the commissioned designer to the arranging inhabitant — not as an amateur architect manque but as a designer of a different kind, whose medium is the arrangement of existing elements and whose design problems are identity, memory, and use rather than form, function, and style. Freud's study and consulting room is the concept's exemplary case: an interior arranged over thirty years by its occupant that became "an integral part of the instrument" of psychoanalysis.

The concept's representational-history register comes from Michael Guggenheim via Graeme Brooker: the user's absence from architectural thinking is the reason the interior discipline was overlooked. "Guggenheim proposes that up until the 1970s, the occupants of buildings were often merely used for the purposes of scale, particularly in representations of the built environment, and he suggests that a central concern of any interior discipline is human occupation. Therefore, this situation has ensured that the interior has not been suitably represented in earlier twentieth-century spatial discourses – in particular Modernism – where the nuances of occupation and use were often overlooked." Guggenheim's sociological (interactive) approach completes the concept's theoretical ground: the user "act[s] on the building regardless of its technological or semiotic implications" — during change of use "the sociological properties take command: the building is now largely defined by its uses." Where Spankie shows the occupant designing, Guggenheim shows why architecture could not see the designing: the occupant was scale, not agent. See change-of-use.

Key Thinkers

• Ro Spankie — the concept's theorist: the occupant's arranging as "a personal interior architecture" that "challenges the traditional understanding of the role of the designer"; Freud's rooms as the demonstration case (2018).
• Billy Baldwin — the decorator's side of the same divide: rooms should "declare the owner's independence, carry the owner's signature, his very private scrawl"; the decorator who hands over — "All right. Now go ahead and mess it up" — ceding the final arrangement to the occupant (1972/2006).
• Amy Campos — the designer's half of the bargain: authorship delivered as a framework — "The clients participate in the making of the space every day and use the framework of the design as a platform for their own experimentations in occupation" (2018).
• Jeremy Till & Sarah Wigglesworth — the building-scale analogue: builders and occupants assuming aesthetic control against the master-architect myth (2001).
• Bernard Rudofsky — the communal ancestor: architecture "without architects" as the majority condition of the built world (1964).
• Markus Berger — the disciplinary invitation: "Appropriating the Everyday" — the occupant's resourceful "misuse" of things ("a coat over the handrail, a cafe mug on the windowsill") as a design resource that would "allow the users to be part of the (design) process, shaping the environment as an active part of habitation" — the occupant's appropriation made a design strategy rather than a residue (2018, see appropriation, aneignung).
• Graeme Brooker — the representational-history register (2018, via Guggenheim): occupants "merely used for the purposes of scale" in architectural representation up to the 1970s; "a central concern of any interior discipline is human occupation"; the sociological approach — the user acting "on the building regardless of its technological or semiotic implications" — as the concept's theoretical ground (see change-of-use).
• Michael Guggenheim (named in the source, not yet paged — see log) — "Formless Discourse" (2011): the absence of the user in architectural thinking; the sociological dominance in change of use ("the building is now largely defined by its uses").

Related Concepts

• Authorship — the occupant as designer is authorship's interior-limit case: the designer whose work is complete only when the occupant begins.
• Psychoanalytic Setting — the concept's richest demonstration: an arrangement whose relationships, not forms, are the design, and which the occupant-Freud recreated in every location he worked.
• Domestic Interior — the concept's home ground: the movable, rearrangeable field where arranging is continuous with inhabiting.
• Appropriation — the occupant's arranging as the gentle form of the user's takeover of designed space.
• Interiority — arranging as the act by which "the occupant… establish[es] their identity": interiority produced by arrangement rather than by enclosure.
• Rule-Breaking — Baldwin's "very private scrawl": the occupant's deviation from the decorator's scheme as the room's success condition.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the founding source: "One of the defining differences between designing an interior, as opposed to the entire building that contains it, is the lack of control over the end product. Interiors are composed of movable elements, such as furniture and fittings, that the occupant arranges and rearranges according to their needs, tastes, and customs. The act of arranging allows the occupant to establish their identity and create a personal interior architecture which challenges the traditional understanding of the role of the designer and the concerns of form, function, and style"; the demonstration case — Freud's two rooms at Berggasse 19, where "the arrangement of his consulting room and study were an integral part of the instrument" of psychoanalysis, and the desk arrangement that "created a secure creative space that allowed Freud to think and to write."
• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — the decorator's side: rooms that "declare the owner's independence, carry the owner's signature, his very private scrawl"; clients who "add enormously to a room in a way that no decorator ever could."
• Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the designer's framework ceded to daily occupation: "The clients participate in the making of the space every day"; the interior as "processes of occupation rather than artifacts of a specific location."
• The Future Is Hairy (Till & Wigglesworth 2001) — the building-scale version: builders assume aesthetic control; the architect is not sole author.
• Death of the architect (Berger 2018) — the appropriation register: the occupant's everyday "misuse" named as a design programme — "a coat over the handrail, a cafe mug on the windowsill, or other applications that are considered as a resourceful 'misuse' of an item or situation"; "This would allow the users to be part of the (design) process, shaping the environment as an active part of habitation" — the occupant-as-designer re-described in appropriation's vocabulary (the user as the environment's active shaper), and framed by the chapter's death-of-the-architect thesis (the designer's authorship decentered so the user's can count). See appropriation, death-of-the-author.
• The dialectics of appropriation (Brooker 2018) — the representational-history register: Guggenheim's diagnosis that "up until the 1970s, the occupants of buildings were often merely used for the purposes of scale, particularly in representations of the built environment," while "a central concern of any interior discipline is human occupation"; the three approaches (technological, semiotic, sociological — the last reversing the first two, "informed the user to act on the building"); the sociological dominance in change of use ("the building is now largely defined by its uses"; "the material properties become relatively less important to the sociological ones"); and "In the processes of creating interior architecture, forms of occupation are inevitable, as opposed to types of 'function.'" See change-of-use.
• Living in Glass Houses (Melchionne 2006) — the concept's negative limit: the occupant whose design act is not designing. To live in a work of art "one must respect it as a designed product, that is, one must live according to its rules. This means not moving the furniture or adding objects, lest the composition be destroyed… The respectful occupant must be a curator of sorts, preserving the house while living in it" (pp. 229–230). The curator-occupant proves Spankie's thesis by inversion: arranging is design, therefore withholding arrangement is the occupant's design choice — an occupant-as-designer who designs by not-designing, sustaining the original author's composition with a habit-repertoire "fully responsive to the organizational and aesthetic terms of inhabited space" (p. 231). Johnson is the figure's real-world limit: the occupant who is the author ("he did not design the house for anyone but himself," p. 230) — the case where occupant and designer are one and the arranging right is self-denied. Where Spankie's occupant designs by moving things, Melchionne's designs by keeping them still: the concept's conservatorial pole. See glass-house, radical-aesthete, authorship.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the concept's freedom-warrant, from the Woolfian room: "this room is my life's wealth, it is 'decorated' by numerous things self-gathered and inherited, both consciously and unconsciously, it is room becoming interior; after all with a room of one's own, one is free to do this" (p. 341). The self-gathering decoration — "self-gathered and inherited, both consciously and unconsciously" — is the occupant's design act described from inside its freedom: the occupant designs not by arrangement alone (Spankie) or curation (Melchionne) but by gathering a life into a room, the act Woolf's independent means makes possible ("with a room of one's own, one is free to do this"). The register also supplies the concept's canonical-theory negative: the classic theorists who lived in rooms they never wrote — "how much time was spent within the buildings yet none thought to include a chapter, book or lamp on the interior" (p. 342) — occupants whose self-designing (chambers "described by ornaments and decorations… enriched with their traces") went untheorized because the discipline had no room for it. See becoming-interior, trace, interior-as-biography.
• source-notes/tang-2006-decorating-culture

Open Questions

• Spankie defines the occupant-designer by "the lack of control over the end product" — but Freud controlled his end product absolutely (he was the room's only user, and had it recreated in London "in the same order"). Is the occupant-as-designer strongest precisely where occupation is single-user and long-term — and does the concept survive the multi-occupant, high-turnover interior?
• What distinguishes ordinary rearranging from an arrangement that becomes part of a discipline's instrument? Is it the duration of occupation, the recording (Freud's writing), or the feedback between room and work?
• Baldwin's decorator and Spankie's occupant both end in the occupant's signature — is "occupant as designer" the secret ideology of the decorating tradition (the room must look un-designed by anyone but its occupant) or its genuine critique?
• If the occupant's medium is "the relationship of its parts rather than by conventional design drawings" (Spankie, on Freud's room), what would a design education for arranging — rather than for form-making — look like? (Cf. the Reader's pedagogical register, Smith 2018.)
• Berger's "Appropriating the Everyday" makes the occupant's misuse a designed-for condition ("allow the users to be part of the (design) process") — but does designing-for-misuse sterilize it (cf. Baldwin's prohibition on the object that "winks"), or is the coat-over-the-handrail precisely the kind of appropriation that survives invitation?
• Guggenheim's scale-figure diagnosis dates the user's representational absence to the 1970s — yet the concept's own canonical case (Freud, via Spankie) is exactly the representation architectural history never made. Is the occupant-as-designer concept the recovery Guggenheim's diagnosis demands — and does the sociological dominance thesis ("the building is now largely defined by its uses") make the occupant the final author of every changed building?