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:

• Bread & Butter and Architecture — Summerson's original 1942 argument for salaried architecture as the future of the profession.
• 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.
• The 'Bread & Butter' of Architecture
• What the Files Reveal: Making Everyday Architecture Talk
• The Role of Consumerism in American Architecture
• Aesthetic Boredom in Everyday Architecture
• Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture
• The Everyday, Building, and Architecture (Haapala)
• Organizing the City through Architectural Projects (Grubbauer & Dimitrova)
• Between Traditionalism and Modernism (Mann 1985)
• Buildings Without Architects (May & Reid 2010)
• A Discourse on Method: The Segal System (McKean 1987)
• The Essential Method: The Segal Method (Broome)
• The Future Is Hairy (Till & Wigglesworth 2001) — the everyday, amateur, and collective authorship against the technocracy of the detail.
• Architecture in Everyday Life (Upton 2002) — grounding the everyday in material/bodily practice, dissolving the Architecture/architecture binary.
• Architecture Without Architects (Rudofsky 1964) — the foundational polemic for non-pedigreed, anonymous, communal architecture.
• 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.
• Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) — habitus as the generative principle of ordinary, uncelebrated production.
• High Street Diversity (Vaughan 2013) — the everyday spatial diversity and resilience of the high street.
• The Big Rethink Part 4: The Purposes of Architecture
• Everyday Life: Philosophical Roots and Proposals for an Interdisciplinary Debate
• The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life
• The Practice of Everyday Life
• The Age of Spectacle: Adventures in Architecture and the 21st-Century City
• The Invention of Everyday Life
• The Everyday: Wandering, Wondering. Re-Positioning Architecture, Spectacle and Everyday Life
• Contextual Counterpoint
• Sociology of Everyday Life
• Everyday Life in the Modern World
• Critique of Everyday Life
• Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment
• Meaning and Effect: Revisiting Semiotics in Architecture
• Untapped: Redefining 'Iconic' Architecture and Ideals
• Look at Me!
• Critical Regionalism: A Not So Critical Theory
• Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror
• Peter Eisenman's Cidade da Cultura Buzzes Back to Life
• The Influence of Local Fiscal Structure and Growth Control Choices on 'Big Box' Urban Sprawl in the American West
• 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.
• 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.
• 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."

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?

Theme

• Vernacular Architecture — the field's history, from ordinary building to self-build and the commercial vernacular.