Architecture in Everyday Life

Author: Dell Upton
Year: 2002 (New Literary History 33: 707–723)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/upton-2002-architecture-in-everyday-life.md

Summary

Dell Upton, a leading vernacular-architecture historian, argues that architecture's "inescapable materiality" makes it an ideal conduit to the specificity of everyday life — more concrete than the vague theories of the quotidian. He surveys how architectural writers (Wigglesworth & Till, Harris, Crawford, Ockman) have drawn on Lefebvre and de Certeau, showing that they tend to retain the binary, hierarchical thinking between "Architecture" (high, professional design) and "architecture"/the everyday (its lesser Other). Upton criticizes this as a rhetorical (linguistic) rather than material model, and proposes grounding the everyday instead in embodied bodily practice and the habitus.

Key Claims

• The everyday resists definition — it is "an Other of some sort, better defined by what it is not than by what it is." Architecture's concrete materiality, however, "makes it a natural conduit to the specificity of everyday life."
• The Architecture/architecture binary: Pevsner's bicycle shed vs. Lincoln Cathedral underwrites a chain of hierarchies — high/vernacular, modern/traditional, art/craft, elite/popular. The everyday appears as "something that accuses Architecture of its failings."
• Lefebvre's challenge: everyday life is simultaneously a colonized site of banality/passivity and "a source of potential liberation" — "something extraordinary in its very ordinariness." Lefebvre's radical demand is not to transfigure the everyday symbolically but to eradicate the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary: "There can be no Architecture, only architecture."
• de Certeau: architecture uses the everyday as a tactic — a rhetorical "guerrilla raid" on the modern landscape — echoing Certeau's strategies (space, power, the "proper") vs. tactics (time, the weak).
• The linguistic model fails: from Learning from Las Vegas' semiotics to deconstructivism, the attempt to treat buildings as language "foundered." Contemporary theorists of the everyday "overflow the rhetorical rather than action-based model."
• Upton's positive thesis: the everyday is best understood materially, through embodied practice and the habitus (Bourdieu) — "the nexus of spaces and times that repeatedly trigger bodily habits and cultural memories." "Symbolic power works partly through the control of other people's bodies," but "the unpredictability of the habitus means that no one can control the everyday." The power to organize space and time is the power to shape self and society.
• The payoff: understanding the everyday through bodily memory in organized time/space "reincorporates Architecture into the larger landscape," reuniting the ordinary and the extraordinary, and ultimately allowing us to relinquish the concept of the everyday and its high/low hierarchy.

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Everyday Architecture · Flat Ontology · Authorship
Authors: Dell Upton · Henri Lefebvre · Michel de Certeau · Jeremy Till & Sarah Wigglesworth
Debates: Genius vs. Bureaucracy — dissolves the Architecture/architecture hierarchy
Related source notes: The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau) · Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre) · The Future Is Hairy (Till & Wigglesworth)

Direct Quotes

"So architecture's materiality makes it a natural conduit to the specificity of everyday life."

"Lefebvre demands not transformation but the eradication of the distinction between the extraordinary and the ordinary. There can be no Architecture, only architecture. Lincoln Cathedral and the bicycle shed are parts of the same landscape, fragments of one whole."

"One definition of everyday life might be 'The nexus of spaces and times that repeatedly trigger bodily habits and cultural memories—the habitus.'"

"The unpredictability of the habitus means that no one can control the everyday."

Open Questions

• Does Upton's materialist/habitus grounding of the everyday offer a way beyond both the counter-modern nostalgia of "dwelling" and the spectacular economy — or does it risk a depoliticized, practice-focussed account (contrast Spencer)?