Everyday Architecture
Everyday Architecture
Definition
Everyday architecture refers to the ordinary, quotidian, inconspicuous, and often anonymous production of the built environment — the "bread-and-butter" work of salaried, departmental, and bureaucratic architects, as well as vernacular building practice. In this wiki the term has two linked senses: (1) the everyday of practice — the humdrum, collaborative, uncelebrated labour of architects that dominant historiography neglects; and (2) the architecture of the everyday — the ordinary built environment and its users. The concept is contested precisely because architectural culture has historically privileged the "one precious building" over this everyday mass of work.
Key Thinkers
- John Summerson — originator of the "bread-and-butter" argument: the architecture of bureaucracy renders the discipline effective in modern life.
- Ricardo Agarez & Nelson Mota — recover the everyday/salaried profession against the hero-genius myth, via a "flat ontology."
- Tim Gough — the ontology of bread-and-butter architecture as machinic assemblage; flat ontology, haecceity, and anti-nihilism.
- Benedikt Boucsein — "Grey Architecture" as everyday architecture and as a mode shaped by external conditions.
- John Chase — consumerist architecture and the commercial vernacular as everyday production.
- Bernard Rudofsky — the foundational polemic for non-pedigreed, anonymous, communal architecture (Architecture Without Architects, 1964).
- (Related: Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre on the everyday of users/inhabitants.)
Related Concepts
- Flat Ontology — the epistemological premise that refuses the high/low (genius/banal) split in order to study everyday architecture.
- Authorship — everyday architecture erodes single authorship in favour of collective, anonymous production.
- Ideology — the hero-genius myth functions ideologically to obscure everyday production.
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
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Bread & Butter and Architecture — Summerson's original 1942 argument for salaried architecture as the future of the profession.
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Architecture is Always in the Middle (Gough 2015) — bread-and-butter architecture as machinic assemblage; flat ontology and the refusal of the high/low split.
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Organizing the City through Architectural Projects (Grubbauer & Dimitrova)
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The Future Is Hairy (Till & Wigglesworth 2001) — the everyday, amateur, and collective authorship against the technocracy of the detail.
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Architecture in Everyday Life (Upton 2002) — grounding the everyday in material/bodily practice, dissolving the Architecture/architecture binary.
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Architecture Without Architects (Rudofsky 1964) — the foundational polemic for non-pedigreed, anonymous, communal architecture.
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Bourdieu for Architects (Webster 2011) — the profession's habitus and cultural capital; the "bread-and-butter" and star systems as two poles of the architectural field.
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Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) — habitus as the generative principle of ordinary, uncelebrated production.
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High Street Diversity (Vaughan 2013) — the everyday spatial diversity and resilience of the high street.
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Everyday Life: Philosophical Roots and Proposals for an Interdisciplinary Debate
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Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the users' side of the everyday built environment: "the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers" (p. 80) — planned, designed, codified production (architecture's place) versus the practiced space of everyday use; stories "organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it" (p. 79) — the everyday occupation of the planned environment as narrative practice. See practiced-place.
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The Age of Spectacle: Adventures in Architecture and the 21st-Century City
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The Everyday: Wandering, Wondering. Re-Positioning Architecture, Spectacle and Everyday Life
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A Language of Contemporary Architecture (Luna & Yim 2023) — the "Facadism" critique: if the Dom-ino system persists inside the envelope, the building remains modern regardless of façade; a method (TO/TY integration) for escaping the modernist everyday of production without resorting to stylistic battles.
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Design and Order in Everyday Life (Csikszentmihalyi 1991) — furniture (not artworks) as the most-mentioned special object in the home; the "symbolic ecology" of domestic space as the lived ground of everyday architecture.
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Architecture for Everyday Life (Swedish Association of Architects 2010) — the Swedish model as exemplar: socially conscious, consensus-based, "from the inside outwards"; Hammarby Sjöstad as "township without empty gestures"; non-exclusive systems that "include everybody."
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Inside out (Webb 2018) — the everyday of mobility: Reyner Banham's 1965 Letter from America (quoted by Webb) praising "the automobile-induced vernacular of mobile homes and drive-ins that represented a radical change in the basic programming of a building" over "the sort of corporate modern architecture purveyed by the likes of Paul Rudolph, SOM, and I.M. Pei" — the everyday roadside taken seriously as architecture's programming problem. See automobile-vernacular.
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Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the everyday object as artistic material and disciplinary program: Venturi's "vast accumulation of standard, anonymously designed products connected with architecture and construction" (quoted in the chapter) re-valued by the readymade and the tableau — Duchamp's doors and windows "stripped bare," Kienholz's domestic furniture, Osorio's "episodic fragments of interior design" — with the tactics of the everyday ("displacement, rotation, fragmentation, or dislocation of ordinary objects") offered to interior architecture and adaptive reuse as a sustainable, poetic alternative to new form. See readymade, tableau, adaptive-reuse.
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Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the vernacular's un-designed half: the garage as the everyday building-type architecture never designed ("Architecture had no response, no assimilation, and no integration – only space"), the highway-homogenized city ("only identified by their highway exit numbers"), and the everyday's inadvertent innovation-space ("Amazon, HP, Apple, Nirvana… founded within this invisible armature of suburbia"). See architectural-purgatory, automobile-vernacular.
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Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the everyday's political-urban register: quotidian action as the city's persisting public life. The chapter opens with the everyday's sharp-focus claim — "Hong Kong is a city where extreme conditions bring the everyday into sharper focus" — and closes on its mutability: "smaller actions regularly achieve the same impacts at a more quotidian scale. Streets become hair salons or workshops, shopping malls host impromptu art classes or musical performances, walkways become restaurants or mahjong parlors. This is all possible because an interior urbanism allows a mutability of hierarchy on a changing wind" (change-of-use, interior-urbanism). Everyday architecture here is not (only) the vernacular building but the daily reallocation of urban space — the planned network practiced into hair salons and mahjong parlors without any architectural authorship at all. See practiced-place, everyday-life.
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Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the designed everyday register: production housing as the everyday architecture the canon ignores — "the 'plain vanilla,' the most common and numerous types of housing and communities underway throughout the country" (p. 6), built without architects from stock plans ("since most state and local governments do not require an architectural license to design a single-family home, stock plans are distributed and marketed nationwide," p. 41), valued by square footage (p. 36), and delivered by an industry of product lines rather than works (3–5 models per community, p. 75). The register's claim is the everyday's designability: the same market that produced the garage-door streetscape can produce porches, nooks, alleys and mixed types at the same cost — "we have focused on housing types of modest size and cost in the interest of seeing new communities accommodate households from varied income levels" (p. 249). Where the page's other sources find the everyday outside design, Wentling works the other flank: the everyday as the design profession's largest unclaimed territory (see advice-literature, typology, suburbanism).
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the concept's street-level fountainhead: the sidewalk ballet as "the art form of the city… an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other" (p. 50); the everyday's built substrate as aged-buildings — "New ideas must use old buildings" (p. 188) — with the adaptations catalogue ("the town-house parlor that becomes a craftsman's showroom, the stable that becomes a house, the basement that becomes an immigrants' club, the garage or brewery that becomes a theater… the butcher shop that becomes a restaurant," p. 193) as the everyday's redesign-from-within; the corner grocery and its generic corruption ("Lone little groceries, in fact, do badly in cities as a rule. They are typically a mark of stagnant and undiverse gray area," p. 190); and the methodological claim that this fabric is knowable only from particulars: "City processes in real life are too complex to be routine, too particularized for application as abstractions" (p. 441). See sidewalk-ballet, aged-buildings, public-characters, everyday-life.
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Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the everyday register as the real ground of architectural experience: Pevsner's bicycle-shed/cathedral distinction rejected (p. 14); architecture defined by intention — a construction 'designed to be more than merely practical' (p. 17); the strip, mall, and tract house 'tell us much about who we are and about the places we want to make' (pp. 14–15); and everyday experience is 'for most people… the only reason… that architecture matters' (p. 10).
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source-notes/conroy-ethnomethodology-critical-theory-everyday
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source-notes/driscoll-2001-moving-ground-locating-everyday-life
Open Questions
- How does the "everyday of the profession" relate to the "everyday" of users theorized by de Certeau and Lefebvre? Are they continuous or distinct?
- Solomon's register makes the everyday's reallocation political ("smaller actions regularly achieve the same impacts at a more quotidian scale") — is the street-turned-salon everyday architecture's highest form (design-free, authorless, resilient) or its limit (no discipline to theorize, no record beyond occupation)? Can interior architecture claim a practice that happens "on a changing wind"?
Theme
- Vernacular Architecture — the field's history, from ordinary building to self-build and the commercial vernacular.
