Antonio Cantero

Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
a.cantero@tudelft.nl

Lived-In Doubles: Post-Occupancy and the Rewriting of Architectural Authorship

In architectural narratives, the completion of a building often signals the culmination of authorship. Yet post-occupancy transformations challenge this closure, revealing a duplicated reality in which users operate as co-authors through lived experience. This paper explores the duality between the projected and the lived in Le Corbusier’s Quartiers Modernes Frugès in Pessac, using Philippe Boudon’s Lived-In Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited (1972) as both subject and method. Based on interviews with residents and design actors, Boudon’s investigation implicitly articulates a post-occupancy evaluation (POE)—one where user-driven transformations overwrite the architectural original with spatial adaptations.

Revisiting Boudon’s study through the lens of POE, the paper examines how occupation produces a ‘second architecture’: a lived-in, inhabited version of the project that exists in tension with its intended form. Drawing on contemporary POE frameworks, the study positions Boudon’s work as an early exploration of spatial authorship divided between the architect and the inhabitant. By comparing evaluative methods and resident modifications, the paper reveals how the building becomes a double of itself: the designed and the transformed, the envisioned and the lived.

Far from being mere deviations, these user interventions offer an alternative authorship—a reflective counterpart to architectural intention. In doing so, the paper reframes POE not as critique, but as a mechanism for revealing architectural duplicity: one rooted in the coexistence of occupation and design. This theoretical repositioning aligns with broader inquiries into architectural doubles, suggesting that the lived environment is always already a twin to its uninhabited self.

Keywords: post-occupancy evaluation; oral history; architectural theory; adaptive reuse; user-centred design.