CLARE COOPER MARCUS DWELLS WITHIN
SUBJECT Clare Cooper Marcus
OCCUPATION Writer and professor of architecture
INTERVIEWER Berry Liberman
PHOTOGRAPHER Ramin Rahimian
LOCATION Berkeley, US
DATE October 2021
Almost 100 years ago, Carl Jung began building his retreat, a stone building in Bollingen that he went to for rest and renewal after months of hard work. He had to fetch his water from a well, light a fire to cook and be warm, and spend his days in rugged simplicity. He said it was a house that reflected his inner life – a psychological map of his own personal development. Jung believed that the psyche was always trying to lead us towards integration and wholeness, and built his home to facilitate that journey. This was the inspiration for Clare Cooper Marcus, Professor Emerita in the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, to write her remarkable book, House as a Mirror of Self, nearly 30 years ago, shining a light on the idea that we inform our homes, and they inform us in return.
Having spent much of her early career focussed on improving low-income housing, Clare came to ask deeper questions about what made a home. Her work evolved from the technical specs of a house – the arrangement and logistics of kitchen, bathroom, living room etc. – to what are the deeper, psychological and even spiritual underpinnings of the experience of home? Why can some live in a mansion and feel alienated from their surroundings, not comfortable or content, and others can live in a one-bedroom studio and feel profoundly at peace? These questions took her on a one-of-a-kind research project interviewing 60 people in the San Francisco Bay Area about their relationship to where they lived. When I read her book, I felt relief that someone had captured the profound exchange between human beings and their dwellings – not the technical, architectural or trend-driven understanding of houses – but the emotional encounter with spaces throughout our lives. I quickly realised it was written at a time of enormous social change with “The Age of Aquarius” of the 1970s, when self-transformation and spiritual openness was at a high in America. I’m not so sure the book could be written today with Instagram saturating our understanding of space creation.
With research techniques like asking her subjects to sit in a chair and “talk” to their home, and then swap roles and “be” their home talking to them – Clare’s research project was more art therapy than
