The role of the user
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1.3.1 Le Corbusier, Carpenter Visual Arts Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 1964. East elevation and entrance ramp. Photograph, Murray Fraser.
commissioned it. An owner-user has the opportunity to transform a space but other users, detached from the commissioning, ownership, design and management of a space, may be more likely to initiate unexpected uses because they lack a strong sense of responsibility for a space. Lefebvre describes the user in two ways, as a negative abstraction, and as an appropriator attacking the functionalist domination and fragmentation of spatial practice.3 Forty names the appropriation of existing spaces proposed by Lefebvre and situationists as an example of flexibility as a political strategy. He writes: This assumption that ‘flexibility’ is achieved through the building, and that it is the business of the architect to embed it in the design has been a general feature of the normal architectural use of the concept – and is what sets it apart from the third sense of ‘flexibility’ which sees it as not as a characteristic of buildings, but of use … In Lefebvre’s idea that through use, through positive acts of appropriation, the functionalist domination of space can be broken, ‘flexibility’ acquires its political connotation.4 3 Lefebvre, p. 369. 4 Forty, ‘Flexibility’, p.10.