Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing

Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing

Stephen Willats, John Wiley 2001.

Followers of the 'Responsive Environments' rubric may have casually, and frequently, glanced at the term 'Personalisation' which seems reduced, in many images and schemes, to the acceptable pot plant on the balcony.

Long before social scientists decided that personalisation was a 'good thing', Stephen Willats was developing a programme of exploration which regarded such personalisation of interior space as the alternative image of banal external design. This book summarises his sequence of personal projects as well as highlighting the images which hidden faces develop as their own personal statements in interior spaces. Nothing shocking here, but the reality of a world which is kept behind walls, even in environments where there is an invitation for users to respond to the carefully contrived invitation of the manipulative 'designer.'