The 'Bread & Butter' of Architecture: Investigating Everyday Practices

Author: Ricardo Agarez & Nelson Mota (editors)
Year: 2015
Source type: article (introductory essay to a themed issue of Footprint)
Raw file: raw/articles/agarez-mota-2015-bread-butter-architecture.md

Summary

The editors introduce a themed issue of Footprint on the "bread-and-butter" of architecture: the ordinary, quotidian, salaried and bureaucratic work of architects that mainstream, hagiographic historiography neglects. Taking Sir John Summerson's mid-century writings as a starting point, they challenge the "resistant hero-genius" model of the architect and argue for a flat ontology of architectural production in place of a "split ontology" that separates high from low, genius from banality. The essay advances a political case for recovering the "minor," collaborative, and invisible everyday of the profession.

Key Claims

• The architectural profession's self-image is dominated by the "resistant hero-genius" figure; architects themselves belittle or disavow their "bread-and-butter" works as second-rate, in a self-prejudice rooted in an enduring "strain of artistic individualism" in architectural ideology (citing Andrew Saint).
• Salaried, departmental, and bureaucratic architecture — e.g. the London County Council Architects' Department, the TVA, Portuguese public-sector offices — was central to professional survival and to disseminating modernism, yet falls through the cracks of a "markedly celebratory architecture culture."
• The editors aim to move from a "split ontology" (high vs. low, genius vs. banal) toward a flat ontology, borrowing Tim Gough's warning against "the prejudice of the split."
• Authorship and collaborative/interdisciplinary teamwork: women architects (Elizabeth Denby, the Parlour project) and anonymous collective enterprises (TVA) show how single authorship fades in the everyday of practice.
• Against the eroding figure of the anonymous spatial agent under neoliberalism, the issue calls for attending to the "other ways of doing architecture" (Jeremy Till, Tatjana Schneider, spatial agency) beyond the mythology of the sole architect-author.

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Architecture · Flat Ontology · Authorship · Ideology
Authors: John Summerson · Ricardo Agarez & Nelson Mota
Debates: Genius vs. Bureaucracy
Related source notes: Wallenstein 2016 — Architecture, Critique, Ideology

Direct Quotes

"bread, butter, and the opportunity to build" (quoting Summerson's 'Bread & Butter and Architecture', 1942)

"a building is significant or insignificant in so far as it incorporates an idea or ideas conceived by its individual designer, and the history of architecture becomes the web of such significant ideas, worked out in special buildings." (quoting Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect, 1983)

"the prejudice of the split" (quoting Tim Gough, 'Architecture is Always in the Middle...')

"the mythological hero-author" — "a comforting familiarity with genius that disguises the reality of how little of the built environment is associated with any architect-author whatsoever." (paraphrasing Jeremy Till & Tatjana Schneider)

Open Questions

• How is the "everyday of architecture" (the professional everyday) related to the broader "everyday" of users and inhabitants theorized by de Certeau and Lefebvre?
• Can a flat ontology of production be reconciled with the continued power of authorship as a marker of creative responsibility?