Ordinary

Ignacio Fortuno Dissertation Mancherter School of Architecture. Y 6

1. INTRODUCTION
We dont ask to be eternal beings. We only ask that things do not loose all their meaning.
Antoine de Saint-Exuperg

There is a time in ones architectural education when some pragmatic decisions, concerning the ethical aspects of architecture, have to be taken if one is to ensure a long and joyful carrier. This essay is an attempt to come to terms with an architecture that not only seems to satisfy my personal ethos, but which also offers a true opportunity to track down and develop a coherent and genuine identity in the practice of architecture. What unites the subjects proposed here is a distrust of the heroic and the formally fashionable, a deep suspicion of the architectural object as a marketable commodity. Consideration of the everyday in architecture is seen as potentially able to resist the bureaucracy of controlled consumption1. The resistance lies in the focus on the quotidian, the repetitive, and the relentlessly ordinary. It is anonymous, its anonymity derived from its undated and apparently insignificant quality.
Banality? Why should the study of the banal itself be banal? Are not the surreal, the extraordinary, the surprising, even the magical, also part of the real? Why wouldnt the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?2

Further characteristics an architecture of the everyday might possess are proposed after a quick definition of the concept of everyday by the philosopher Henri Lefebvre. These are intended to be neither a blueprint nor a recipe for an architecture of the everyday but more like tentative proposals and tangential provocations that describe a territory irregular and open, inexact and conceptually fragmented. Alliances are often unlikely, contradictions blunt. There is no perfect order, no grand scheme. Historically, ordinary environment was the background against which architects built the extraordinary. However recent shifts in the structure of everyday environment shows a loss of implicit common understanding that previously enabled architects to formally enhance and innovate while still maintaining environmental coherence. Consequently, architects must now undertake a study of the ordinary as the fertile common ground in which form -and place- making are rooted.
1. Henri Lefebvre, Quotidien er Quotidiennete. Encyclopedia Universalis, vol.13

The interdependence of architecture and culture has not been sufficiently recognized. The international, consumerist architectural journalism of today violently detaches buildings from their cultural context and presents them in an arena of individual architectural showmanship.
The human task of architecture is not to beautify or to humanize the word of everyday facts, but to open up a view into the second dimension of our consciousness, memories and dreams.2

In todays neurotic architectural climate, the intellectual construction seems to be often more important and more central than a sensory and emotional encounter with the architectural work. The fierce quasi- theorizing and intellectualization accelerates alienation and separation from social reality, instead of supporting the integration of architecture and culture, artifact and mankind.

2. Juhami Pallasma, The recovery of the modern.AR -1996.

2. THE EVERYDAY AND EVERYDAYNESS

Man must be everyday, or he will not be at all. What is the goal? It is the transformation of life in its smallest, most everyday detail.1 Probably more than any other philosopher of the century, Henri Lefebvre addressed themes intrinsically relevant to urbanism and architecture: everyday life and the nature of space. Lefebvres concept of everyday life is simply real life, the here and now; it is sustenance, clothing, furniture, homes, neighborhoods, environment-i.e. material lifebut with a dramatic attitude and lyrical tone.2 He stressed that contradiction is intrinsic to its very nature. While it is the object of philosophy, it is inherently nonphilosophical; while conveying an image of stability and immutability, it is transitory and uncertain; while governed by the repetitive march of linear time, it is redeemed by the renewal of natures cyclical time; while unbearable in its monotony and routine, it is festive and playful; and while controlled by technocratic rationalism and capitalism, it stands outside of them. Everyday life embodies at once the most dreadful experiences of oppression and the strongest potentialities for transformation. However inhuman, it reveals the human that still lies within us.
EVERYDAY ARCHITECTURE

In order to escape the ever-quickening cycles of consumption and fashion that often reduce architecture to a stylish fad, architects should acknowledge instead the needs of the many rather than the few; address diversity of class, race culture and gender; design without commitment to a priori architectural styles or formulas, and with concern for program and construction. We may call the result an architecture of the everyday, though it resists strict definition; here are some points that might be related to it.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY MAY BE GENERIC AND ANONYMOUS.

Rather like the no frills package in the supermarket still a perfectly good container for its contents the generic does not flaunt its maker. It is straightforward. Unostentatious, it can lurk, loiter, slip beneath the surface, and bypass the controls of institutionally regulated life.

1. Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne,1947 2. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the modern world, 21-22
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY MAY BE BANAL OR COMMON.

It does not seek distinction by trying to be extraordinary, which in any case usually results in a fake or substitute for the truly extraordinary. In its mute refusal to say look at me, it does not tell you what to think. It permits you to provide your own meaning.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY MAY THEREFORE BE QUITE ORDINARY.

It is blunt, direct, and unselfconscious. It celebrates the potential for inventiveness within the ordinary and is thereby genuinely of its moment. It may be influenced by market trends, but it resists being consumed by them.

AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY MAY BE CRUDE.

There is a freshness to things that are raw and unrefined. The architecture of the everyday celebrates the inherent qualities and textures of materials. Do not deny or hide the nature of material, but permit its proportion and use to follow accordingly.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY MAY BE SENSUAL.

The everyday word is sensual. It not only provokes sight but also touch, hearing, smell. The architecture of the everyday encompasses places known by their aroma, surfaces recognizable by their tactile qualities, positions established by echo and reverberation.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY MAY BE HARMONIOUS.

Architecture must not obscure the real beauty found in simple things.

AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY MAY ALSO BE VULGAR AND VISCERAL.

While vulgarity may seem the opposite of anonymity, both are often oblivious to external standards. This is not necessarily bad: standards of taste serve to legislate and perpetuate an approved set of objects. The vulgar rejects good taste and the unthinking obedience it demands. In architecture, standards of good taste seem to dictate that the presence of the body is not to be acknowledged in or by buildings. Architectural photographs rarely show people, and the architect often ignores the true user. The result is sterility. Visceral presence cannot be denied.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY AKNOWLEDGES DOMESTIC LIFE.

There is poetry and consolation in the repetition of familiar things. This is not to romanticize dreary and oppressive routine; events need not be dictated and programmed by architects. An architecture of the everyday allows for personal rites but avoids prescribing rituals.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY MAY TAKE ON COLLECTIVE AND SYMBOLIC MEANING BUT IT IS NOT NECESSARILY MONUMENTAL.

Without denying the need for monuments, it questions whether every building need be one.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY RESPONDS TO PROGRAM AND IS FUNCTIONAL.

It is a form of design in which program contributes meaning, and function is a requirement to satisfy rather than a stile to emulate. It resist debasement into winsome reproductions of another time in the name of the vernacular or simplistic contextualisim.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY MAY BE UNANTICIPATED.

Architecture may change as quickly as fashion, but it does not have to be fashionable. Note that it is subject to different forces of change from those that drive fashion. The forms, materials, and images of innovation in everyday life are often unpredictable. The next everyday cannot be discovered through focus groups and market analysis.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY IS BUILT.

3. STRUCTURING THE ORDINARY

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KNOWING THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

For thousands of years, built environments as such remained unquestioned and taken for granted; knowledge about how to make ordinary environment was ubiquitous, innately manifest in the everyday interactions of builders, patrons, and users. During the modern era, however, every aspect of the built environment is routinely re-examined, subjected to alternative solutions. Ordinary growth processes that had been natural and self-sustaining, shared throughout society, have been recast as problems requiring professional solution. Built environment, the ever-present, stable, ordinary background for architectural innovation, is now itself being reinvented by professionals bit by bit, time after time. Practices historically developed to create unique and limited acts of monumentality cannot guide us in engaging the commonplace. We need to shake off worn-out ambitions, among other constraints on our thoughts and actions. In this new situation, the unspoken ways of ordinary environments must be articulated. We cannot revive the nave past. We dare not promise an unrealizable future. But to make peace with our task of designing the everydayordinary we must seek more intimate knowledge of it. More than architecture the subject should be then built environment. It is innately familiar. Anew, we observe what always has been with us not to discover, much less to invent, but to recognize.
CHANGE

Built environment, in all of its complexity, is created by people. Yet it is simply far too complex, too large, and too self-evident to be perceived as a simple entity, artefact like a chair, a car, a painting, or even a building. Moreover, built environments have lives of their own: they grow, renew themselves, and endure for millennia. Conservation may serve to freeze works of art in time, resisting times effects. But the living environment can persist only through change and adaptation. In growing and changing through time, the built environment resembles an organism more than an artefact. Yet, while ever changing, it does possess qualities that transcend time.

Despite transformation, identities of buildings and cities represent values shared with ancestors and passed down to descendants, uniting past and future. Similar continuity exists in public spaces-streets, boulevards, 6

squares, and neighbourhoods-and even in details, in the way a doorway or a window is crafted, or how a room is laid out. The antiquity of monuments and public spaces, and the meaning, with which they are invested, underscores how much else perennially changes: buildings are demolished; ancient roads are widened; new streets are insinuated into existing urban fabric. Even the fundamental qualities of public space, seemingly so permanent, are gradually altered by the transformation of buildings and street-scapes that define it.
AGENTS

Thus, the built environment comprises not only physical forms, i.e. buildings, streets, and infrastructure- but also the people acting on them if built environment is an organism it so by virtue of human intervention: people imbue it with life and spirit of place. As long as they are actively involved and find a given built environment worth renewing, altering, and expanding, it endures. When they live off, the environment dies and crumbles, pulled back down to earth by the force of gravity. To use built form is to exercise some control, and to control is to transform. There is thus no absolute distinction between those who create and those who use. A complex hierarchy of control patterns within a continuity of action emerges. For designers and planners, use is typically set a priori immobilized to allow optimum problem solving during programming and design. But in reality, use is neither static nor passive. Use marks the beginning and end of each act of transformation, forming part of the cycle of actions by which built environment lives. To perceive how buildings intrinsic capacity to adopt and transform represents the key to their survival, the perspective that has given rise to programmatic functionalism must be transcended. We must learn to look afresh at the intricate on going symbiosis between people and built matter. There are sticks and stones, and there are people living among them: the two are inseparable, though readily distinguished.

CONTROL

The key to this way of perceiving the environment is control: the ability to transform some part of that environment. Control may result in closing a communicating door between two rooms, or in demolishing a neighbourhood. Whenever physical parts are introduced, displaced, or removed from site, some controlling agent-a person, group of persons, organisation or institution- is revealed. Control thus defines the central operational relationship between humans and all matter that is the stuff of built environment. As dynamic patterns of change echo throughout a built environment, they reveal the structure of control. In the light of the built environments organic patterns of growth and change, the transformational behaviour of its forms, it appears to act very much as a living whole.

Bologna- The portico outside the town gates, begins to switch back across the hills, heading toward the shrine of San Luca, begun in 1674. Along the first km, buildings were later built behind and atop the arcade.

Bologna- Continuation. The portico begins to switch back across the hills, as it approaches the shrine.

4. TRADITION AND MODERNITY

That no one is quite immune to a homogenizing process caused by the rise of telematic communications and by the massification of the society through media, is evident by the way in which the architectural profession has been co-opted by the commodifying values of the late modern world that are all the more insidious for being implied rather than declared. Thus we may recognize through Gregottis characterization those aspects of contemporary practice that favor:
a little bit of context, but in its most insensitive quantitative or stylistic interpretation; a little bit of modernity in techniques and communication; and perhaps a little tenors high note here and there to add a touch of artistry, especially in the form of inconsequential originality which introduces a shade of ineffability into the solution, an ineffability necessary for providing the existence of creative freedom. And above all a great deal of flexibility, which often results in close adherence to the folds of profit; a generous share of that plastic democracy that goes under the name of animation; a dash of inconsequential participationalism. All this is seasoned with a few drops of environmentalist fundamentalism. No definite form: rather, total plasticity and interchangeability of solutions within this context. In other words, no architecture. The solution is thus never the one that would suit the project and the place, one that would interpret them according to some necessity. It is more likely to be a solution already open to all hybridizations: not the solution that, in its clarity, is able to include and confront authentic differences, but rather a solution that tends to drown such differences in the process of homogenization set in motion by diversity turned into pure ideology.1

Given the thrust of multinational capitalism that oscillates between unmediated territorial exploitation and neglect; the task of tectonic transformation which involves confronting the rapacity of fashion and conmodification while grounding the site in a literal sense, in order to endow the work with a feeling of historical depth, can only be made by a professional practice that would:

have none of the glorious characteristics of the great avant-gardes of the past.It would be a patient minority, one able to consider duration without conceit, monuments without monumentalism; a minority capable of deep respect for skills and techniques, without the ideology of a craftsmans leader apron, and without any nave faith in the powers of hypermodern technological society; a minority able to take pleasure in free invention as the necessary solution to a question, not as frivolity. A minority whose acts would respect an economy of expressive means, as well as simplicity achieved by passing through the complexities of reality without oversimplifying them; a minority capable of continuously constructing a critical distance from reality, above all from an overjustified context; a minority capable of rebuilding within itself the diversity required in a quest for clarity, but without undue pride over the momentary certainties that this produces; a minority that wishes to remain outside of fashion and of image; a minority capable of returning materiality to the embodiment of things.2
1&2. Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture, 11

The Modern Movement enthusiastically aspired to create a universal culture. The new machines for living in set in space, light and greenery were to emancipate their inhabitants from their bonds with the past, and to cultivate a New Universal Man. Half a century later, however, the techno-rationally biased and economy-obsessed buildings that have become only too familiar everywhere impair our sense of locality and identity. The standard building of today accelerates estrangement and alienation of integrating our world-view and sense of self. Meanwhile, we have learned to admire unique and authentic forms of indigenous and vernacular traditions, which were earlier hardly considered part of the realm of architecture. We admire the tangible integration of natural and material conditions, patterns of life and forms of building in traditional societies, and this gives us a strengthened sense of causality and existence. The diversity of building in traditional societies is brought about by the impact of local conditions and the specificity of culture. In our own culture the sheer force of industrial technology, combined with mobility, mass-communication and uniformity of lifestyle is causing cultural entropy that minimalises diversity. Beyond doubt, the gradual disappearance of a sense of human message and locality from our buildings is the result of cultural factors underlying the act of building. Is it possible to alter the course of our culture? Clearly our identity, and mental well being, cannot be supported by universally standardized and abstracted environment, as the organization of our physical world is a projection of the mental one and vice-versa. An architecture capable of supporting our identity has to be situationally, culturally and symbolically articulated. Not so much by using the notion of regionalism for its geographic and ethnological connotations but speaking rather of situational or culturespecific architecture.
The fundamental task of architecture is to help us experience our existence with deeper significance and purpose. Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.3

What are the constituents of locality? They are, of course, expressions and experiences of specific nature, geography, landscape, local materials, skills and cultural patterns. But they are not detached elements; the qualities of culturally adapted architecture are inseparably integrated in tradition. Without continuity of an authentic tradition even a well-intentioned use of surface elements of regional character is doomed to sentimental scenography, to be a naively shallow architectural souvenir.

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Culture is not composed of elements that can be disassembled and recomposed; culture has to be lived. Cultures mature and sediment slowly as they become fused into the context and continuity of tradition. Culture is an entity of facts and beliefs, history and present, material realities and mental conditions. It proceeds unconsciously and cannot be manipulated from outside. Hence, an authentic culturally differentiated architecture can only be born from differentiated patterns of culture, not from fashionable ideals in design. A culturally-adapted architecture is not merely a matter of visual style but of integration of culture, behaviour and environment. To deny cultural differentiation is foolish. A culturally-specific character or style cannot be consciously learned and added on the surface of design, it is a result of being profoundly subject to a specific pattern of culture and of the creative synthesis which fuses conscious intentions and unconscious conditioning, memories and experience, in a dialogue between the individual and the collective. All artists elaborate their self-image in their art and a differentiated building tradition supports the collective self-image of an entire culture. This applies also to apparently traditionless building in America, like the Strip of Las Vegas, for instance. The creative artists relation to history is equally complex. Authentic artists are usually more concerned with a general feeling for time and history than any factual history or its products.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.4

Todays fashionable attempts to recreate a sense of place and rootedness in history through application of historical and regional motifs usually fail because of the onedimensionally literal use of reference and manipulation of motifs on the surface level. The past is taken as a source from which to select instead of being the continuum and context of creative work. Instead of being accepted as an autonomous process, culture has been turned into an object of deliberate fabrication.
4. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays.

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The present concern with regionalism has the evident danger of turning into sentimental provincialism, whereas vital products of art in our specialised culture are always born from an open confrontation between the universal and the unique, the individual and the collective, the traditional and the revolutionary. The profoundly Mexican architecture of Luis Barragan, for instance, echoes distinct features of Mexican culture and life, particularly the presence of death as an accepted dimension of life, and turns these cultural ingredients into his unique metaphysical and surreal art which is traditional and individual, timeless and radical at the same time. The architecture of Alvaro Siza is an abstraction and condensation of social and building traditions of Oporto. His architecture is abstracted to the degree that one can hardly trace this tradition but its presence is felt in the authoritative quality of his architecture. The most outspoken advocate of situationally adapted Modernity in the Nordic countries as well as within the Modern Movement as a whole was, of course, Alvar Aalto. Aaltos architecture did not aim at the absoluteness typical of the main line of the Modern Movement. As a result, he could use motifs of history and vernacular tradition, combined with a Modern language, and create architecture remarkably rooted in place and time.

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The architecture of Alvar Aalto and Luis Barragan reveal that culture-specific character of architecture is not a matter of simple manipulation of recognisable elements. Cultural isolation and protection do not offer any guarantee of unique architecture. Regional character may be achieved from totally contradictory ingredients. Frank Lloyd Wrights American architecture synthesised themes from North American and Mexican Indian cultures, and European architectural history as well as traditional Japanese architecture. The impact of traditional Japanese art on todays Western aesthetic ideals is another example of the incredibly composite nature of culture.

On the other hand, Le Corbusiers work strongly influenced by Mediterranean vernacular tradition- has given rise to one of the strongest contemporary traditions in Japan and India. And this influence is again reflected back to the West in the work of Ando, Correa and many others. Similarly, the universal ideals of the International Style were turned into a humane and somewhat romantic of post war Modernity in the Northern countries. All great art tends to be regional for the simple reason that it is open to interpretation and, consequently, can echo any cultural conditions. All great art is the common property and heritage of mankind. Regionalism in the industrial world cannot any longer be founded on a set of isolated and perfectly integrated conditions. Perhaps the most meaningful form of cultural survival that remains is a regionalism of the mind, the strategy of resistance, the subculture that believes in and searches for authenticity. Not authenticity on ethnographic grounds but that of human experience and interaction.
Real architecture, even at its most eclectic periods, has always had integrity, so that people looking on it, and the people inside, could all enjoy the spaces and forms. There was a generally agreed conception of what people wanted to do and how to make the places to lead their lives in. We desperately want to get back to this integral world, yet it is always elusive. We keep looking for the philosophers stone that will transmute the mundane to a built poetry that can unite us all, of whatever background, in homecoming.5
5.

Peter Davey, Regional Meaning, Nov.90

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5. AN ARTISTS AXIOMS ON ARCHITECTURE

The activities of art and architecture can be defined in many ways. in the forties, fifties art had to be defined as art itself in order to be developed. The social systems and their wars had demolished the earlier efforts toward more general thinking and destroyed the relationship of art and architecture as they did that between most aspects of society. Wars benefit central governments and the ensuing strong central governments are jealous of rivals, certainly in combination especially culture. The interests of any community are smashed into pieces by the requirements of the Government. The fear of culture is actually a little cheerful. It means a little involvement, some importance, and a little power in a good way. Culture makes them nervous. Hermann Goering said, "When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my revolver." I consider the attempted coherence, more breadth than coherence, of De Stijl, the Bauhaus and the Constructivists as live, as normal, and not oppressive. It's the separation and isolation that are oppressive, the exclusivity of specialists in all kinds of design, their rote appeal to rules learned by rote, their behavior as merchants in control of a market. The three groups did something tremendous. They didn't impose their work upon the world. On the contrary, everyone used and debased their designs. It is not thought that is an imposition; it is mediocrity, the consequence of very little thought of the easy way out, that is imposed upon the world. Convention and the easiest thing to do - usually not even cheaper, just easier - determine the appearance of the world. I'm not arguing, incidentally for a confusion of art and architecture, a fashion now but for a coherent relationship. Therefore, within the capacity of one person or of a small group, the relationship of all visible things should be considered. Second: all visible things are important. As in art, there are no public and private types, nor in architecture should there be. The difference between buildings is in the function not in "the style", and in whether they are big or small, not in whether they are grand or modest. Buildings may have certain panache, but not according to their social standing. This idea applies also to expense, which can mean care and special materials, to either costly or cheap buildings.

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There is nothing wrong with cheap buildings. In fact saving could be called a "function" to consider, which is three: the particulars of architecture are not a nuisance, but sources of good architecture. Failures of common sense are also an esthetically disagreeable, such as a waste of money or a disregard for the site. The main plan can arise from considering the site, either as terrain, as nature, or as existing streets and buildings. Materials vary from place to place; local ones are cheaper and usually better suited to the climate, and those doing the work know how to use them. They are used to a certain way of building and this is hard to fight. 0rdinarily, if any of these considerations are ignored, the city, the building, the utensil look like impositions. All of these factors, again, are not limits but interesting considerations from which new ideas for buildings arise. Four: this is also true for the function of a building, one thing which separates architecture from art. Consideration of the function is enjoyable. It's not in the way of being creative - it's against "creative", a present delusion and one in the past as well. Form may not closely follow function, but my axiom is that form should never violate the function. "Forms" for their own sake, despite function, are ridiculous. Five: "Small is Beautiful". Never make anything (politically as well) bigger than necessary. Six: new land should not be built upon. There are exceptions, but this is an easier rule to observe than is thought. The natural world seems not to exist for almost everyone. The land could be more rigorously conserved. And existing structures should be saved, important and unimportant alike, even to a cost beyond that of a new building. Seven: all buildings and cities should be agreeable and livable. Almost none are so of the last thirty years. The reason for this can only be not knowing how to live well. Obviously this applies most to those with money and power. Eight: as "klein ist schon", so is simple. Part of the present "expression" and "creativity" is an extreme complication of parts. Complication has become a symbol of importance. As to simplicity, to me symmetry is the given and asymmetry is the exception, caused only by reasonable particulars, such as the site or the function. And to have simplicity and symmetry proportion is crucial: we see simple proportions. Much of the quality of a structure lies in these The scale results from these.

6. FORM VERSUS MEANING

The argument that too much attention to form had destroyed interest in meaning, was put most famously by the American architect Robert Venturi In his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi wrote that In the early 60's... form was king in architectural thought, and most architects focused without question on aspects of form.1 For Venturi this meant that architects had neglected meaning and signification. Venturi took the well-known Miesian jingle 'Less is more' and 15

parodied it with the retort 'Less is a bore'; however, he was quick to point out that the complexity he sought could not be found by simply sticking on more ornamental details. Rather he was in favor of a tension bred by perceptual ambiguity -a richness of both form and meaning- which should affect the overall character of a design:
''The tradition 'either-or' has characterized orthodox modern architecture; a sun-screen is probably nothing else; a support is seldom an enclosure; a wall is not violated by window penetrations but is totally interrupted by glass; program functions are exaggeratedly articulated into wings or segregated pavilions.... Such manifestations of articulation and clarity are foreign to an architecture of complexity and contradiction, which tends to include 'both-and' rather than exclude 'either-or'. If the source of the 'both-and' phenomenon is contradiction, its basis is hierarchy, which yields several levels of meanings among elements with varying values. It can include elements that are both good and awkward, big and little, closed and open, continuous and articulated round and square, structural and spatial. An architecture which includes varying levels of meaning breeds ambiguity and tension."2

Venturi claimed that his 'both-and' approach to architectural elements and meanings was more in tune with the complexity of modern experience than were the sterilities of the preceding generation, but gave little evidence of an underlying social vision or ideal. His second book, Learningfrom Lay Vegas, written with Denise Scott Brown, 'a treatise on symbolism in architecture', was intended to address this state of affairs against what they called 'Heroic and Original' modem architecture, in which the creation of architectural form was to be a logical process, free from images of past experience, determined solely by program and structure', and whose 'total image derives from purely architectural qualities transmitted through abstract form', the authors proposed 'Ugly and Ordinary' architecture. With its assortment of references to conventional roadside constructions, in 'Ugly and Ordinary' architecture, the 'elements acts as symbols as well as expressive architectural abstractions'; as well as representing ordinariness symbolically and stylistically, they are enriching 'because they add a layer of literary meaning'. The modernist obsession with form, resulting in what Venturi and Scott Brown called 'ducks', denied attention to meaning.

1&2. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

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7. THE MOST GENERAL FORM

Since the mid-1980s there have emerged out of different West European centers architectures that have an unexpected coherence and similarity. With the aid of documentation and dissemination by journals such as Quaderns and 9H, the work of certain young architects in Barcelona, Madrid, Porto, Vienna and the Ticino comprises what seems at first to be a kind of new orthodoxy - an architecture of extraordinary quality arising from a pro-modernist understanding of production, tectonic density, and compositional rigor, but with a sensitivity to the particularities of place and a confident critical stance relative to the modernist avantgarde. Martin Steinmann's early formulation of a new "realism" in architecture1 and Kenneth Frampton's mediations on "place-form" and "critical regionalism2 have given the architectural audience possible categories for understanding this recent European production and the cultural tensions out of which it arises. Still, we tend everywhere to look for architecture to fulfil our desire for certainty, plenitude, and affirmation in the face of often crushing social and cultural realities, and much of the new orthodoxy obliges us with fictions of depth and authenticity in an increasingly depthless and inauthentic world. But to fulfil that desire in any facile or unambiguous way, it seems to me, is just what the architecture of Roger Diener refuses to do. In Das Prinzip Hoffnung Ernst Bloch spoke about Neue Sachlichkeit in architecture: Today, in many places, houses look as if they are ready to travel (reisefertig). Although they are unadorned, or precisely because of that, they express their farewell. Their interiors are bright and sterile like hospital rooms, the exteriors look like boxes on top of mobile poles, but also like ships. They have flat decks, port holes, gangways, railings; they shine white and to the south, and as ships they like to disappear. Bloch found little hope expressed in such architecture, product as it was of the late capitalist hollow space and abstract technology. Rather this hollow space
penetrates the so-called art of engineering as much as the latter increases the hollowness by its own emptiness. Only a

new classless society would make a true architecture possible. It is on the whole a negative judgment of the architecture of Neue Sachlichkeit and, allowing for anachronism of interpretation, Bloch's words might just as well apply to the buildings of Roger Diener. Nevetheless, Bloch allowed that sachliche architecture dialectically produced a "significant utopian effect. What it means here is the combination of the old utopia of crystallization with the desire to disorganize.
1. Martin Steinmann, Reality as History,AU 1976. 2. Kenneth Framton, Towards a Critical Regionalism,1975. & Place-Form and Cultural Identity, 1988.

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Bloch's characterization of this desire to split apart and reutilise what is given by an alienated social condition and received architectural conventions hangs in our minds with disturbingly ambiguous resonance: the architecture likes to disappear. It is the dissatisfied, dialectic, and positively negation quality of this sharp, stark architecture but also and not inconsistently its utopian effect that distinguishes the work of Diener from the new orthodoxy and with which we must try to come to terms.
Architecture and urban planning today are not concerned with transforming the world. Rather they are concerned with interpreting it,3 Architecture must therefore take on certain of the

seemingly negative and alienating characteristics of the very condition it seeks to interpret.
There is a stability that sometimes threatens to fall apart... Sometimes elements are built in sharp contour: the material corporeality almost disappears... The emptiness and affliction of the city is not celebrated, not even consciously made a theme, but neither is the appearance of surmounting it presented. Nonetheless, uncertainty is understood as potential. We read the city attentively, mark its fault lines, try to recognize traces in them and as such emphasize them.4

What all this comes to mean in the work of Diener is a disjunctive imbrication of different architectural modes understood as traces of sedimented experiences, images, and procedures that erupt within the city. First is the serialization of building blocks and the relentless repetition of elements such as balconies and windows which set the reproducibility inherent in mass technology. Second is the interruption of this repetition with dissonant fragments and distortions. The dissonance and montage of fragments is part of a modernist formal strategy previously worked out as a critical negation of traditional perceptual conventions that seek a false unity and harmony. But third are techniques of a different kind that involve an assault on the modernist notion of aesthetic resistance through the embrace of utilitarian, "banal", or quotidian architectural elements, materials, and figures. The function of Diener's assemblage of diverse parts is to write across the face of the buildings the heterogeneity, discontinuities, and contingencies of society, to unfold architecture into the exteriority of multiple technologies and the social city. The building just is these conditions. It is in this sense that the architecture tries to disappear, to become aleatory.

3&4. Roger Diener, On the uncertainty of the Individual, Quaderns 58.

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Ordinarily one would expect some overarching, unifying spatial, formal, or material logic that would give a fullness and presence to the disjunctive building components and materials. This is the orthodox mode of perception, which values the authenticity, aura, and depth of architecture as a metaphor and support of an ideal, unified, centred individual. But Diener's work is concerned, in his own words, with "the uncertainty of the individual" as constructed in and by architectural experience, and traditional modes of perception are therefore disfranchised in order to shift toward a condition of simultaneous collective reception in which the individual is liquidated, given over to the city and its multiple procedures and structures. Diener uses architectural figures, images, and typologies as devices to intensify the raw materiality of the built objects themselves - the glaring brightness of a white wall, the hardness of black brick, the noise of a back courtyard, or the silence of an empty room - and thrust the experience of that object, almost indifferent and unrelentingly external, toward the viewer with unpadded severity. The Umfunktionierung of this raw material emphasized the tactile properties of things and their psychological effects in real space and real time, and induces a play of sensuous energies in the viewer, a compulsive pleasure taken in the quiddity of the building parts but also in the toughness, the contradictions, disruptions, gaps and silences, all of which explode the received social meanings of those familiar things. This is nothing less than Bloch's utopian desire to disorganize the older "crystalline utopias" which gave the viewer a visual homologue of a future world, complete and whole, but which must now be considered anachronistic. They are not metaphors of an intact world centered on the individual. Diener installs the altogether different perception of a world where the aesthetic object has turned its back on the individual as such. To enter into that object requires a degree of self-immolation. But this is neither the levelling of individual specificity by consumerist culture nor the sublimation of the subject into some idealized transcendence or higher omnipotence. Rather individuality is drained off into the city itself. But as long as it still takes pleasure in this dissolution, the subject cannot be entirely annihilated. On the contrary, this threat of dissolution before the object stuns the psychological subject into recognition of the collective ideological-material mechanisms that are its very causes. As Walter Benjamin wrote, Not to find one's way in a city may
well be uninteresting and banal. But to lose oneself in the city... that calls for quite a different schooling.5 Diener's architecture insists that this society and its cultural artefacts are

constructions; not "natural," finished unchangeable facts but historical-ideological productions. And therefore things could be otherwise; constructions can be reconstructed. Architecture can enunciate a conception of space, physical and social, that is other than the one we have. Bloch's hollow space becomes productively empty.
5.Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle

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The architecture is ready to travel, provided we understand by that statement not only that the building is a visual metaphor of social forces, but also that the building is the actual production of a concept of an alternative social space. Diener's architecture configures itself in such a way as to reveal the present physical and cultural order as unsatisfactory and proposes an explosion of its elements and a new formation out of its particles as a possible (albeit symbolic) way out: an anticipatory deviation from what we have, an architecture ready to depart.

8. A NONHEROIC MODERNISM
A bricklayer who learnt Latin, is how Adolf Loos characterized himself, a statement that indicates Looss position between the two sides that constituted the extreme limits of early 20th c. architecture. One side was formed by the forced embrace of historical material, resulting in the stifling of the natural and active presence of tradition. The other border consists of the complete break with tradition through the emphasis on the supposed power of fantasy and imagination and their capacity to invent the new ex nihilism. However different the two positions might appear, they are both rooted in the same idea: to transform life into a Gesamtkunstwerk by means of the promiscuous mingling and total mobilization of all the arts. The architecture of Loos hangs like a floating note between tradition and progress. Loos cherished tradition at the same time as he said farewell to it. And this fundamental insight into the essence of such a leave-taking constitutes his absolute modernity. In his designs the difference unfolds itself in its full radicalism: the difference between interior and exterior, between front and rear facade, between walnut and marble, between brass and glass, between the language of the material and the language of the construction. Loos no longer contrived a total picture, but displayed the complicated consonance of these differences, their dissonance. His Raumplan makes the interior disintegrate into a conglomerate of details and tuned rooms. Neither drawings nor photographs -and Loos was proud of this- are able to reproduce this poetic interior art. The exteriors of Looss buildings are reconciled to their modern fate and say nothing about the interior. Nor are they even a veil concealing some secret. They are different. It is the strategy of keeping silent; in the unbounded field of the metropolis is where facts do the talking. And this withdrawal of language makes it possible for living to be poetic.

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The Irish-born designer and architect Eileen Gray, a leading figure in the French decorative arts of the 1910's and 1920's; developed a refined aesthetic for the interior relying upon subtle juxtapositions of exotic, folk and machine-age finishes, and upon a sensitivity to the intimate rituals of daily existence. Gray's highly innovative furniture and architecture combined the pure minimal lines of Modern Movement aesthetics with a sense of comfort practicality, and wit. Her best known work, a villa she named E. 1027 at Cap Martin in France, interprets the spatial principles and forms of Le Corbusier and revealed 'a relaxed and elastic control of the visual ambiance', a sense of

human nuance and spatial incident at odds with stylistic manipulation and with the vacuity of merely functionalist design.

External architecture seems to have absorbed avant-garde architects at the expense of the interior, as if a house should be conceived for the pleasure of the eye more than for the well-being of its inhabitants. Even if lyricism can lose itself in the play of volumes brought together in the light of day, the interior should still respond to man's needs and the exigencies of individual life, allowing for repose and intimacy. Theory is insufficient for life and does not respond to all of its requirements. It is necessary to free oneself of a tendency with obvious failings and seek to create an interior atmosphere that is in harmony with the refinements of modem life while utilizing current technical resources and possibilities. The thing constructed is more important than the way it is constructed, and the process is subordinate to the plan, not the plan to the process. It is not about constructing beautiful ensembles of lines, but above all constructing all dwellings for people.1

1. Eileen gray and Jean Badovici L'Architecture Vivante (winter 1929)

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9. THE SIMPLE LIFE, MATTER - OF - FACTNESS

At the end of the nineteenth century, critics seized hold of the idea that the renewal of architecture was to be achieved by pursuing the practical and matter-of-fact, taking as the principal model the domestic comfort of the middle-class dwelling. The main exponent of this idea was the German architect and critic Hermann Muthesius; in his book StileArchitecture and Building-Art, he explained as follows:
Just as today we all work, just as everyone's clothing is middle class, just as our new tectonic forms (in so far as they are not the work of architects) move m the track of complete simplicity and straightforwardness, so also we want to live in middle class rooms whose essence and goal is simplicity and straightforwardness.1

The key of all this lay in the word, sachlich. Untranslatable in English, it means variously

'practical', 'material', 'factual', 'matter-of-fact', 'artless', 'straightforward' and 'functional'. Muthesius's model for a sachlich
architecture was the domestic work of the English Queen Anne movement- Alongside monumental architecture, Muthesius saw having existed in previous times.

a simple middle-class building art... which satisfied one's everyday needs in dwellings and in other ordinary artifacts. In this production... One remained simple and natural, limited oneself to the necessary and familiar, and generally followed a tuneless local guild tradition on which the changes in monumental architecture had only a limited effect.2

The achievement of the British late nineteenth-century architects was to have revived this tradition, `a simple and natural, reasonable way of building, and made it into the expressive means of their domestic work; the result stood in sharp contrast to the decorative excesses of German and Austrian Jugendstil architecture. Muthesius's idea that 'simplicity' lay in the comfort of the ordinary and everyday he derived from William Morris, whose writings are full of the merits of simplicity. It is to Morris that must be attributed the notion that in the simple life and surroundings of the ordinary man or woman there exists the essential material for artistic work. To take one of many examples, Morris writes `simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a

misery, but the very foundation of refinement. From simplicity of life would rise up the longing for beauty'. Thanks to Muthesius and the Deutsche Werkbund,
this sense of 'simplicity' as the expression of ordinary life was to carry considerable weight in modernist circles.

1. 2.

Herman Muthesius, Style- Architecture and Building-Art,94 Ibid.75

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10. ON SIMPLICITY
Simplicity, as a process of adhering to the essence of use, to lack of ornament and to mimesis of the technical reproducibility and expressive rigor of utensils, has been the most prominent and common stylistic banner of modernity in this century.

But if one abandons the idea that a moral pride in modesty and an egalitarian, sachlich striving can serve as mimeses of collective reason, progress and liberation, then it certainly seems more difficult to enumerate the values of simplicity in times of highly complex and intense signals. At the very least, the matter of simplicity in architecture becomes subject to different possible interpretations. Designing a simple building has become a very complicated problem, at least for those who believe that simplicity in architecture is not something natural or spontaneous, does not result from restoring linear reduction, is not tautology, simplification, a retreat from the complexity of reality, or, least of all, a relinquishing of invention. Simplicity today stands on a dangerous ridge. One slope harbors pure opposition to market coercion, to contrivances that lack an aim or an internal reason for expression. On the other side lie in ambush oversimplification and poverty of invention, aphasia and mannerism of poetic silence; in brief, the inarticulate superstition of simplicity. In other words, simplicity should not be simplification, and above all not simplification as a formal model. Eloquent simplicity can be reached through great effort, but it is never a good starting point, nor an objective at any cost. Architecture is not simple; it can only become simple. Nor would it be wise, in these times of noisy, exhibitionistic redundancy of communication, to be ideologically forced to take the side of simplicity as an a priori mimesis of logical and moralistic rigor. That is important but remains transitory.

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The fragmentation in our times certainly calls for some solid points, some secure, wellfastened nails. However, such solidity must be reconstructed not through reduction but rather by pushing project research until it succeeds in breaking through the tangled web of complication in order to rebuild a hypothesis for a structure that will organize architecture according to the practice of a meticulous, although consciously provisional, clarity. It is very difficult today to imagine a return to order that could be more than a coat of whitewash over the disorder and conflicts of our times, if it does not confront the irresolvable contradictions placed daily before our eyes by notions such as logic and reason. Simplicity must make contradiction itself clear and comprehensible without denying its existence and its value as a material for establishing difference. The reason behind a simple building must reveal, not cover, the fissures of doubt; they must reconnect not isolate. The must first address their own limits, and must limit the risks of instituting a law that lacks the necessary internal order. That is, they must realize that its balance is precarious, but at the same time pursue it with tenacity. A simple building must thus compose its own image as the superficial tension of complexity; for there is no level of complexity that cannot be expressed through the clarity of simplicity without simplification. In that sense, a building is never simple enough. To free oneself from the superfluous; that is, to identify what is superfluous without confusing it with the richness of curiosity, of a question, of questioning, requires an accurate and difficult effort toward discrimination, even though solely liberating oneself from the superfluous does not guarantee access to the hart of simplicity. A building is simple not because its shapes conform to elementary geometry, not because all of it is immediately visible, or because the logic is evident in its connections, but because all its parts voice their necessity, both reciprocally and with respect to the meaning of the specific architectural solution. In simplicity there must be nothing preestablished, nothing immobile. Instead, all must be balance, measurement, relation between points, vital organization, mysterious transparency. A simple building can also have an interior whose functions, spaces, uses and distributions are complex; an interior rich in interrelations rather than in form, for which simplicity is, above all, a triangulation of the experimental field. 24

The simplicity of a building, moreover, has to do with silence. It is the creation of a pause in the tumult of language; it identifies the divergence of sense among signs; it appears as the proud fixation of an infinite series of hesitations, tests, erasures, experiences; it is the rewriting of what we have always known. The simple project destroys all neuroses about the future, gives back to the past, not survival, which is a hypocritical form of oblivion, but a new life that takes the noble form of memory. The simplicity of a building also represents an aspiration to find one's place near the origin of architecture itself, to look as if one has always been there, firmly fixed to the earth and to the sky, in an open discussion with the surroundings that starts with the recognition and critique of the identities and distances of each.

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11 . CONCLUSION
Built environment has always been self-organising; Architects intervene in a natural, ongoing process. Despite their increasing ability to effect large-scale change and their escalating ambitions, built environment follows its own laws. That reality renders their practice thoroughly thematic. Eventually, they must engage the environments terms, not just their own intentions. Deep currents of form, place, and understanding flow, determining how professional practice will function. They may, for instance cause us to abandon the idea of vertically integrated design control in favor of a mode of dispersed responsibilities. The big building, like older urban fabric, will become susceptible of fine-grained transformation, reinterpreted through its own internal patterns of public space and private settlement. They may challenge us to once more articulture territorial reality, so persistently ignored in (post-) modernist free-flowing space-to deal substantively with the ancient presence of boundaries, gates, and territorial depth in a new way. Most difficult of all for environmental professionals may be learning to use forms of understanding and to speak of them freely. To find words suitable for naming thematic qualities. To find pride in continuity, in variation on a common theme. Human creativity is irresponsible. The desire to invent, renew, and reinterpret makes environments bloom. But the new can only be identified against what is held in common. Now that we are responsible for the well being of the common as well, it must be discussed. Thus a fresh vocabulary is in order. We tend to record the innovative while discounting the familiar. But the former, which initially depends on the later, may eventually transform it. We should therefore seek to understand our present environments, so radically different from those in the past, as the result of a collective search for new thematic knowledge. We may begin by re-examining what, in an age of invention and revolution, has eventually become conventionally accepted, and is now taken for granted in practice. We might then discover a rich ore of already common forms, spaces, and patterns of control, brought to light in modern times by experiment and innovation. The idea that a living environment can be invented is obsolete: environment must be cultivated. This requires proper use of levels, careful articulation of territory, and creative application of types, patterns, and thematic systems. It must also ensure well-modulated distribution of control, compatible with an increasingly mobile and informed humanity. After all, it is by the quality of the common that environments prosper and by which, ultimately, our passage will one day be measured.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

-., 'The recovery of the Modern." Architectural Review, 1996. Brand, J & Janselijn, H. Architecture and Imagination Constant, C., "Eileen Gray." Phaidon, 200 1. Curtis, W., "Modern Architecture since 1900." Phaidon, 3 d ed., 1996. Forty, A., "Words and Buildings." Thames & Hudson, 2000. Gregotti, V., Inside Architecture." Graham Foundation., MIT, 1996. Habraken, N.J., The structure of the Ordinary." MIT 1998 Harris, S. & Berke, D., eds. "Architecture of the Everyday." Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. Groodrich, LL, "Edward Hopper." Harry N. Abrams, 1976. Norberg Schulz, C Principles of Modern Architecture Venturi,R & Scott Brown, D. Out of the ordinary

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Contents

Page

1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1 2. THE EVERYDAY AND EVERYDAYNESS......................................... 3

EVERYDAY ARCHITECTURE ............................................................................................... 3

3. STRUCTURING THE ORDINARY ...................................................... 5

KNOWING THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT ............................................................................. 6 CHANGE .................................................................................................................................... 6 AGENTS..................................................................................................................................... 7 CONTROL.................................................................................................................................. 8

4. TRADITION AND MODERNITY ......................................................... 9 5. AN ARTISR'S AXIOMS ON ARCHITECTURE14 6. FORM VS MEANING ........................................................................... 15 7. THE MOST GENERAL FORM ........................................................... 17 8. A NONHEROIC MODERNISM........................................................... 20 9. THE SIMPLE LIFE, MATTER-OF-FACTNESS .............................. 22 10. ON SIMPLICITY 23 11. CONCLUSION 26 BIBLIOGRAPHY...27 CONTENTS.28

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