Upton, Dell

Bio Sketch

Dell Upton is an American architectural historian (Professor at UCLA) specializing in vernacular and early American architecture and the material culture of the everyday. A leading figure in the "new" architectural history that refuses the high-art canon, he is known for studying architecture as part of the broader "cultural landscape" and for theorizing everyday life through bodily practice and the habitus.

Key Works

• Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (1986).
• Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (2008) — on urban life and the "right to the city" in the early republic.
• Architecture in the United States (1998) — a social/material history of American building.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Everyday Architecture
• Everyday Life
• Flat Ontology
• Habitus — Upton grounds the everyday in the habitus (Bourdieu).

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Upton is a key voice in Geoffrey's vernacular & everyday architecture area (he was logged as "page needed" in the Groth ingest). His argument in "Architecture in Everyday Life" — to ground the everyday materially/experientially and to relinquish the high/low Architecture/architecture hierarchy — directly advances Geoffrey's "flat ontology" and authorship concerns, dissolving the hero-genius/canon in favour of the everyday cultural landscape.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Architecture in Everyday Life (2002)
• Everyday life in the real world (Maycroft 2007) — Maycroft shares Upton's materialist/empirical commitment to grounding everyday-life theory in observable practice; both resist the philosophical/cultural-theory dominance of the field.

Upton draws on Pierre Bourdieu for the concept of the habitus.