architecture

of the

everydays t e v e n h a r r i s a n d d e b o r a h b e r k e

p r i n c e t o n a r c h i t e c t u r a l p r e s s

y a l e p u b l i c a t i o n s o n a r c h i t e c t u r e

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments v i i i

Everyday Architecture s t e v e n h a r r i s 1

Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life: An Introduction

m a r y m c l e o d 9

Industry j a m e s c a s e b e r e 3 0

The Everyday and Everydayness h e n r i l e f e b v r e 3 2

Television Sets m a r k b e n n e t t 3 8

Intimate (Tele)visions e r n e s t p a s c u c c i 3 9

Catfish and Coltrane: A Conversation About Making a Homesite

p e t e r t o l k i n a n d m a b e l o . w i l s o n 5 5

Works g r e g o r y c r e w d s o n 6 4

Omoide no Shotokyo: Remembering Old Little Tokyo

s h e i l a l e v r a n t d e b r e t t e v i l l e 6 8

Desert House with Cactus j a m e s c a s e b e r e 7 4

Ugly and Ordinary: The Representation of the Everyday

d e b o r a h f a u s c h 7 5

Tom’s Garden m a r g i e r u d d i c k 1 0 7

Toilets j a m e s c a s e b e r e 1 2 0

Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture j o a n o c k m a n 1 2 2

Gecekondu m a r y - a n n r a y 1 5 3

A Visit to WomEnhouse p a t m o r t o n 1 6 6

Georgian Jail Cages j a m e s c a s e b e r e 1 8 0

The Levittown Look r o b e r t s c h u l t Z 1 8 2

The Everyday Today: Experience and Ideology p e t e r h a l l e y 1 9 1

The Everyday and the Utopian p e g g y d e a m e r 1 9 5

Family Values (Honey, I’m Home)

m a r k r o b b i n s a n d b e n j a m i n g i a n n i 2 1 7

Thoughts on the Everyday d e b o r a h b e r k e 2 2 2

Winterhouse j a m e s c a s e b e r e 2 2 7

Contributors 2 2 8

vii

E V E R Y D AY A R C H I T E C T U R E

S T E V E N H A R R I S

Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the

common, was explored and poeticized. That which had been

negligently trodden under foot by those who were harness-

ing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far

countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign

parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the

philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are

the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it

not?—of new vigor when the extremities are made active,

when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”

In the twenty years since Deborah Berke and I finished school, the

nature of architectural discourse has fundamentally changed. In the

mid-1970s there were those still discussing architecture from within

the discipline. Peter Eisenman was lecturing on the political implica-

tions latent in Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino, Anthony Vidler on the

redemptive geometry of the Cité de Refuge. In a series of lectures at

the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1976, Colin Rowe

inveighed against the failed political agenda of modernism.

At that time, the introduction into architectural discourse of

the-oretical models from other disciplines—mathematics, logic, lin-

guistics, literary criticism—had already been underway for a number of

years. Contemporary architectural theory began to differ significantly

from texts that had come before, particularly those preceding 1968.

By the mid-’80s, French structuralism and its derivatives, particularly

poststructuralism, had become institutionalized within the architectural

academy, superseding theories derived from other fields. Why struc-

turalism eclipsed other schools of theory is not difficult to grasp: as a

pedagogically efficient technique of textual analysis, it could be de-

ployed on a purely formal level, safely removed from the intense intel-

lectual and political critique of consumer society inherent in theories

derived from Marxist analysis.

The hegemony of structuralism and its derivatives coincided

with the virtual abandonment of architecture’s social and political ambi-

tions and the estrangement of direct experience from architectural dis-

course. Textual “readings” of the architectural project and a tendency

toward formal hermeticism exacerbated the alienation of architecture

from lived experience. Meanwhile, competing schools of theory associ-

ated with Marxist analysis, at least in America, became affiliated with

theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, and with

student activists and anarchists groups. To a large degree, the success of

structuralism and its derivatives within the academy can be seen to cor-

respond to the failures of the social movements of the ’60s in America

and France.

While this theoretical wrangling was underway, the produc-

tion of architectural objects continued, albeit more slowly in New York’s

late-’70s recession. Neither neo-Marxist critiques of consumer culture

nor poststructuralist analyses jeopardized the patron-dependent archi-

tectural commission. The focus on authorship and the obsession with

the display of heroic formal dexterity in both the fabrication of the

architectural object and the representation of the architectural project

resulted in a series of architectural commodities marketed and con-

sumed in ever-quickening cycles. Between the early ’70s and the early

’90s, for example, the same apartment on Central Park West was ren-

ovated three times. The original apartment by Emory Roth was first

renovated by Robert Stern. About five years later, the apartment was

E V E R Y D AY A R C H I T E C T U R EH A R R I S

2

redone by Michael Graves, only to be redesigned a few years later by

Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas. Each iteration was duly pub-

lished in the architectural press and shelter magazines, and parts of the

Graves version was even disassembled and tax-deductibly donated to the

Brooklyn Museum.

The consideration of everyday life as a critical political construct

represents an attempt to suggest an architecture resistant to this com-

modification/consumption paradigm, a paradigm that has come to

dominate contemporary architectural practice. Neither sentimental nor

nostalgic, this alternative to theories derived from structuralism and

its descendants proposes reconsideration of another strain of French

thought developed between the 1930s and ’70s that is represented by

the critique of everyday life advanced by Henri Lefebvre. Engaged inti-

mately with the quotidian, with lived experience and political struggle,

this line of thought did not find the broad American audience of struc-

turalist discourse, but was known primarily among activist groups such

as the Situationists.

What unites the articles and projects collected 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, in Lefebvre’s

words, “the bureaucracy of controlled consumption,” that is, the forces

of late capitalist economy and their complicit governmental author-

ity. The resistance lies in the focus on the quotidian, the repetitive, and

the relentlessly ordinary. The everyday is that which remains after one

has eliminated all specialized activities. It is anonymous, its anonymity

derived from its undated and apparently insignificant quality.

Lefebvre’s aphoristic and episodic critique of everyday life can also

be related to other theories that place emphasis on the role of the quotid-

ian. The Annales school of historiography, sociological critiques of popu-

lar culture, theories of abjection, histories of the vernacular, issues of

authorship, and contemporary feminist theory are among the discourses

that underlie many of the projects and articles included in this volume.

3

This collection is neither a blueprint nor a recipe for an archi-

tecture of the everyday; no examples for the pages of the magazines,

no projects to be marketed as the latest fashion. There is no Howard

Roarke of the everyday. Instead these are tentative proposals and tangen-

tial 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. It is in the dialectical

relationships among and between these various contributions that the

everyday resides: between Mary Tyler Moore and Franz Kafka, among

Levittown and Old Little Tokyo and Las Vegas.

Potential sites for an architecture of the everyday begin with

the body. Secretive and intimate, it is marked by the routine, the repeti-

tive, and the cyclical; as the locus of desire, it is often home to the

transgressive, the perverse, and the abject. Both Peggy Deamer’s essay,

“The Everyday and the Utopian,” and Pat Morton’s investigation of the

WomEnhouse web site can be read in terms of—to use Deamer’s phrase—

the body/subject/individual. Deamer’s article reconsiders the work of

1960s and ’70s utopian architects in terms of the writings of Marshall

McLuhan, Herbert Marcuse, and Fredric Jameson. Morton’s presenta-

tion of the WomEnhouse web site, on the other hand, is probably best

understood relative to contemporary feminist theory. Issues of the body

are conflated with issues of domesticity—one moves from the home

page through the Throat to the Hymen—in the virtual spaces of (the)

WomEnhouse.

WomEnhouse represents one of the multiple and sometimes con-

tradictory considerations of the domestic that underlie a number of

these projects and essays. The quotidian nature of domesticity is fore-

grounded in Mark Robbins and Benjamin Gianni’s “Family Values

(Honey I’m Home!).” By documenting the private, ordinary realm of

the everyday lives of purportedly extra-ordinary people—homosexu-

als—the project offers a view of marginalized domesticity and demon-

strates the often banal character of the unauthorized.

E V E R Y D AY A R C H I T E C T U R EH A R R I S

4

Issues of domesticity are also central to several other projects

included in this volume. Mabel Wilson and Peter Tolkin’s photographic

essay on John Outterbridge’s residence/studio/gallery in South Central

Los Angeles documents the insinuation of domestic life into the public

space of the art gallery. Wilson’s text and Tolkin’s photographs provide

specific tectonic readings of a building process formally and materi-

ally improvisational. Similarly, Mary Ann Ray’s photographic analysis of

gecekondu—houses taking advantage of a Turkish law allowing those who

build in one night to remain—develops a taxonomy of formal strate-

gies deployed by anonymous builders. While the Wilson/Tolkin project

focuses on the juxtaposition of domestic routine with the authored

work of art, the Ray essay suggests an authorless vernacular architecture

whose legal status is a product of specific domestic routine.

While Ray’s photographs of gecekondu record the tectonic result

of a law that defines property ownership in terms of specific domestic

activities, Robert Schultz’s graphic analyses of various Levittown houses

demonstrates the marketing of domestic accommodation through the

manipulation of suburban imagery. As opposed to Ray’s categories,

which are primarily formal and material, Schultz’s distinctions are eco-

nomic and iconographic; he lists the appliances that come with the

house, diagrams public spaces within the house, and develops a “preten-

sion index” keyed to the front elevation. Schultz’s gentle irony exploits

the disjunction between simple democratic ideals—represented by the

housing of returning World War II veterans—and the literal production

and highly sophisticated marketing of the house as a commodity.

Discussion of the Levittown house recurs as one of the three

domestic models in Signs of Life, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown,

and Steven Izenour’s 1976 show at the Renwick Gallery in Washington.

Deborah Fausch’s essay about this exhibition, “Ugly and Ordinary: The

Representation of the Everyday,” traces the debate among often contra-

dictory uses of the term everyday and its relationship to ideas of vernacu-

lar, populist, and nominally democratic architecture.

5

A less benign reading of the postwar American suburb occurs in

the photographs of Gregory Crewdson. Constructing tableaux within

his studio, he manipulates the familiar and ordinary to create a realistic

unreality, made strange and alien. As A. M. Homes has noted, Crewdson’s

world includes the stiff-stocked dioramas of museums of natural his-

tory, train set suburbs spread out across ping-pong tables, and the high

happy colors of Disney, all seen as though we were burglars come call-

ing on our own lives. The suburban domestic environment is rendered

simultaneously desirable and fearful.

Suburban desire and the class associations inherent in what

Herbert Gans referred to as “taste-cultures” underlie Margie Ruddick’s

article on the garden of her neighbor Tom. Contrasted with the upper-

middle-class conceit of discretion and restraint—ironically produced at

great expense—Tom’s garden is a matter-of-fact compilation of prag-

matic accommodation. Straightforward and at times vulgar, it is seen to

possess an authenticity reflecting a direct engagement with the natural

world. Peter Halley’s essay also examines issues of class and coded repre-

sentation, distinguishing between one use of the everyday as a signi-

fier of wealth and power, and another as the embodiment of common

democratic culture. For Halley, the first use is elitist and perverse, while

the second is firmly rooted in twentieth-century American art.

Issues of popular culture also inform Mark Bennett’s floor plans

of American television situation comedies. As Ernest Pascucci’s essay

“Intimate (Tele)visions” notes, television is the most everyday medium

of architectural representation, broadcast directly into the home and

participating—as Pat Morton points out in her WomEnhouse essay and

Peggy Deamer describes in her comments on McLuhan—in the dissolu-

tion of the strict division between public and private. The adjacency of

Bennett’s drawings and Pascucci’s text is intended to invite speculation

about television’s architectural representation of everyday life. Indeed

Pascucci’s essay specifically questions the tendency to associate televi-

sion with the death of public life, exemplified by the writing of Richard

Sennett and Kenneth Frampton in the 1970s.

E V E R Y D AY A R C H I T E C T U R EH A R R I S

6

Highly-mediated representations of everyday reality also occur

in the work of James Casebere. Photographing a world entirely of his

own making—whitewashed models of commonplace landscapes and

interiors—his often Foucaultian subjects (courtroom, storefront, prison

cell, pulpit) are rendered in an extraordinarily banal and matter of fact

manner. In Casebere’s work, architecture uncannily embodies social

ideals at both the individual and collective level.

Casebere’s photographs along with the essays by Fausch and Pas-

cucci shift the discussion of the everyday from the domestic to the

public realm and the more overtly political. Unlike the “Signs of Life”

exhibition where Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s analysis was insis-

tently neutral, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s “Remembering Old Little

Tokyo” project is explicitly political. It is theoretically indebted to the

Annales school of historiography and is entirely public in focus. Based

on a kind of history from below, it uses text, images, and timelines

imbedded in the sidewalk to tell the stories of a Japanese-American

community. This narrative begins in the 1890s and extends through the

1940s, when many of the neighborhood’s residents were forced out of

their homes and into internment camps.

De Bretteville’s project can also be understood relative to the

notion of deterritorialization that informs Joan Ockman’s essay on

normative architecture. Tracing the transformation of revolutionary

European modern architecture of the 1920s into American corporate

architecture of the ’50s and ’60s—particularly that of Mies van der

Rohe and Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill—Ockman chronicles the shift-

ing relationships between minor and major architecture, between the

glass utopias of the ’20s and the fully embodied expressions of ad-

vanced capitalism of the ’50s and ’60s. Rejecting the approaches of both

Tafuri and Venturi and Scott Brown, Ockman’s proposal for a critical the-

ory of normative architecture depends on strategies neither heroic nor

nostalgic, but incremental, subtle, and persistent.

Finally, two essays serve as bookends to this volume. The first,

Henri Lefebvre’s “The Everyday and Everydayness,” is accompanied by

7

an introductory text by Mary McLeod. Her essay not only situates Lefeb-

vre within twentieth-century French intellectual history, but also chron-

icles his involvement with the Surrealists, the Situationists, the Utopie

group, and the events of 1968 in France.

The final essay is that of my co-editor, Deborah Berke. Aphoristic

and anecdotal, modest and direct, her essay proposes eleven character-

istics an architecture of the everyday might possess. Reading her essay,

one begins to imagine, in physical and tectonic terms, an architecture

that suppresses authorship, denies celebrity, and flirts with invisibility:

an architecture of the everyday.

E V E R Y D AY A R C H I T E C T U R EH A R R I S

8