Death of the architect: Appropriation and interior architecture

Author: Markus Berger Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 40 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge) Raw file: raw/chapters/berger-2018-death-of-the-architect.md

Summary

Berger transfers Roland Barthes's 1967 "death of the author" to architecture: decentering the architect as a "god-like" author makes lived experience central to the production of space and opens the built environment "to multiple meanings/readings and creative appropriation for making and remaking the world we live in." Because most construction is the reuse of existing buildings, this relocation is interior architecture's disciplinary opportunity — the chapter repositions the "much younger disciplines of interior architecture and interior design as not marginal but integral" to architecture. Through the OED's registers of appropriation, Lefebvre's definition of appropriation as resistance to domination, the German Aneignung (both "to take away" and "to learn"), the palimpsest (Machado), the art-historical lineage (collage, readymade, assemblage), and his own Copyshop project, Berger proposes appropriation as interior architecture's mode of practice: a slow, self-conscious, rebellious, and creative "apprenticeship" of taking over existing buildings, whose pasts must be read through their "diverse social and cultural lives" rather than a singular architectural origin.

Key Claims

The death-of-the-author transfer: when Barthes declared the death of the author in 1967, he "freed the text from the dominant 'god-like' theological presence of the writer, best captured for architecture in Ayn Rand's towering depiction of Howard Roark who 'held his truth above all things and against all men.'" The heroic architect has "dominated much of the history of modern architecture, with manifestos, changes in style, and advancements in material and technology subsumed under his singular creative authority."
The stake of decentering: "By decentering the architect as a god-like author, following Barthes's cue, could we not engage architecture and its interiority differently?" — it allows "the lived experience of architecture (like Barthes's reader) to become more central to our understanding of the production of space," and, "by relinquishing origins and authorial intent, the built environment can be opened up to multiple meanings/readings and creative appropriation for making and remaking the world we live in."
The demographic fact of reuse: "most of the construction industry in the United States is focused on the reuse of existing buildings, and the market for green buildings is exploding; the lion's share of the opportunity exists in retrofits, not new buildings" (note 3: over 77.9 billion square feet of US commercial space, only a small percentage new each year; the retrofit market predicted at $10–15 billion by 2014).
The historiographic consequence: remaking the existing built environment "requires a complete reconceptualization of architectural history and theory. The past of buildings cannot be merely narrated from a singular architectural origin, but rather has to be thought through its diverse social and cultural lives." The building's history is nonlinear: "the forms and spaces accumulate meanings through years of appropriation and acts of living."
The etymology of appropriation (OED): from the Latin "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'" — "laden with both negative and positive meanings": "privatization, theft, borrowing, copying, or adaptation."
The cultural-theory charge: appropriation in cultural theory is "the adoption of elements of one culture by members of a different cultural group," especially "without the consent of the originating culture, and when the appropriating group has historically oppressed members of the originating culture" (Caceda) — so "an act of appropriation can become a sign of submission to a dominant culture or of rebellion against it."
Lefebvre's definition: in The Production of Space, Lefebvre "defines 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 we find ourselves within."
The photographic erasure of habitation: "Architects, architectural historians, and photographers for architectural work tend to view and represent buildings as pristine, untouched by any real human interaction. Any disturbance in the form of use, practices of habitation, and alterations by people's belongings and lifestyles is considered as a violation of the 'real' architecture – to be erased out of the visual record."
The two views of acts of living: "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."
Appropriation in art (OED): "practice or technique of reworking the images or styles contained in earlier works of art, esp. (in later use) in order to provoke critical reevaluation … or to challenge notions of individual creativity or authenticity in art." Art conceptualized appropriation "not just as a rebellious act, but also as a deeply creative one."
The art lineage: "Words and techniques like collage, bricolage, montage, pastiche, and assemblage come to mind. From cubist compositions of newspaper cuttings, wine labels, etc. to Marcel Duchamp's 'ready-made' urinal to Barbara Kruger's reinterpretation of found photos, appropriation in art has unsettled our preconceived notion of things/objects and their place in time, and in so doing it has shown us the creative possibilities of rendering multiple points of view and nonlinear time."
Nelson's semiotic formula: appropriation is "a distortion, not a negation of the prior semiotic assemblage" (Robert Nelson, Critical Terms for Art History, p. 163) — its potential "to make us think and interpret anew lies in our very recognition of these historical and cultural references."
The constructed past as raw material: "These references are not sacrosanct, to be enshrined in one dominant narrative, but rather elements of a constructed past which we must draw upon as creative raw material to give meaning to our present."
The norm of architectural appropriation: "if we conceive of the architectural intervention as appropriation, then it must be self-conscious, rebellious, and creative in disposition."
Ancient appropriation: the reuse of building materials, "as of spoils after a war, is as old as the built environment. These ancient appropriations did not simply recreate something 'authentic,' but rather mobilized a set of references to shape public memories and display power."
The double rejection: against conservation's attempt "to return to and 'fix' a building to a singular mythological origin" and developers' erasure of "its undesirable past to repurpose an interior," appropriation "allows us to form a far more dynamic relationship with the living and breathing spaces that we take over and remake in new fields of meaning. Instead of viewing a building with a single identity, appropriation acknowledges the potential of multiple authors, multiple pasts, and the formation of a multiplicity of futures."
Aneignung's double meaning: the German word for appropriation "has two very different meanings: to take something away, and to learn something" — the learning meaning ("to train until one has mastery and is able to make one's own") "is what sets aneignung apart from the English 'appropriation.'" In German-speaking countries a craft "is still learned through the old medieval institution of apprenticeships, and an apprentice learns the craft through appropriation."
Copying as the first process: "The apprentice learns through copying the matter; duplication and repetition without any original thought or experimentation is integral to the first process of appropriation of the master's skills."
Sennett's slow craft time: "Craftsmen take pride most in skills that mature. This is why simple imitation is not a sustaining satisfaction; the skill has to evolve… Slow craft time also enables the work of reflection and imagination – which the push for quick results cannot. Mature means long; one takes lasting ownership of the skill" (The Craftsman, p. 295).
Tradition as appropriation: appropriation "is the slow and long accumulation of skills that become 'one's own.' This is central to the making of 'tradition,' but it is not a static tradition, for as a set of skills become 'one's own,' the very achievement of mastery requires the apprentice to add something to what has been copied. Thus appropriation in this sense also recognizes slow change that is integral to 'taking' and remaking."
The guru-shishya critique of "influence": art history's focus on stand-apart originality understands transmission only as traceable "influence"; Indian classical music's guru-shishya tradition shows the alternative — the student "must add something to the technical mastery he receives… not with the grand gesture of 'originality,' but rather it is the subtle soul force of creativity."
The palimpsest (Machado, 1976): "remodeling can be seen as writing over, as underlining, as partially erasing, as interstitial writing, as a way of qualifying, accentuating, quoting, commenting upon, as digression, interlude, or interval, as a way of writing parenthetically, of setting off by punctuation, as a new form of an old story" ("Old Buildings as Palimpsest," Progressive Architecture 57, pp. 47–49). The repurposed building becomes "an encounter between layers of signs"; "a new plot is composed out of the old words, a new interpretation has taken place."
The self-critique of interior architecture: "Unfortunately, interior architecture largely ignores the rich semiotics and the multilayered histories of buildings, and follows instead a few simple approaches. Existing spaces and buildings are either completely rewritten or overwritten without leaving any traces of the earlier 'words,' or the new design is merely juxtaposed against the old in order to create a contrast. Both of these forms of interventions… desire a tabula rasa, a clear canvas on which the architect's authorship can be clearly differentiated and is visible to all."
The aneignung alternative: "if the ethos of architectural intervention took the form of aneignung then it would have a far more vivid canvas of habitation to 'take away' from and add to, as an apprentice or a shishya must do to become a craftsman or guru, with the slow and subtle life force of creativity."
The legal economy of copying: "So much fear has been created around copying as the antithesis of originality, that repetitive copying has largely been removed from our education systems, and a huge body of laws on intellectual property have made appropriation a dangerous, instead of creative, task."
Copyshop (Copenhagen, 2005–2007): Berger's former-retail-site project "became a platform for discussion of copyrights, patents, and intellectual property," critiquing IP's "control over the value and distribution of products in the market place" by participating in the marketplace — "creating merchandise such as 'modified originals,' 'improved copies,' 'political anti-brands,' or the 'Supercopy' as a new original."
Transformation as method: "To appropriate, to rewrite, or to recontextualize is to transform something from one state into another state, and as a process it can generate the possibilities of simultaneously engaging multiple points of view and creating new forms of multi-authorship and multidimensionality."
Interior architecture's borrowed toolbox: the discipline "could apply and appropriate the techniques used in art, such as the mentioned collage, bricolage, montage, pastiche, and assemblage, as well as other more human- and environment-centered approaches."
Appropriating the Everyday: inhabitants already appropriate — "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" — and designing with this "would allow the users to be part of the (design) process, shaping the environment as an active part of habitation."
Appropriating the Appropriation: a second named strategy — "we question and expand on the terms of originality, authorship, and authenticity in transformations. Here we deal with multiple forms of authors and originals to find the values of various sources and understand design as a continuation of possible further interventions in the future."
Eliot's hierarchy of taking: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different" (The Sacred Wood).
Against the recuperative project: Berger endorses Sponsler's target — "the recuperative project preoccupied with beginnings, sources, and the recovery of lost originals" — and her alternative: appropriation "emphasizes the act of taking as 'active, subjective, and motivated'" — "an active, subjective, and motivated strategy that emphasizes movement rather than stasis."
The movement thesis: via Harry Mathews ("all books come from other books"; "what matters in writing, as in music, is what's going on between the words; the movement is what matters, rather than whatever is being said") and Godard ("it's not where you take things from, it's where you take them to") — appropriation refocuses the field "beyond the formal and visual, further valuing the existing as essence for a new discourse of context, as understanding of space and place, and as new interpretations of narration that include memory."
The never-completed work (Valéry): "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations" — the building as permanently unfinished, each intervention one stage in a series of inner transformations.

Connections

Concepts: death of the author — the chapter's frame; appropriation — the central concept, here given its disciplinary form; aneignung — the German double meaning (taking + learning); palimpsest — Machado's image of the layered building; authorship — single authorship unsettled, "multiple authors, multiple pasts"; adaptive-reuse — the industry context ("retrofits, not new buildings") and the practice the chapter theorizes; tabula-rasa — the mindset Berger indicts (including interior architecture's own); interior-architecture — the discipline relocated "as not marginal but integral"; readymade — Duchamp's urinal in the art lineage; montage, assemblage — the transferable techniques; tradition — apprenticeship and the guru-shishya making of tradition; repetition — "duplication and repetition" as appropriation's first process; everyday-life — "Appropriating the Everyday"; occupant-as-designer — users "shaping the environment as an active part of habitation"; semiotics — the building as text, "layers of signs"; trace — the "traces of the earlier 'words'"; sustainability — the retrofit/green-building market; practiced-place — appropriation as the making of space by practice.

Authors: Henri Lefebvre — the Production of Space definition of appropriation; Gregory Marinic — editor of the volume. Named in the text without pages (see log): Roland Barthes, Ayn Rand, Richard Sennett, Rodolfo Machado, Robert S. Nelson, Claire Sponsler, Harry Mathews, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Duchamp, Barbara Kruger, Shepard Fairey, Eden Caceda, Kathleen Ashley & Véronique Plesch, Heinrich Hermann, Liliane Wong.

Debates: Interior Design vs. Architecture — the "not marginal but integral" relocation; The Everyday vs. Iconic Architecture — appropriation's view of habitation against the heroic image of the pristine building; Tradition vs. Innovation — tradition as slow appropriation.

Related source notes: Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the readymade and adaptive reuse's mimetic tactics, which Berger's chapter generalizes into the discipline's mode; (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — alteration as historical practice, the historiographic twin of Berger's nonlinear building history; The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1984) — the everyday tactic of making do; Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — the reuse industry's scale; Internal disconnect (Marinic 2018) — the developer-erasure pole Berger names.

Direct Quotes

"This disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins" (opening epigraph, quoting Barthes's "The Death of the Author")

"[Howard Roark] held his truth above all things and against all men" (quoting Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, p. 711)

"The past of buildings cannot be merely narrated from a singular architectural origin, but rather has to be thought through its diverse social and cultural lives." (opening)

"The architect can no longer simply represent the body and soul of a building, rather the forms and spaces accumulate meanings through years of appropriation and acts of living." (opening)

"the lion's share of the opportunity exists in retrofits, not new buildings" (opening)

"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." ("The art of appropriation")

"In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre defines appropriation as a deliberate act to dissipate or replace feelings of domination. In this sense, it can be understood as both an act of rebellion against authority and a way of negotiating the structures of inequality we find ourselves within." ("The art of appropriation")

"Appropriation unsettles ideas of single authorship, originality, and authenticity established by conventional art history, but the relating of the old to the new is a creative intervention that sets into motion the many possibilities of recontextualization." ("The art of appropriation")

"Appropriation, as Robert Nelson has explained, is 'a distortion, not a negation of the prior semiotic assemblage.'" ("The art of appropriation," n. 6, p. 163)

"These references are not sacrosanct, to be enshrined in one dominant narrative, but rather elements of a constructed past which we must draw upon as creative raw material to give meaning to our present." ("The art of appropriation")

"if we conceive of the architectural intervention as appropriation, then it must be self-conscious, rebellious, and creative in disposition." ("The art of appropriation")

"Instead of attempting to return to and 'fix' a building to a singular mythological origin, as much of conservation does, or of entirely erasing its undesirable past to repurpose an interior, as developers do, appropriation as architectural practice allows us to form a far more dynamic relationship with the living and breathing spaces that we take over and remake in new fields of meaning." ("The art of appropriation")

"Instead of viewing a building with a single identity, appropriation acknowledges the potential of multiple authors, multiple pasts, and the formation of a multiplicity of futures" ("The art of appropriation")

"The German word for appropriation, aneignung, has two very different meanings: to take something away, and to learn something." ("An apprentice of appropriation")

"The apprentice learns through copying the matter; duplication and repetition without any original thought or experimentation is integral to the first process of appropriation of the master's skills." ("An apprentice of appropriation")

"Craftsmen take pride most in skills that mature. This is why simple imitation is not a sustaining satisfaction; the skill has to evolve… Slow craft time also enables the work of reflection and imagination – which the push for quick results cannot. Mature means long; one takes lasting ownership of the skill." (Sennett, The Craftsman, p. 295, quoted)

"That which he adds is not with the grand gesture of 'originality,' but rather it is the subtle soul force of creativity." ("An apprentice of appropriation," on the guru-shishya tradition)

"remodeling can be seen as writing over, as underlining, as partially erasing, as interstitial writing, as a way of qualifying, accentuating, quoting, commenting upon, as digression, interlude, or interval, as a way of writing parenthetically, of setting off by punctuation, as a new form of an old story" (Machado, "Old Buildings as Palimpsest," quoted; Progressive Architecture 57, 1976, pp. 47–49)

"a new plot is composed out of the old words, a new interpretation has taken place" (Machado, quoted, n. 10)

"Unfortunately, interior architecture largely ignores the rich semiotics and the multilayered histories of buildings, and follows instead a few simple approaches." ("An apprentice of appropriation")

"They desire a tabula rasa, a clear canvas on which the architect's authorship can be clearly differentiated and is visible to all; but if the ethos of architectural intervention took the form of aneignung then it would have a far more vivid canvas of habitation to 'take away' from and add to, as an apprentice or a shishya must do to become a craftsman or guru, with the slow and subtle life force of creativity." ("An apprentice of appropriation")

"So much fear has been created around copying as the antithesis of originality, that repetitive copying has largely been removed from our education systems, and a huge body of laws on intellectual property have made appropriation a dangerous, instead of creative, task." ("The copy toolbox")

"To appropriate, to rewrite, or to recontextualize is to transform something from one state into another state, and as a process it can generate the possibilities of simultaneously engaging multiple points of view and creating new forms of multi-authorship and multidimensionality." ("The copy toolbox")

"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" ("The copy toolbox," on "Appropriating the Everyday")

"This would allow the users to be part of the (design) process, shaping the environment as an active part of habitation" ("The copy toolbox")

"Here we deal with multiple forms of authors and originals to find the values of various sources and understand design as a continuation of possible further interventions in the future." ("The copy toolbox," on "Appropriating the Appropriation")

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." (T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, quoted in "A travelogue")

"Interior architecture must break away from the frameworks of conventional architectural history and theory and develop its own conceptual tools that can reshape architecture as well." ("A travelogue")

"the recuperative project preoccupied with beginnings, sources, and the recovery of lost originals" (Sponsler, quoted in "A travelogue")

"Appropriation in a lexicon for interior architecture has the same potential, to be an active, subjective, and motivated strategy that emphasizes movement rather than stasis." ("A travelogue")

"all books come from other books" and "[w]hat matters in writing, as in music, is what's going on between the words; the movement is what matters, rather than whatever is being said." (Harry Mathews, quoted in "A travelogue")

"it's not where you take things from, it's where you take them to" (Jean-Luc Godard, quoted in "A travelogue")

"A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations." (Paul Valéry, "Recollection," quoted as the chapter's closing epigraph)

Open Questions

The chapter indicts interior architecture itself ("Unfortunately, interior architecture largely ignores the rich semiotics…") — can a discipline founded on alteration actually practice aneignung (the palimpsest's "new plot… out of the old words"), or do the professional structures of brief, budget, and authorial portfolio push every intervention back toward the rewrite/juxtapose dyad Berger diagnoses?
Berger's two strategies — "Appropriating the Everyday" (the user's resourceful misuse) and "Appropriating the Appropriation" (design as continuation) — remain sketches: what would a design education built on copying-and-adding (the aneignung of the apprenticeship model) look like inside a studio system organized around "original" thesis projects?
If "all books come from other books" and the work is "never completed… one stage in a series of inner transformations," does architectural copyright — the legal regime Berger's Copyshop critiqued — become structurally incompatible with the appropriation discipline?
Is appropriation's anti-originary stance compatible with the cultural-theory meaning Berger himself cites (adoption "without the consent of the originating culture")? The chapter holds both senses together (rebellion and domination) without settling when taking-over becomes taking-from.
How does Berger's Aneignung (taking + learning) relate to Lefebvre's appropriation-as-resistance and to the Spuybroek/Heller everyday-appropriation registers in this wiki — is the pedagogical meaning a third register, or the slow-craft mechanism underlying the others?