Occupying Architecture

There are two occupations of architecture – the architect and the user. Both make architecture – the former by design, the latter by use. But the terms architect and user are not mutually exclusive: they exist within each other. Just as the architect is a user as well as a creator, the user can be an (illegal) architect, occupying and making architecture through both use and design. Architects resist such intrusions into the body of their profession, and into the body of their architecture. Many architects falsely assume that architecture is merely a physical phenomena with specific material and dimensions – a building, but not any building: their building unoccupied. This book explores the relationship between the architect, the user and architecture, revealing that architecture is not just a building but that it is the relation between an object and its occupant. The contributors discuss how and why architectural production and discourse ignores the user, focussing on what is crucially absent from present debates and practice.
Beginning with the architect, the book proceeds to explore models for architectural practice that actively engage the issue of use, and concludes with examination of the user. Occupying Architecture proposes a complete re-working of the relations between design and experience to transform practices of the architect, and ways of seeing and using architecture. Architecture can be made by anyone and of anything: it is a guestion not an answer. Iain Borden, The Bartlett, University College London, Mark Cousins, Architectural Association, Paul Davies, South Bank University and Architectural Association, Fat, Greenw