The Everyday: Wandering, Wondering. Re-Positioning Architecture, Spectacle and Everyday Life

Author: Gabu Heindl
Year: 2009 (in position alltag, HDA Graz)
Source type: article/chapter
Raw file: raw/articles/heindl-2009-everyday.md

Summary

Heindl re-positions architecture between spectacle and everyday life. She reads walking/flanerie/dérive (de Certeau's "poaching," Situationist dérive, Surrealism, Burckhardt's strollology) as an alternative, "deviant usage" of the city that turns everyday practices into "innovative forces of production." Against the hasty opposition of an "architecture of the everyday" to spectacular architecture, she draws on Hal Foster's inversion of Debord — spectacle as "an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital" — to argue that the Bilbao icon has use-value too (the "Bilbao effect"), and asks "whose use we're talking about." She ends by invoking the right to the city (Lefebvre/Harvey), Rancière's dissensus, and the need to "take position" — including the Bartleby-like power of refusal ("doing nothing").

Key Claims

• Walking as critical practice: "Every usage of the city is, implicitly, an act of building." Walking the street (de Certeau's poaching, the dérive, flanerie) frees the environment from a teleology "from A to B," turns it into a question, and produces "close usage" against the master-plan's "god-like vision" of clean surfaces.
• Against the everyday/spectacle binary: one should "not simply apply the labels '(architecture of) spectacle' and '(architecture of) use', but rather focus on their mutual translations." Following Hal Foster on Bilbao: "spectacle is 'an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital.'" "Spectacle does not only have the exchange-value ... of a glamorous commodity, but, in this case, it also has use-value" — the "Bilbao effect."
• Whose use? the spectacle→use trajectory "poses the eminent question of whose use we're talking about" — the "distribution of goods and uses"; contrary to its self-image, Bilbao architecture is "not public or free at all, but rather exclusive and private," "it produces exclusions and unequal distributions."
• Everyday as background, spectacle as foreground: (Wigley) "the huge effort devoted to creating the backdrop against which images appear"; "architecture is the surplus added to everyday life." A "shifting of the focus from the foreground to the background" — rendering visible the invisible, rupturing "the categorical differentiation that separates the everyday as unimportant from architectural importance."
• Autonomy vs. life-world (Eisenman, Tafuri, van Toorn): Eisenman's autonomy is "transgressive of its time and place"; Tafuri calls architects to "reform" within economic/technical conditions, since architecture is "an altogether negligible phenomenon." Following van Toorn, Heindl wants "a specific kind of negotiation between two constitutive politics of aesthetics: the one of the life-world and the one of autonomy which installs and allows permanent disagreement."
• Taking position / the right to the city: the right to the city "is about a right to ... changing the city"; Situationism did not "affirm or celebrate the everyday but [criticize] it and revolutionize existing conditions." Rancière: politics "always involves a break with usage ... the decision, the positing." With Wigley/Price, "doing almost nothing becomes the most powerful intervention" — the Bartleby-like "I would prefer not to."

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Everyday Architecture · Dérive · Spectacle · Gentrification
Authors: Gabu Heindl · Guy Debord · Hal Foster
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function · Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: The Society of the Spectacle (Debord) · Recodings (Foster)

Direct Quotes

"[E]veryday practices turn into innovative forces of production."

"[S]pectacle is 'an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital.'" (Hal Foster, as quoted)

"[T]he question of whose use we're talking about" — "it produces exclusions and unequal distributions."

"[T]o do almost nothing becomes the most powerful intervention." (on Wigley/Cedric Price)

Open Questions

• Can the everyday be revalued "without a-priori attributing a foregrounding of style," as Heindl argues, or does the everyday inevitably fall back into either spectacle or compensatory "social architecture"?