Kenny Cupers is Assistant Professor of Architectural
“To a century during which
much of the widely admired
architecture is self-referential,
Use Matters offers an urgently
needed reminder. From the
early-twentieth-century
housers to the postwar
champions of social science,
modern architecture was
shaped by a sustained—if
with the nature and demands
of its clientele. Use does
indeed matter, as the essays
demonstrate so elegantly.”
Dell Upton, University of
California, Los Angeles
HISTORY
Kenny Cupers
universal but a historically constructed category
of twentieth-century modernity that continues
to inform architectural practice and thinking in
“Buildings are not static
objects, and yet how do we
access their dynamic position
in culture? This collection
answers that question by
historicizing and theorizing
use in a wide range of areas,
from modernist planning and
systems theory to ergonomics and even philosophy. In
the process, it generates an
exciting and new perspective
on modern architecture.”
Mark Jarzombek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Edited by
show, interest in the elusive realm of the user
was an essential part of architecture and
Use
Matters
history, from the bathroom to the city, from
ergonomics to cybernetics, and from Algeria to
central yet rarely acknowledged actor in architecture,
the user. Its cutting-edge
scholarship reveals as unexpectedly complex those
usually depicted as generic.
With users no longer hidden in
plain sight, Use Matters opens
up a fascinating new arena of
investigation and research.”
Margaret Crawford, University
of California, Berkeley
Use matters
From participatory architecture to interaction
design, the question of how design accommodates use is driving inquiry in many creative
Use matters:
an alternative
history of
architecture
Edited by Kenny Cupers
Figure 9.1 Alternative
“sitting” method of entering
and leaving a high bathtub.
From Alexander Kira,
The Bathroom (1967), 64.
First published 2013 by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 selection and editorial material, Kenny Cupers; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Use matters : an alternative history of architecture / edited by Kenny Cupers. -- First edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
1. Architecture and society--History. 2. Functionalism (Architecture) I.
Cupers, Kenny, editor of compilation.
NA2543.S6U84 2014
724’.6--dc23
2013015537
ISBN: 978-0-415-63732-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-63734-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-88414-1 (ebk)
Book design by Nienke Terpsma, typeset in Neue Helvetica
and Letter Gothic Std.
Kenny Cupers
I
SUBJECTIVITY
AND
KNOWLEDGE
II
COLLECTIVITY,
WELFARE,
CONSUMPTION
15
Chapter 1
and
modern architecture
in Red Vienna
Eve Blau
103 Chapter 6
III
PARTICIPATION
201 Chapter 12
Landscape and
participation
Mariana Mogilevich
Sheila Crane
35
Chapter 2
121 Chapter 7
the user experience
Paul Emmons and
Andreea Mihalache
215 Chapter 13
Ergonomics of
democracy
Jennifer S. Mack
233 Chapter 14
139 Chapter 8
51
Chapter 3
for and against
the “user”
and the postmodern
user
Isabelle Doucet
249 Chapter 15
William J. Rankin
69
Chapter 4
153 Chapter 9
ergonomics in the
Tatjana Schneider
Barbara Penner
264 Notes on
sciences in
169 Chapter 10
Avigail Sachs
85
Chapter 5
and the postmodern
Plattenbau
Max Hirsh
and the instruments
183 Chapter 11
theory
Brian Lonsway
Michelle Provoost
Introduction
with the question of use and how use, in turn, has shaped
experience, event, or performance, the production of architecture
the interest in the agency of the user across many creative
1
an unchanging fact that transcends shared preconceptions or
1
Introduction
1
For instance Nishat
Awan, Tatjana Schneider,
and Jeremy Till, Spatial
Agency: Other Ways of
Doing Architecture
(London: Routledge,
2011); Bryan Bell and
Katie Wakeford,
Expanding Architecture:
Design as Activism (New
York: Metropolis Books,
2008); Andres Lepik,
Small Scale, Big Change:
New Architectures of
Social Engagement
(Basel: Birkhäuser,
2010); Michael Fox and
Miles Kemp, Interactive
Architecture (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).
2
Use Matters
architects” 2
3
How Buildings Learn
4
5
requires paying attention to a more diverse set of actions and
6
7
3
Introduction
2
Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed
Architecture (New York:
Museum of Modern Art,
1965).
3
Charles Jencks and
Nathan Silver, Adhocism:
The Case for Improvisation (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1973).
4
Stewart Brand. How
Buildings Learn: What
Happens After They’re
Built (New York: Viking,
1994).
5
Jonathan Hill, Actions
of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users
(London: Routledge,
2003).
6
For instance Dell Upton,
“Form and User: Style,
Mode, Fashion and the
Artifact,” in Living
in a Material World:
Canadian and American
Approaches to Material
Culture (St. John’s
Nfld: Memorial University of Newfoundland,
1991).
7
Jorge Otero-Pailos,
Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology
and the Rise of the
Postmodern (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
8
9
and the third with the advent of participation in the 1960s and
I
representations of
actual production
10
4
Use Matters
8
Henri Lefebvre, The
Production of Space
(Oxford: Blackwell,
1991). For its influence on contemporary
discourse in architecture and urbanism,
see Everyday Urbanism,
eds. John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and
John Chalks (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1999).
For its influence in
architectural history,
see, for instance, Iain
Borden, Skateboarding,
Space, and the City:
Architecture and the
Body (New York: Berg
Publishers, 2001);
Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1999).
9
Harald Rohracher, The
Mutual Shaping of Design
and Use: Innovations for
Sustainable Buildings
as a Process of Social Learning (München:
Profil Verlag, 2006);
Thomas Gieryn, “What
Buildings Do,” Theory
and Society 31 (2002):
35‾74; Monica Mulcahy,
“Designing the User/
Using the Design,”
Social Studies of
Science 28, no. 1
(1998): 5‾37; Steve
Woolgar, “Configuring
the User: The Case of
Usability Trials,” in
A Sociology of Monsters:
Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination
(London: Routledge,
1991).
10
See, for instance,
Johanna Drucker, “Architecture and the Concept
of the Subject,” in
Architects’ People, eds.
Russell Ellis and Dana
Cuff (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
architecture and use, from the emergence of new types of archi
11
12
Architects’ Data
Bauentwurfslehre
that served rather than dictated use and informed new strategies
5
Introduction
11
See Susan Henderson,
“A Revolution in the
Woman’s Sphere: Grete
Lihotzky and the Frankfurt Kitchen,” in Architecture and Feminism
(New York: Princeton
Architectural Press,
1996); K. Michael Hays,
Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The
Architecture of Hannes
Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 1992).
12
The notion of systemization of architectural
knowledge is borrowed
from a forthcoming book
by Gernot Weckherlin
about Ernst Neufert.
See Walter Prigge and
Wolfgang Voigt, eds.,
Ernst Neufert: Normierte Baukultur im 20.
Jahrhundert (Frankfurt
am Main: Campus Verlag,
1999).
American Graphic
Standards
6
Use Matters
13
The consequences of this
evolution are analyzed
in my forthcoming book
The Social Project:
Housing Postwar France
(Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press,
forthcoming 2014).
14
See Jonathan Hill,
Actions of Architecture: Architects and
Creative Users (London:
Routledge, 2003).
II
matic in the economies of the postwar decades in Europe and
the context of growing economic prosperity, the notion of users
13
14
7
Introduction
15
8
Use Matters
15
Adrian Forty, “Flexibility,” in Words and
Buildings: A Vocabulary
of Modern Architecture
(New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
in the automotive industry, was meant to accommodate for a
matters of safety in private use and consumption, however, was
9
Introduction
III
16
See, for instance,
Peter Blunder Jones,
Doina Petrescu, and
Jeremy Till, Architecture and Participation
(London: Spon Press,
2005); Felicity Scott,
Architecture or TechnoUtopia: Politics after
Modernism (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press,
2007).
16
10
Use Matters
impasse of naivety and apathy to which much of contemporary
11
Introduction
awareness that something is constructed a certain way is a
12
Use Matters