The architecture of inhabitation : transgressing the boundaries of formal architecture

Abstract

This dissertation challenges the notion that architecture can ever be complete, shifting the conversation from ‘architecture as product’ to ‘architecture as process’ and effectively accepting that architecture is subject to change. The inhabitant can act as this force of change over the course of the building’s lifetime, making it ‘living’ architecture. Unfortunately, formal or conventional architecture tends to forget this, negating the dweller’s inhabitation and agency as a valid contribution to architecture. Instead, it perceives the dweller as a contingency, reducing the creative inhabitant to a generic user in an attempt to create a false sense of stability and completion. However, inhabitation and dweller agency produce their own architecture: the architecture of inhabitation. If to inhabit is to create and to contribute by means of this agency, then to inhabit is inevitably to transgress the boundaries of formal architecture. Emergent themes explore the individual and collective ways in which people engage with their domestic setting through boathouse dwellings as the prime locus of inhabitation and dweller agency. Through an ethnographic and inductive methodology, the architecture of inhabitation is uncovered as an ongoing process in which dwellers’ agency can be explored across a spectrum and is revealed to depend upon liberty and affordance. The engagement and involvement invested into space breed communal agency and collaborative spatial construction. Within the realm of the personal, the architecture of inhabitation emerges as a natural process of moulding the environment to oneself and oneself to the environment, allowing architecture to act as an extension and expression of the self. Thus, “the [dwellers]’ experiences construct the architecture as much as the architect” (Bo Bardi, n.d., as cited in Mosley & Sara, 2013, p. 54). By acknowledging the dweller as a creative agent, this study questions formal architecture and the agency of the architect. This is interpreted not as a threat, but as an opportunity to self-reflect as a profession while opening up architecture to include and enable the inhabitant and the everyday processes of inhabitation, generating new forms of hybridity and co-creation. While designing with people rather than for people is a step in the right direction, it is imperative that we seek ways to facilitate designing by people. The proposed shift in mindset reimagines our own agency as architects as a conduit for dwellers’ agency and has the potential to transform our role by expanding our scope beyond building, simultaneously reprioritising humanistic motivations.