ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to disturb the complexity of human occupation, to embrace a diverse range of vantage points conceptual, theoretical and pragmatic and to reveal something of the more intangible underlying realities. It considers occupation in terms of the relationship between the interior of the body, the body itself, and the exterior world. By focusing on two museums, Sir John Soane's house as museum and Kodja Place, the book shows how these museums expose the concept of occupation in terms of ruin, repudiation and revolution: that it is not simply a question of the reliquary harbouring objects. The book looks at grand, revolutionary visions as the suppressors of human drives; at urban sexualization as a subjugatory positioning of the female; at the earth and floor as embodied memory and imagination; and lastly, at abandoned asylums as a juxtaposition of curiosity, fear, myth and experience.
