Use matters: history of

Transcription

1 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.

2 First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 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 material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation 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.S6U dc ISBN: (hbk) ISBN: (pbk) ISBN: (ebk) Book design by Nienke Terpsma, typeset in Neue Helvetica and Letter Gothic Std.

3 Kenny Cupers I SUBJECTIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE II COLLECTIVITY, WELFARE, CONSUMPTION III PARTICIPATION 15 Chapter 1 and modern architecture in Red Vienna Eve Blau 35 Chapter 2 the user experience Paul Emmons and Andreea Mihalache 51 Chapter 3 William J. Rankin 69 Chapter 4 sciences in Avigail Sachs 85 Chapter 5 and the instruments theory Brian Lonsway 103 Chapter 6 Sheila Crane 121 Chapter 7 Jennifer S. Mack 139 Chapter 8 for and against the user 153 Chapter 9 ergonomics in the Barbara Penner 169 Chapter 10 and the postmodern Plattenbau Max Hirsh 183 Chapter 11 Michelle Provoost 201 Chapter 12 Landscape and participation Mariana Mogilevich 215 Chapter 13 Ergonomics of democracy 233 Chapter 14 and the postmodern user Isabelle Doucet 249 Chapter 15 Tatjana Schneider 264 Notes on

4 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 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). 1 Introduction

5 Use Matters 2

6 architects 2 3 How Buildings Learn 4 5 requires paying attention to a more diverse set of actions and 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). 3 Introduction

7 8 9 and the third with the advent of participation in the 1960s and I representations of actual production 10 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). 4 Use Matters

8 architecture and use, from the emergence of new types of archi Architects Data Bauentwurfslehre that served rather than dictated use and informed new strategies 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). 5 Introduction

9 Use Matters 6 American Graphic Standards

10 II matic in the economies of the postwar decades in Europe and the context of growing economic prosperity, the notion of users 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). 7 Introduction

11 15 15 Adrian Forty, Flexibility, in Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 8 Use Matters

12 in the automotive industry, was meant to accommodate for a matters of safety in private use and consumption, however, was 9 Introduction

13 III See, for instance, Peter Blunder Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till, Architecture and Participation (London: Spon Press, 2005); Felicity Scott, Architecture or Techno- Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007). 10 Use Matters

14 impasse of naivety and apathy to which much of contemporary 11 Introduction

15 awareness that something is constructed a certain way is a 12 Use Matters