The Everyday (Architecture)

The interest of this paper concerns the problem about the migrant house – why has it been so difficult to define? In order to examine the problem of the lack of literature on the migrant house it is important to look at the literature on the Australian house, and to ...

One of the enduring origin myths of America is the idea of the New England village. As a symbol of how to make place, the story of New England represents the story of the nation, with the former being smoothed over and whitewashed to relieve the tensions of the latter. The mythology of New England reveals the necessity of fabricating heritage as a means to convey truth — the world, not as it is, but as it should be. It is the process of constructing America as a cultural landscape, and its relation to the enduring ideal of the New England village, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, that this article addresses.

Come è possibile accostare l’estetica, ovvero lo studio dell’arte e del bello, alla vita di tutti giorni? Eppure nell’attuale dibattito anglo-americano questa locuzione ossimorica sta prendendo sempre più consistenza teorica nell’ambito di una nuova disciplina, l’Everyday Aesthetics. Il libro si propone di presentare, per la prima volta in lingua italiana, questo recente campo di indagine, intrecciando le ricerche anglo-americane sull’Everyday Aesthetics e quelle europee sull’estetizzazione del reale. Da queste analisi appare evidente che l’estetica ha ormai cessato di essere una filosofia riferita a uno specifico oggetto di studio (arte bella), ed è diventata un paradigma transdisciplinare, aperto alle pratiche della vita di ogni giorno (cura del corpo, cibo, moda, design). Tuttavia tale ampliamento di orizzonti verso la quotidianità non deve volgersi a una bellezza superficiale e consumistica, come spesso accade, ma all’acquisizione di una consapevolezza corporea (aisthesis) capace di guidarci verso scelte più responsabili e di indurci ad avere maggiore cura di noi stessi, degli altri e dell’ambiente in cui viviamo.

Indoor swap meets proliferated within metropolitan Los Angeles's rapidly diversifying inner suburbs throughout the 1980s and 1990s, transforming onetime retail and industrial buildings into multitenant vendor markets. Relying on architectural and programmatic theming to attract Latinx shoppers, many swap meet managers built market environments that resembled Mexican mercados and tianguis. While some urbanists have interpreted these markets as sites of "Latino Urbanism," their Korean ownership, large cohorts of Asian vendors and Black shoppers, and ties to Asian banking and garment industries complicate these narratives. Tracing the origins of this Korean-dominated business niche through case studies in Koreatown, Lynwood, South Los Angeles, and Anaheim, this article illustrates how shoppers and vendors used swap meets' non-White social environments to negotiate class and social differences. Rather than essentializing these market environments as "Latinx" spaces, this article argues that swap meets are better understood as fertile sites of material and social exchange across ethnic and class lines.

The paper explores Tati's use of new film media in 'Playtime' in ways that reveal more fundamental modes of social, mimetic and situational mediation as performed in the film by architects, and architect-like characters, and by the architectural settings which Jacques Tati devised.

This paper proposes a framework for understanding what novelist Georges Perec has called “the rest” that we live through, the qualities of experience and meaning-making in everyday, in-between spaces, and the ways in which people make sense of the big world through the small. The work explores how common neighborhood places are essential to people’s lives, and its framework of “layered dynamics” suggests ways of understanding an individual epistemology of everyday place. The paper grapples with what Doreen Massey has called a “global sense of the local” and how the meanings we make in our most common places relate to our understanding of the larger world, as well as the reciprocal process by which place helps shape us. Drawing on environmental psychology and differing theoretical conceptions of the individual, as well as innovative methods involving neighborhood tours and photographs with residents of a small neighborhood in Oakland, California, this work explores how, through emergent and often conflicting experiences, the everyday physical world around us derives a variety of individual significances. This paper suggests that these spaces are crucial for study and concern, not only for environmental psychologists and geographers but also for planners. The framework proposed here is a range of dynamic and emergent layers that let us understand the complexity of what neighborhoods are really for: as the sites where individual and place meanings are made through a reciprocal dynamic process.

This article is a proposal to address visual mapping as a means to reveal the inter- relationships between a place represented, a place lived and a place perceived. A form of critical cartography called hybrid-mapping is used to interrogate the combined sociocultural and biophysical legacies of the continually changing land- scape. This approach expressly facilitates a focused interpretation of the everyday lives of urban dwellers and the nuanced connections between landscape, history and culture. Offering to a larger conversation about landscape representation, this arti- cle introduces, situates and analyses the application of hybrid-mapping in a crea- tive research project entitled Chinatown Invisible about Manhattan’s Chinatown. The Chinatown Invisible project uses hybrid-mapping to interrogate the quotidian practice of ‘making-do’ to adapt existing urban structures to fulfil everyday needs. Capturing and understanding making-do is vital because it sheds light on the ways in which residents informally claim space and how they shape the ongoing physical evolution of their neighbourhood, establishing their ‘right to the city’. Chinatown Invisible shows how hybrid-mapping unveils the dynamics between culture and landscape in an urban setting, bridging critical geography and landscape representa- tion to examine multiple ways in which we can interact with the processes of real, imagined and perceived space.

This paper discusses the relationship between an architectural project, Giuseppe Terragni’s design of the Danteum, and a poem, Dante’s Divine Comedy. The project is of special interest precisely because it takes the poem as its architectural design program. However, in this particular case, the relationship between poetry and architecture might have been traveled in both directions and in multiple ways. Before Terragni ever interpreted it as a program of architectural design, The Divine Comedy had been an inspiration for works in numerous media including painting, sculpture, and music. While descriptions offered in hymns such as those of Paulus Silentarious on the Hagia Sophia suggest that intersections between poetry and buildings were part of the Byzantine and early Christian cultural tradition that precedes Dante’s Divine Comedy. This paper considers various echoes of The Divine Comedy and the metamorphoses of its expanded body across verbal, visual, and spatial media, while allowing that some of the spatial motifs that were incorporated in the poem have their origins in a similar translation from works in other media, including architecture. this paper questions how the internal logic of architecture, as a symbolic medium, transforms aspects of the poem: How might architecture enrich our understanding of the Comedy in ways which would otherwise not be available? The question is discussed in three parts: part one considers the possibility that architecture underlies the poem already; part two examines visual images based on the poem; part three looks at the Danteum to see how meaning has been projected and transformed. The fact that some of the central myths of a culture are distributedly recorded over many different works in different symbolic media is rather familiar. Thus, it is not particularly surprising that an individual work of art of special significance can acquire an extended body comprising subsequent re-statements in media other than the original. The question this article addresses is not why The Divine Comedy, having already served as a point of departure for paintings or sculptures, was also to serve as a point of departure for architectural design. This question only calls for a circumstantial and historical answer that is very much linked to the status of the poem in Italian culture at the time as well as to the aims of both client and architect. The possibility that the poem, prior to inspiring specific architectural designs, was itself inspired by architectural precedents expressing some of the same underlying mythological themes simply confirms that some manner of transmutation from one medium to another is not only possible, but perhaps even expected. What the article addresses instead is what, about a given work, changes as the symbolic medium changes. If meaning is to some extent dependent upon the medium in which it is constructed or expressed, then translations across media without transformation, loss or accretion are impossible. the more particular questions raised in this article are: what does our knowledge of The Divine Comedy contribute to our understanding of Terragni’s design and what does the latter contribute to our new understanding of the Comedy? To some extent these questions are related to yet another issue which is answered more clearly in this paper - in what exactly consists the act of design formulation that produces the Danteum?

When architects design their own homes, they become their own dream clients. For anyone intrigued by the possibilities of domestic architecture, One Hundred Houses for One Hundred European Architects of the Twentieth Century initially seems as if it will be a fascinating entré into the private worlds leading modern architects have built for themselves. Each house is illustrated with a floor plan and exterior and interior photographs--many in color--and each architect's major projects are listed, along with brief bibliographies. So far, so good. Cathy Curtis (Amazon.com Review)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/100-Houses-Special-Gennaro-Postiglione/dp/3822837865

The space of Lina Bo Bardi's Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo in its history and at a moment by no means ordinary but that provided plenty of room for ordinary life to unfold:
“This is the architecture of freedom,” John Cage proclaimed, as the story goes, when walking along the square on Avenida Paulista under the museum’s building block in 1985. It is not surprising that this is Lina Bo Bardi’s favorite statement about the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), since few artists of the twentieth century positioned themselves so radically against aesthetic preconceptions and within the realm of everyday life as Cage did.
Lina Bo Bardi tested the outer limits of the idea of the open ground floor, of the building block suspended from a frame, and of the transparent interior. So fundamental to modern architecture, these three ideas have been manifested in the MASP in such a massive dimension that they exceed the scope of their initial idea.

In an age where displacement and dislocation are a common place, McKenzie Wark sets out to make the best of it. In Dispositions, he creates a way of writing that can create a sense of belonging while remaining outside of the markers of a reliable identity, whether in terms of nation, profession, gender or genre. Walking a fine line between the essay, the memoir, fiction and the prose poem, Dispositions creates a nomadic geography that can find its way across the space of both the city and the space of the text. Wark reimagines Australian writing as a 'minor literature', traversing the world in its own way. As Mark Amerika says: "Dispositions reads like a philosophictional codework that samples vocabularies, manipulates meanings, and mixes discourses. Wark's tele-nomadic GPS blog style is an anti-memoir you won't forget."

This article uses two seminal 20th-century houses—Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea—to examine the natural symbol of inside and outside, which for Karsten Harries (1988, 1993, 1997)  is one important lived relationship sustaining successful architecture and place.

A fresh history of the Situationist International by the author of A Hacker Manifesto.

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles.

McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists' unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong—Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.

Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group's history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can ...

The book's jacket folds out into a poster, Totality for Beginners, a collaborative graphic essay employing text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.

This paper describes a method devised for students of architecture to explore the city through walking and mapping. The method aims to encourage students to explore space in the city not only as a geometric reality, but also as space that has symbolic significance in the memories of people and as space that is created through how people appropriate the city in their everyday lives. It was developed over a number of years in collaboration with the third-year students of the architectural design studio at the school of architecture in the University of Cape Town (UCT). Ideas on different ways of understanding space were borrowed from the philosopher Henri Lefebvre and the affordances of walking as a tool from De Certeau. The idea to use mapping in a creative process of understanding the city was inspired by Corner (1999) and later expanded through the work of Graafland (2012). One of the challenges the students faced was to find ways in which to capture information about space seen through this range of theoretical lenses in a way that would render visible the aspects of the city that otherwise would remain invisible to a designer. For this the students were encouraged to experiment with their graphic skills, through the use of notations (Allen, 2000) and graphic techniques of wayfinding. The students were provided with a matrix developed from the spatial triad offered by Lefebvre (1991b) in The Production of Space and made more accessible by commentators on Lefebvre in particular Schmid (2008). The process begins by offering the students advice from the philosopher and sociologist, de Certeau, who continued the work of Lefebvre, to 'go down below' as opposed to mapping from above, and to walk the city to discover its everyday reality. Students were introduced to the idea that walking can be seen as a tool for architects and readings on theories about walking were encouraged. Another concept borrowed from de Certeau was that of strategies and tactics. This provided a lens that would bring into focus conflicting rationalities (Watson, 2003), the tensions that exist between governing powers and the agency of people in their day-today lives that play out specifically in cities of the global south. The students were tasked to identify aspects of the urban fabric that represented power and those that were indicators of how people survived or appropriated these mechanisms of control in their daily lives. In order to ensure the exercise was relevant to architecture, the matrix based on the spatial triad was overlaid with another triad, one that captures what architects do implicitly when drawing, that is record, understand and project. The walking and mapping project was therefore structured into three phases: recording the urban fabric with a focus on the aspects related to urban governance; understanding, focussed on uncovering the invisible qualites of space as experienced by the users; and projecting an imagined world into the future that would improve on at least one of the aspects of lived realities uncovered through walking and mapping. The paper concludes by showcasing an examples of student projects that were the result of this process of discovery of the urban reality of their project site and a built work that achieved the desired transformation in question. These examples illustrate how, by engaging with space as understood by its users, students and architects alike, are able to imagine a future world in a way that is topical and resonates with the everyday challenges of people living in the city.

"Investigation on Sacndinavian architecture between the two WW. Topic was the study of what has been called "Regionalism of Internationalism".
http://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/scandinavia-anni-trenta-nineteen-thirties/libro/9788885322400
"

This research combines multiple theoretical approaches to consider the relationship between architectural spatial configurations and spatial practices in one Camden housing estate. Two primary theoretical fields are reviewed and critiqued: semiotic and structuralism and theories of the everyday. A key focus is the way in which architecture is discussed in visual or aesthetics terms with little reference to its spatial characteristics. This is diagnosed in the literature of architectural semiotics and structuralism, history and criticism of housing and everyday accounts of architecture. Using the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau the argument is made that spatial configurations are intimately linked to spatial practices. This work is partly pre-figured by social and other critiques of the perceived autonomy of the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. A review of key texts by Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman identify some of the potential of a socio-spatial approach to architectural criticism.
Within the field of the everyday (and others) the tendency towards privileging agency is countered by de Certeau’s balanced account of the relationship between forms and practices.
A review of some of the literature on Camden housing highlights the aesthetic bias setting up a sketch analysis of one estate focusing on the specificity of its spatial configurations and their relationship to practices. The case study looks at a few selected moments of a large estate in Camden, calling into play many of the issues raised, to show how specific configurations relate to present and historical forms, practices and interpretations. The intent is to provide a suggestive reading that reveals the weaknesses of previous reviews as well as pointing towards the development of a spatial approach to architecture which connects the specificity of forms to the way in which they are practiced thus highlighting the responsibility of forms.

Traditionally anthropology (aka ethnology) has been the academic arena most attentive to everyday life; it is the empirical registering of ways of life. This recording of the quotidian is a means to the end of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call a thick description. An ethnographically thick description is the way in which Jane Jacobs’s methods of the writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is most often characterized. Although it makes up a small portion of the corpus, Jacobs’s observations about the people and activities on Hudson Street (her home) are what resonate for most readers. Like anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, Jacobs was inextricably immersed in the daily lives of the people and place she was studying. In making visible the ‘street ballet’ of Greenwich Village, by recording the mundane and highly specific actions of daily life, she made the familiar strange. She made visible and significant ‘where the what’ happens and, most noteworthy, by whom.

UNPLUGGED ITALY is a collection illustrating the works and research of eight young Italian architecture firms who, in spite of the quality of their production, have never been the object of trade publications in Italy. All the selected firms are small companies, led by architects of less than 50 years of age and comprehensively representing Italy’s geographical and cultural landscape: from Studiometrico, Studioazero/Transit and Made Associati in northern Italy to Mduarchitetti and 2A+P/A in central Italy, Fgp St.udio e Sdgr Studio in the southern Campania region, and finally the deep South with Aion in Siracusa.

This paper crosses the borders of human geography to bring back two related bodies of work from experimental psychology that investigate, in an unusual and refreshingly precise way, long-standing human geographical concerns with tem-porality, place and subject formations, meaning-making and well-being. It is argued that the traffic of ideas and empirical findings between human geography and experimental psychology can be mutually profitable if, and only to the extent that, it encompasses a sustained epistemological, methodological and political critique of the disciplinary practices that have yielded those ideas and findings.

The social history of the ‘modern house’ in the early years of the Turkish Republic has predominantly been told as the story of the affluent. This group’s residential, professional and entertainment culture became a prime marker of modernisation whereas Turkish architectural historians have limited their research largely to the ‘cubic style’ single family houses built for and by the upper and middle classes. But can these models explain the complexity of the ‘modern house’ in 1930s’ Turkey? How did architectural layouts, when transferred to different social, cultural and spatial contexts, contribute to the production of gendered divisions? My article adopts domesticity, gender and class as a framework to identify the emergence of ‘indigenous’ forms of modern architecture and urbanism in early republican Ankara. Analysing the Workers’ Houses Settlement (1938), I argue that although individual units were characterised by minimalised spatial configurations, the layouts significantly deviated from Western models. Furthermore, by appropriating localised building traditions and living with extended families, lower-income residents shifted the widely disseminated image of the middle-class ideal of domesticity imported from Central and Western Europe, which has become integral to Turkey’s official discourse of modernism since the 1930s.

"This paper addresses several ideas proposed in the conference description. To begin with the paper, based on a recently completed research project, will engage with ‘alternative readings of territory and a range of spatial practices’. It does this through the identification of ‘patterns of rituals of occupation’ identifying how ‘daily routines and activity are curtailed, moulded and adapted to a particular environment.’ It will however contest the increasingly presumed domination of human agency in spatial discourses. That is, it will test whether form is as insignificant as is suggested by James Gowan’s statement: ‘I can east a sandwich in any size of room.’
This is done through a critical reading of the work of Lefebvre, de Certeau, and others. I will propose that de Certeau’s view of the relation between spatial configurations and practices achieves a (rare) dialectical balance where neither form nor practice is privileged. As such, it identifies form as an active (but not fully determinant) participant in the formation of practices, inhabitation and meaning.
The paper will sketch out the basic premises of the above authors and will identify both the strengths and gaps in applications of theories of the everyday, space and spatial practices. The paper will also highlight the difficulty (or reluctance) in translating these ideas to concrete situations. In conclusion, by reference to a mundane space and practice – the entry sequence leading to front doors in 1970s housing estates – a case will be made for how these theories can be understood on a formal level while remaining attentive to the differences of individual practices. A comparison of contemporary and historical entry sequences and individual modifications to these will suggest an arena where everyday practices, spatial form and history intersect. The aim is to suggest a way of looking at spaces that accounts for human action while acknowledging the responsibility of form."

Roads and Anthropology is the first collection of road ethnographies, edited by two pioneers in the anthropological explorations of infrastructures, the essays published in this book aim to pave the way for that rising field of anthropological research.

This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Table of Contents
-Dalakoglou D. & P. Harvey. Introduction. Roads and Anthropology: Ethnographic Perspectives on Space, Time and (Im)Mobility
-Nielsen M. Roadside Inventions: Making Time and Money Work at a Road Construction Site in Mozambique
-Campbell J. Between the Material and the Figural Road: The Incompleteness of Colonial Geographies in Amazonia
-Kernaghan R. Furrows and Walls, or the Legal Topography of a Frontier Road in Peru
-Harvey P. & H. Knox. The Enchantments of Infrastructure
-Klaeger G. Rush and Relax: the Rhythms and Speeds of Touting Perishable Products on a Ghanaian Roadside
-Pedersen M. & M. Bunkenborg Roads that Separate: Sino-Mongolian Relations in the Inner Asian Desert
- Dalakoglou D. ‘The Road from Capitalism to Capitalism’: Infrastructures of (Post)Socialism in Albania

Through discussion of the ‘Integrative Habitation Unit’ in Kiryat Gat, designed by Artur Glikson in the early 1960s, the paper reveals the processes by which the residential environment, the basis of day-to-day life, is envisioned by architects and enlisted by a nation-state attempting to build its community by reinforcing its hold on land and people. This depicts the duality of

Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration explores the interface between
migration and architecture. Cities have been substantially affected by transnational
migration but the physical manifestations of migration in architecture – and its
effect on streetscape, neighbourhood and city – have so far been under-studied.
This contributed volume examines how migrants interact with, adapt, and
construct new architecture. Looking at the physical, urban and cultural impact of
these changes on a variety of sites, the authors explore architecture as an identity
category and investigate what buildings and places associated with migration tell
us about central questions of belonging, culture, community and home in regions
such as North America, Australia and the UK.
This book makes an important contribution to debates on place identity and
the transformation of places as a result of mobility and globalised economies in
the twenty-first century.

This paper draws attention to the micro-social practices that self-organising resident groups engage in over the years that it takes to build a co-housing community. This ‘social architecture’ is what distinguishes co-housing from superficially similar shared-space neighbourhoods. Co-housing developments are attracting renewed attention in Anglophone neo-liberal economies against a backdrop of crisis in conventional housing. Discussion draws on the views of co-housing residents from participatory research from the UK, USA and Australia. By engaging with a deeper understanding of group processes, shared visions and interpersonal capabilities – the ‘glue’ binding collaborative community relations, this paper challenges the priority usually given to the material characteristics of home and neighbourhood design.

Keynote Presentation as part of KLAF 2018, Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival, Malaysia, 4 July 2018.
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DATUM:EDU
04 July 2O18, 9:OOam - 6:00pm, Plenary Hall KL Convention Centre

The architectural profession is today confronted with an increasingly complex and challenging environment. From the local to the global, the international to the vernacular, architects have to continually adjust and adapt their practice in a fast changing milieu to engage with new shifting conditions both within the profession and externally. The new generation of architects are called upon to provide better answers and solutions, to lead and inspire in a world requiring ideas, beauty, optimism and inspiration. As part of the yearly Datum:KL conference, the inaugural Datum:EDU conference is a one-day event that seeks to explore the different methods of pedagogical approaches and formats of institutions and academies across the region and internationally. How does architectural education keep track with the CHANGES in our contexts and circumstances to remain relevant in an age of the contingent. Delegates from the South East Asia (ASEAN region), Malaysia and internationally will gather in Kuala Lumpur this July 4th, 2018 to meet, network and discuss current issues on architectural education and its direction.