Hoardspace
Within the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that nearly inexhaustible compendium of human behaviors odd and unapproved, there is only one disorder that features, as a diagnostic criteria, the misuse of space. This figure—this mentally unfit individual who offends the sensibilities of the psychiatrist and the architect in equal measure—is the hoarder.
Due to its recent reality TV popularity, the symptoms of Hoarding Disorder (HD) are well known: its sufferers accumulate large quantities of possessions, often of limited or varied value, which they are then unable to discard. This ceaselessly growing mass of things piles up in the hoarder’s home, and it is here that the architectural dimension comes into play. For, according to the DSM, the accumulation of possessions only becomes a diagnosable problem when these objects “congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromise their intended use.” Bric-a-brac on its own does not a hoarder make; it is the placement of such objects in the wrong space that constitutes the disorder.
Within the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that nearly inexhaustible compendium of human behaviors odd and unapproved, there is only one disorder that features, as a diagnostic criteria, the misuse of space. This figure—this mentally unfit individual who offends the sensibilities of the psychiatrist and the architect in equal measure—is the hoarder.
Due to its recent reality TV popularity, the symptoms of Hoarding Disorder (HD) are well known: its sufferers accumulate large quantities of possessions, often of limited or varied value, which they are then unable to discard. This ceaselessly growing mass of things piles up in the hoarder’s home, and it is here that the architectural dimension comes into play. For, according to the DSM, the accumulation of possessions only becomes a diagnosable problem when these objects “congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromise their intended use.” Bric-a-brac on its own does not a hoarder make; it is the placement of such objects in the wrong space that constitutes the disorder.
While these wrong spaces are manifold in number (it has been estimated that anywhere from 2-6% of the population fill their homes with hoards) there is one space that has been especially instrumental in making HD a diagnosable disease: the house depicted in the Clutter Image Rating Scale. A tool for assessing the presence and severity of hoarding, the Clutter Image Rating Scale is comprised of images of a prototypical living room, bedroom, and kitchen, each room represented via a grid of nine photographs showing the area in increasing states of disarray. These gradational messes serve as the standard measure against which professionals judge individual hoarding cases. If, as many argue, hoarders suffer from a heightened sensitivity to the aesthetic or otherwise qualities of an object that leads them to treat their possessions as singular and unique—and therefore not reducible to the abstract categories via which organization is achieved—the Clutter Image Rating Scale counters this mode of viewing. Via this device, the thousands of distinct objects that comprise a hoard are condensed into an ordered and rational nine point scale.
What would happen, however, if we refused this act of enclosure? With Hoardspace, Familiars Strangers has chosen to view this influential house not through the eyes of the scientist, who seeks to use it as a device for producing an abstraction, but through the eyes of the hoarder, whose perceptiveness to the infinite details of the world only produces a disordered plenitude. In this expansive register the house ceases to be a standardized background of rooms to instead become a collection of stone, wood, and brick, the end result of a Gantt sheet, the product of financial capital, the concretization of ideology, a store of embodied energy, and much, much more. Ultimately, such an unsettled, anti555-functional mode of analysis has the power to reveal new histories of the home, of domesticity, of storage—and, as such, of hoarding itself.