Patterns of occupation

‘Home is represented not by a house, but by a practice or set of practices. Everyone has his own’. 1 This paper proposes that interior space is not a series of still lives but rather it gains meaning and significance through its occupation. This shifts the focus from the ‘object’, the architecture, to the ‘subject’, the occupant and places emphasis on what we have termed ‘patterns of occupation’, constructed through acts of ritual, arrangement, order and repetition. Suggesting that occupation precedes the physical enclosure, the paper will go on to argue that interior space is defined by the user’s impulse to arrange and order their space, rather than by the conscious actions of the designer. This impulse for order can, however, be at odds with the inevitable disorder created through the act of occupation, thereby establishing a cyclical, dialectical logic. We claim this dialectic or tension is a creative drive in terms of how we occupy and construct space as it intriguingly echoes the workings of the human psyche. The paper begins by examining the notions of ritual, arrangement, order and repetition and then considers how these might be applied as analytical tools to the definition of an interior space. Then, looking in particular at how Sigmund Freud organized his own rooms, we suggest that his psychoanalytical enterprise is entwined with the ordering and arrangement of interiority, physical as well as psychological, and that this ordering and arrangement are inherent to the practice of occupation. In sum, through ritual, arrangement, order and repetition, Freud’s interior came to delineate a topology of the inner self, and as such it may be read as a paradigm both for psychoanalysis and for interior design disciplines.