Architecture In Everyday Life

Architecture in Everyday Life
Upton, Dell.
New Literary History, Volume 33, Number 4, Autumn 2002, pp.
707-723 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2002.0046
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by UCLA Library at 06/19/10 8:55PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v033/33.4upton.html

New Literary History, 2002, 33: 707–723
Architecture in Everyday Life
Dell Upton
F
or an enterprise that exalts the concrete, the study of
everyday life is remarkably vague about its object. The everyday
comprises “seemingly unimportant activities.”1
Or it is “a set of
functions which connect and join together systems that might appear to
be distinct.”2
Or it is that which is leftover, which falls outside of or runs
counter to the scrutiny of power or officialdom. It is an Other of some
sort, better defined by what it is not than by what it is.
The same vagueness about the nature of everyday life plagues
architecture. For one architect, “The everyday is that which remains
after one has eliminated all specialized activities.”3
According to an-
other, everyday space lies “in between such defined and physically
definable realms as the home, the workplace, and the institution, [it] is
the connective tissue that binds everyday lives together.”4
But what is this
connective tissue? Where can we find it? How do we recognize it? Of
what is it made?
Architecture is inescapably concrete and it forms the fabric and the
setting of everyday life. Consequently, to approach everyday life through
architecture—architecture with a lower-case a, understood in its broad-
est sense to encompass the entire material world (or “cultural land-
scape”) that people make and think—is to be forced to pin down, in
ways too often lacking in theories of the quotidian, the precise ways in
which everyday life is experienced and the specifics of its relationships to
other aspects of life and landscape. So architecture’s materiality makes it
a natural conduit to the specificity of everyday life.
Over the last decade, contemporary theories of everyday life have
begun to infiltrate Architecture with a capital A—the realm of high
design and theory that forms one small corner of the larger world of
architecture. The increasingly pervasive commodification and homog-
enization of life and landscape and the extreme social stratification
associated with globalization seem poised to devastate both the cultural
landscape and the architectural profession. As the architect Steven
Harris noted, “The consideration of everyday life as a critical political
construct represents an attempt to suggest an architecture resistant to
this commodification/consumption paradigm, a paradigm that has
come to dominate contemporary architectural practice” (EA 3).

new literary history
708
Architectural exploration of everyday life is closely allied to the work
of Henri Lefebvre, who planted the theory of the everyday squarely in
architecture’s bailiwick. “Everyday life is sustenance, clothing, furnish-
ing, homes, neighbourhoods, environment. . . . Call it material culture if
you like, but do not confuse the issue,” he wrote (EL 21). In particular,
his fascination with the spatial nature of social life resonated with a long-
established claim that space should be the defining element of a
modern Architecture.5
Thus architecture’s discovery of Lefebvre follow-
ing the English-language publication of The Production of Space (1991)
helped to rehabilitate space after a quarter-century of the postmodern
elevation of representation and language over space and materiality.6
Lefebvre framed his interest in space and the everyday as part of his
lifelong project to examine the meaning of modernity, and modernity—
what it means to be modern, what a modern Architecture might be—is
also a central strain in twentieth-century architectural discourse.
In current architectural history, theory, and practice, then, discussion
of the everyday takes place at the intersection of architecture and
Architecture—of the study of the material settings of human life and of
the narrower concerns of professional design. In the first part of this
essay I will examine some ways that theories of the everyday have been
used to reflect upon goals and practices in the study and making of
architecture. The idea of the everyday has pushed architectural thought
in important new directions, but those directions have been limited
both by weaknesses in the original theories and by misreadings prompted
by the intellectual history and preoccupations of Architecture. In
particular, theories of the everyday have reinforced an Architectural
habit of dichotomous and hierarchical thinking about the landscape. In
addition, architectural writers have fit their thinking about everyday life
into the discourse model that has dominated Architectural theory for
thirty years. In the second part of the essay I will present an alternate way
of thinking about the everyday that transcends these problems by
drawing on the materiality of landscape and by grounding everyday life
in bodily practice.
I
Unlike, say, literary critics or sociologists, who study the works, actions,
and values of other people at a distance, builders intervene directly in
everyday life. This means that architects must examine their own
professional practices and social identities as well as those of the people
for whom they build. This habit of self-scrutiny long antedated Architec-
tural interest in the everyday, so called. Since the beginnings of

709
architecture in everyday life
European-American professionalization two centuries ago, architects
(expanding that term to include landscape architects and urban design-
ers) have struggled to differentiate themselves from builders and clients
and to establish a clear social identity that would give them the cultural
authority to dominate the building market and control the shaping of
the landscape. They have failed. Many nonarchitects—builders, clients,
critics—continue to claim some authoritative knowledge of the field and
decline to grant architects the absolute authority they seek. Many of the
first professional architects in the United States worked for speculative
builders, turning out standardized row-house and storefront plans.
Many contemporary architects work for speculative builders, turning out
standardized tract-house and office-building plans.7
Sociologists tell us that professionalization always requires that one
define and control a unique body of expertise that is acknowledged by
outsiders.8
As Lefebvre put it, “Architects have a trade. They raise the
question of architecture’s ‘specificity’ because they want to establish that
trade’s claim to legitimacy. Some of them then draw the conclusion that
there are such things as ‘architectural space’ and ‘architectural produc-
tion’ (specific, of course). Whereupon they close their case” (PS 104).
Architectural discourse turns on a set of dichotomies between Architec-
ture and its lesser Other meant to distinguish architects’ work from the
routinized spatial schemes, standardized imagery, and hackneyed tastes
of non-professionals. The fundamental distinction between Architecture
and “mere building” was first voiced in the nineteenth century and
encapsulated in Nikolaus Pevsner’s memorable comparison between a
bicycle shed, “a building,” and Lincoln Cathedral, “a piece of architec-
ture.”9
Other binaries derive from this original one: “high” or “aca-
demic” or “art” architecture versus vernacular architecture, progressive
or modern design practices versus traditional or folk ones, elite versus
popular aesthetics, art versus craft. In every case, professionally designed
works are credited with a self-conscious sophistication, a subtlety, and a
depth that are lacking in other kinds of building, which are conse-
quently defined by what they are not. Professionally designed structures
constitute extraordinary landmarks in a vast expanse of the ordinary.
The dichotomy has not always favored Architecture. Modernist po-
lemicists sometimes praised the non-professional Other as an exemplar
of the uncorrupted, unaffected, even spontaneous creativity lost in the
over-refined, over-sophisticated world of professional design. For ex-
ample, Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects, the record of an
exhibition mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1964,
presented an eclectic array of photographs of “non-pedigreed” architec-
ture as evidence of the intuitive genius of builders who sought only to
accommodate the values and everyday lives of their “primitive” or

710
“traditional” communities in a direct manner. The influential critic
Reyner Banham expected Rudofsky’s book to provoke “a real orgy of
professional self-abasement.”10
A few years after Architecture without Architects appeared, the architects
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown held the architectural profes-
sion up to another standard, that of the popular architecture of
capitalist America—“Pop” for short—found along its automobile strips
and in its mass-built suburbs. They argued that architects working in a
commercial society needed to be grounded in the “reality” of lower-
middle-class American aesthetic values. Close study of the existing
landscape might offer “formal vocabularies for today which are more
relevant to people’s diverse needs and more tolerant of the untidinesses
of urban life than the ‘rationalist,’ Cartesian formal orders of latter-day
Modern architecture.”11
To be in touch with authentic popular values
was “a way of being revolutionary for an architect.”12
Now the Other had
moved from the distant shores of Africa and the Mediterranean to the
tract houses that surrounded architects’ own home towns.
Everyday-life theory is permeated with congruent binaries. Lefebvre,
for example, made an elemental distinction between the “Quotidian”
and the “Modern.” He also contrasted the alienated, colonized, “terror-
ized” everyday life of modernity to the unalienated, natural life of
ancient European and Mesoamerican societies as well as to his highly
romanticized portrait of the preindustrial European peasantry. So
everyday theory appeared to endorse the longstanding bifurcation of
Architectural categories. In Architecture and the Everyday, the British
architects Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till describe the professional
world as “an island” defined by the “self-contained and self-referential
languages of architecture.” Surrounding the rarefied terrain of Archi-
tecture’s island is the everyday mainland, an important and necessary
reference point for architects, but a different territory.13
But theories of
everyday life also pushed architectural thought a step beyond Architec-
ture/vernacular architecture, modern/traditional, high-style/folk di-
chotomies in demonstrating that professional designers belong to the
everyday world as well as to the elite world of Architecture. For earlier
generations, the traditional, the vernacular, and the popular were exotic
lands meant to be surveyed, catalogued, analyzed, and mined rather
than inhabited. Denise Scott Brown emphasized “the agony in our
acceptance of pop”:14
in her firm’s famous formulation, the popular
landscape was “almost [but only almost] all right” (LV 6). In the end, she
wrote, “we are part of a high art, not a folk or popular art, tradition. We
use these other traditions, as others have before us, for an artistic
reason; but for a social reason as well. . . . There is a social need for
architectural high art to learn from and relate to folk and pop traditions

711
if it is to serve its real clients and do no further harm in the city” (PO 37).
The idea of the everyday forces us to acknowledge that Architecture is
part of architecture, that designers are a part of the everyday world, not
explorers from a more civilized society or detached doers for clients and
to cities.
Nevertheless, everyday theories have yet to reveal to architects a
satisfactory way to inhabit the everyday world professionally because
architects focus on the dualities in the theory while overlooking the ways
the categories blur. Despite a certain looseness of exposition that allows
one to read the everyday as an Other—as that which is outside, that
which is omitted or escapes from the regimentation of the modern
world—Lefebvre asserts the mutual dependence and individual incom-
pleteness of the everyday and the modern. They are simultaneous and
connected, in Lefebvre’s formulation, “two sides of a reality more
amazing than fiction: the society of which we are members” (EL 24–25).
Which was primary and which was secondary depended on which way
you turned the single, entwined ball: each “responds and corresponds”
to the other (EL 24–25).
To insist on a complementarity that blurs the categorical lines is to
raise once more the problem of defining the everyday precisely, of
saying what its qualities are, and through what particular processes it acts
and is acted upon. By failing to define the everyday more precisely,
architectural writers leave it in the undifferentiated and negative realm
occupied by tradition, the vernacular, and pop. Like those previous
Others, the everyday landscape is something that accuses Architecture
of its failings. For architect Margaret Crawford, one of the earliest and
most eloquent advocates of the everyday, “Everyday space stands in
contrast to the carefully planned, officially designated, and often
underused spaces of public use that can be found in most American
cities” (IEU 9). One brims with possibility, the other is a failure. For
Steven Harris, “It is anonymous, its anonymity derived from its undated
and apparently insignificant quality” (EA 3).
The word anonymous is critical, for it evokes another time-honored
Architectural dichotomy, between name-brand Architecture as the ex-
pression of discrete creative minds and the rote processes of unnamed
vernacular or traditional builders guided as well as constrained by
communal rather than individual values. The everyday, like the vernacu-
lar, is that which is outside the purview of “specialized activities,”
including Architecture. That is both its virtue and its failing. It cannot
even be encompassed by professional media of representation: the
planner John Friedmann lamented “the very real difficulties of authen-
tically representing the city of everyday life. . . . The codified languages
of maps and statistics are, in the event, quite useless. For meanings are

712
formed through experience and are shared in the small talk of everyday
life. But this talk carries little weight with planners and engineers.”15
As
with Venturi and Scott Brown’s pop aesthetes, the makers and users of
the everyday landscape live a life that is simply too large for petty
professional categories.
This way of thinking lapses into the populism that Lefebvre feared the
study of the everyday life might become, “magnifying the life of the
proletariat, of the man in the street—of people who knew how to enjoy
themselves, how to get involved, take risks, talk about what they felt and
did” (EL 37). For Lefebvre the complementary nature of the Quotidian
and the Modern mean that neither sphere monopolized power or
powerlessness, banality or innovation. Everyday life is both a colonized
setting of oppression, banality, routine, passivity, and unconsciousness
and the locus of an ultimate reality and a source of potential liberation:
there is “something extraordinary in its very ordinariness” (EL 37).16
It is “a
lower sphere of meaning” that requires elevation above the ordinary to
achieve its potential, but it is also a place where “creative energy is stored
in readiness for new creations” (EL 14). For Michel de Certeau, another
theorist of the everyday whom architects read closely, everyday practice
lacks the “organized discourse” of modernity but is a “multifarious and
silent ‘reserve’ of procedures” that might eventually undergird a less
oppressive society.17
In his most expansive moments, Lefebvre wrote of the liberated “total
man,” who, as Rob Shields has put it, lived “life as an oeuvre, a work of art
that required the full investment and reconciliation of both body and
mind” (LL 71). This complete human being inhabited the premodern
countryside, where there was no everyday life because all life was
unified: “nothing had yet become prosaic, not even the quotidian; the
prose and the poetry of life were still identical” (EL 29). Total men and
women and an unalienated way of life would be recreated through the
act of revolution, when modern men and women “are no longer able or
willing to live as before.”18
Architecture is inherently conservative. With rare exceptions, archi-
tects prefer to build rather than to tear down, to create the enduring
rather than the ephemeral, to enforce order rather than to break it. Le
Corbusier once posed the question “Architecture or Revolution?” sug-
gesting that Architecture—“amelioration”—could avert revolution—
“catastrophe.”19
Thus architectural writers have studiously ignored
Lefebvre’s insistent claims that the alienation and oppression of every-
day life in the modern world could only be resolved through revolution-
ary change.
This argument threatens Architecture’s hierarchies because it makes
Architecture and unalienated life incompatible. Lefebvre declines to

713
allow us to hang on to everyday life as a kind of totem or aide memoire. We
have a choice, he wrote, between retaining the everyday as a cherished
intellectual concept, an object of sentimental contemplation, or abolish-
ing it. Either we “refute the distinctions between philosophical and non-
philosophical, superior and inferior, spiritual and material, theoretical
and practical, culture and ignorance, and . . . undertake a radical
transformation not only of the state and politics, economics, jurisdiction
and sociology, but also of everyday life; or [we] revert to metaphysics,
Kierkegaardian anxiety and despair and the liberalism Nietzsche strove
to overthrow” (EL 14–15). In a specifically architectural context, the
meaning of Lefebvre’s challenge is even more provocative: the dichoto-
mies are untenable. Art-architecture strives for the extraordinary, some-
thing that would at the least transfigure everyday life symbolically, while
Lefebvre demands not transformation but the eradication of the distinc-
tion between the the extraordinary and the ordinary. There can be no
Architecture, only architecture. Lincoln Cathedral and the bicycle shed
are parts of the same landscape, fragments of one whole.
So far architects have chosen not to relinquish the distinction
between Architecture and the everyday or the position this distinction
grants them. While Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till wish to avoid
reifying the everyday by delineating “an alternative aesthetic based on
it,” neither do they want “to get caught within the binary trap of
remaining immersed in the ordinary. This would lead to the disavowal of
architectural knowledge and creativity alike—knowledge because it is
associated with the repressive structures of power and expertise, creativ-
ity because it is associated with uncritical genius” (EVA 7). Architecture
not Revolution.
As a result, when architects try to incorporate the everyday into their
work, the results tend to be embarrassingly literal and decorative. They
design aesthetically pleasing carts for street vendors to make them
acceptable to the powers that be, or they create small public places on
leftover bits of land, or they design a house whose form is taken from the
reflection of vegetation in a pond on site, or a building meant to disrupt
the routines of perception or to mimic the messiness of everyday
existence.20
In its commitment to old and new dichotomies, Architecture uses
everyday life most confidently and most effectively as a rhetorical
strategy—or a tactic, to use Michel de Certeau’s term. Certeau described
space as the “proper” (propre) domain of power, which manifested itself
through spatialized “strategies.” That is, power, “a proprietor, an enter-
prise, a city, a scientific institution,” manifests itself in a visible territorial
order characterized by “organizing discourses.” Where Lefebvre saw
everyday life as a colonized space, Certeau imagined it as spaceless and

714
formless practices without an organizing discourse. It works in time not
space, employing tactics—short-term raids on power as opposed to
strategic assaults from long-established positions. “A tactic insinuates
itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its
entirety. . . . It has at its disposal no base.” Everyday practices are tactical
in this sense: they are “victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’, . . . clever
tricks, knowing how to get away with things” (PEL xix, 35–36, 48).
Everyday practices operate in the interstices that power’s strategies, no
matter how all-encompassing they aim to be, cannot master. Everyday
life raids institutional fortresses, undermining and challenging their
totalizing ambitions. So architecture employs the trope of everyday life
to make guerilla raids on the modern landscape, perhaps to redraw
some links or to build some new ones, but never to reconstruct it from
scratch.
This seems to me to be the import of architect and theorist Joan
Ockman’s call for a “minor” and a “major” architecture that would
coexist in critical tension. Minor architecture, “defined by deterri-
torialization, intensified political consciousness, and the anticipatory
assemblage of new cultural forces,” would serve as a check on the
“territorial, apolitical, and conservative of the status quo, or normative” major
architecture. “[T]hat which is major is constantly redefining itself in
relation to that which is minor, and that which is minor is always
potentially challenging or hybridizing that which is major.”21
This is
close to Certeau’s concept of strategies and tactics. Major architecture is
constantly subject to raids by the minor and so must adjust its premises
and its strategies to account for them. The use of the everyday as a kind
of rhetorical device that grounds a politically charged critique of
Architectural process further echoes Certeau’s vision of language as the
principal battleground on which strategy and tactics clash.
In a similar mood, Margaret Crawford envisions an Architecture in
touch with everyday life that could help channel frustrated desires into
a political language that would “make a new set of personal and
collective demands on the social order. Therefore the practices of
everyday urbanism should inevitably lead to social change, not via
abstract political ideologies imposed from outside, but instead through
specific concerns that arise from the lived experience of different
individuals and groups in the city” (IEU 13).
Nevertheless, neither Crawford’s arguments nor Ockman’s nor in-
deed those of any architectural theorist of the everyday, give adequate
attention to the physicality of everyday life or to the materiality of
Architecture. Lefebvre warned that language “makes everyday life, is
everyday life, disguises and conceals it, hiding it behind the ornaments
of rhetoric and make-believe, so that, in the course of everyday life,

715
language and linguistic relations become denials of everyday life” (EL
120–21). Although the architectural advocates of the everyday call for a
practice grounded in “reality” rather than in “abstract theory,” theirs
remains a rhetorical rather than an action-based model.
II
Architecture took its curious turn toward rhetorical models around
1970. In their seminal Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of
Architectural Form, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven
Izenour attacked the modernist emphasis on space and form for its low
“level of content.” They directed readers to the Las Vegas strip to see an
architecture that was “antispatial . . . an architecture of communications
over space” (LV 6–8). Good architecture, they claimed, drew on a
vocabulary of long-established, conventional signs, most effectively em-
bodied in architectural decoration, to convey its message. Learning from
Las Vegas was one of the first of a thirty-year succession of treatises that
tried to build architectural theory on linguistic analogies. From the
semiotic models of the 1970s, through occasional attempts to use
Chomskian generative grammar, to the deconstructivists of the 1990s,
architects, theorists, and some historians struggled to demonstrate that
buildings might be thought of as a kind of language, or as “texts” or
“representations.”22
One by one these efforts foundered, for in the end
no one has ever established what it is, beyond the simplest commercial
or social messages (“eat here,” “sleep here,” “I’m rich,” “I’m in the
know”) that architecture communicates. Even where architecture incor-
porates imagery or “iconic” qualities, there is no necessary message
intended.
Contemporary architectural theorists of the everyday still work within
the linguistic model, overlooking a significant, if secondary, strain of
everyday-life theory that emphasizes the material nature of ordinary life.
Some of the first philosophers and aestheticians to consider the every-
day, the Pragmatists and their aesthetic Dada and Surrealist contempo-
raries, insisted on founding everyday life and its reform in practice, or
what is now termed “embodied action.” In Art as Experience, the Pragma-
tist philosopher John Dewey argued that “Art is thus prefigured in the
very processes of living”: it is grounded in ordinary life through the
process of grappling with the material world with the aim of producing
an object. “Every art does something with some physical material, the
body or something outside the body, with or without the use of
intervening tools, and with a view to production of something visible,
audible, or tangible.”23

716
While recent architectural theory offers little basis for a materially
grounded analysis of everyday life, there are clues to be found in art. As
Architecture took the linguistic road, some artists, notably the Minimalist
sculptors, moved toward a rigorously material understanding of experi-
ence. These artists explored artifactual presence by stripping away
notions of empathy, iconography, narrative (“relation”) and, by exten-
sion, discourse.24
As the critic Charlotte Willard noted at the time, these
sculptors “explored typically architectural concerns of ‘space, volume,
movement, light,’” and, through their choice of scale and setting, the
equally architectural issue of corporeal experience.25
In a famous exchange reported by Robert Morris, the sculptor Tony
Smith told an interviewer that he hadn’t made his six-foot cube Die
(1962) larger because he “was not making a monument” nor had he
made it smaller because he “was not making an object.”26
Either choice
would have diminished the effect he sought by removing his work from
the immediate human realm and reducing it to an object of distanced
contemplation. By making it as high as a person, Smith made Die a work
to be confronted, not looked up to or down on. He gave it a kind of
subjectivity to which the viewer was forced to respond. The point, as
Michael Fried famously noted in a hostile but perceptive article, was that
the Minimalist object was “theatrical”: it was a presence that, by its
human scale or aggressive positioning, demanded to be reckoned with
by viewers as though it were another person.27
While it was framed squarely in the high-art tradition, the Minimalist
project is useful for thinking about everyday spaces. The physicality of
the encounter with Minimalist sculpture and the ways the object
manipulates the architectural space of the gallery to force viewers to
respond resemble the kinds of ordinary, taken-for-granted, interactions
that constitute everyday experience. When we confront a Minimalist
sculpture we often confront a work whose maker wants “to seize and
hold the space of that gallery—not simply to fill it, but seize and hold
that space.”28
The viewer must surrender or fight back, learning some-
thing about him- or herself in the process. Anthropologists and psy-
chologists of perception and cognition offer a concrete sense of how this
happens through their investigation of human territoriality and agency.
Like other animals, we humans are territorial, meaning that our daily
round occupies a relatively limited and predictable range, and we tend
to maintain a relatively constant personal distance—“a small protective
sphere or bubble”—between ourselves and others of our species.29
In humans, the formation of this buffer is an important stage in the
process of self-definition. Some of our earliest forms of self-awareness
arise from our understanding that we are bounded objects in a space
that extends beyond us.30
By differentiating self and non-self in this

717
elementary way, we gain a sense of agency, a realization that some but
not all of the events around us can be attributed to our own thoughts
and deeds.31
Taken together, our bodies and their protective bubbles
help to define our selves by giving us an idea of “self-coherence” as
physical entities with limits and the power to act and to be acted upon.32
Yet these limits are remarkably fluid. Anthony Cohen makes a useful
distinction between borders and boundaries. Borders are facts. The
formal line dividing two nations is a border. Boundaries, on the other
hand, are normally permeable and imprecise; they divide only to the
extent that they are allowed to. National boundaries may be crossed
constantly by people, languages, ideas, or goods.33
The body appears to
be defined by a clear border, the enclosing envelope of skin. But the
closer one looks, the more the border appears to be a boundary, and a
very fluid one at that. The environment penetrates the body, as a person
breathes, eats, and drinks. More subtly, the skin itself is a permeable
boundary, constantly “exchanging matter with energy.”34
Our “sen-
sorimotor space” and perceptual “receptive field,” the areas within our
immediate grasp and within reach of our perception, respectively,
extend our selves into a space much larger than our bodies proper, but
they also make us vulnerable to the influence of the architectural and
human spaces beyond our bodily boundaries.35
Culture, which includes explicit and implicit propositions about daily
life, shapes and amends these raw possibilities. It defines the practical
limits of our territory and the social meanings of various sorts of self-
colonization of space (HD 3; EP 99, 101). The goal, then, is not to
discard language as an element of everyday life. As Lefebvre, inspired by
his early association with the Surrealists, observed, “Living bodies, the
bodies of ‘users’—are caught up not only in the toils of parcellized space,
but also in the web of what philosophers call ‘analogons’: images, signs
and symbols” (PS 98).36
Practice, or kinesis, and rhetoric are inseparable.
The psychologist Ulric Neisser attempted to account for the interac-
tion of perceptual, cognitive, and cultural data in shaping our sense of
being. He cast them into five, interdependent “kinds [or modes] of self-
knowledge” that range from the purely environmental and perceptual
to the (almost) purely rhetorical.37
The first mode, the ecological self, is
dependent directly and exclusively on sensory data.38
The second, the
interpersonal self, provides access to other people in the same manner
that the ecological self does for the nonhuman environment, for certain
portions of the brain appear to be uniquely devoted to recognizing
other human faces and interpreting their expressions. The three other
modes are private self-knowledge, which encompasses awareness of
those thoughts and experiences not available to others; extended self-
knowledge, or awareness of the self’s continuity in the past and the

718
future; and conceptual self-knowledge, the socially given, culturally
mediated, self-reflective “theory” comprising “a wide array of beliefs and
assumptions” about ourselves.39
At one end of the spectrum, then, is the body in primary contact with
its environment. At the other is the culturally formed person under-
standing herself as an embodied self whose actions have observable
consequences in the physical environment, but also as a social being
who must modify and mediate her more private responses in acceptable
ways.40
Neisser’s model offers a way to understand the intersection of the
sensory and the personal with the social and the cultural in the
formation of selfhood, or the sense of individual identity and agency, and
personhood, or the sense of social identity and agency.41
The navigation of everyday spaces, the ordinary, unexceptional sites
of most of our sensory and intellectual experiences, is the primary arena
within which selfhood and personhood are forged. In the give and take
of everyday life we learn the personal and social meanings of our agency.
Repeated individual actions become practices and clusters of practices
become social formations. As Lefebvre observed, the “concrete, practi-
cal and alive” experience of everyday life determined the “discreteness
yet inclusiveness of the individual and the social. . . . This unity is the
foundation of all society: a society is made up of individuals, and the
individual is a social being, in and by the content of his life and the form
of his consciousness” (CEL 72). Pure discourse models of the everyday
confront only the social side—the ways everyday life shapes social
identity and agency—but a materialist account that includes embodied
actors encompasses the inseparability of social and individual identity
and agency, of what the philosopher Calvin O. Schrag calls the “we-
experience” and the “I-experience” (SP 79).
For an example, we might turn to the early American republic, where
cultural patterns transformed fundamental psychological processes in
struggles over what Lefebvre called “the right to the city.”42
Early-
nineteenth-century American media were filled with endless accounts of
tobacco usage—smoking and chewing and spitting—that filled newspa-
pers, literary essays, and visual images. Journalists spoke of the smell of
cigar smoke from the streets that clung to clothing in polite parlors.
Artists depicted streets full of cigar smokers and spitters of all races,
classes, and ethnicities nearly smothering refined passers-by.43
Tobacco
represented the impingement of one’s undesirable urban neighbors on
one’s own social space and identity. It epitomized the unease of many
elite urbanites in the socially mixed, heavily traveled streets of the new
American cities. The choice of tobacco as a metaphor for urban social
and personal claustrophobia was deliberate, for the urban elite increas-
ingly defined themselves according to a particular genteel ideal of

719
posture, movement, and space-holding—one that prescribed a narrowly
drawn, inviolable bubble of space that would isolate each urbanite from
every other one, making the streets into a collection of small, noncon-
tiguous private spaces. Tobacco violated this.
This concern for posture is a manifestation of its central role in the
human orienting system, where it helps to define the self at a particular
location with respect to environment through aligning the perceptual
systems in essential ways. Beyond simple orientation—Neisser’s ecologi-
cal self—posture is central to what cognitive scientists call the body
image, the fragmented, transient sense of our bodies as they appear to
our consciousness. Body images embrace our intellectual, sensate, and
emotional senses of ourselves as three-dimensional objects.44
Genteel
codes idealized a body drawn in on itself and at rest that enacted self-
control and stability and created a distinctive and unambiguous iconog-
raphy of self. Its tight, predictable perimeters were of the sort most easily
identifiable to the human eye. The carefully limited, closely controlled
genteel body warned against intrusions on its defenses by sight or touch.
The ideal was reinforced by images of its negative: of bodies slouching
and dressed in exaggerated ways and smoking, all of which extended
personal space beyond permissible bounds and violated others’ bound-
aries. The genteel response was to try to open up the streets by
forbidding various kinds of informal selling and other occupations of
sidewalks and, when they were able to incarcerate their nemeses in
prisons and asylums of various sorts, to create spaces that enforced
proper postures and means of social interaction.
We can begin to understand why Lefebvre and Certeau were so
interested in the power to structure space and time, for, more than
regulating particular events, it is the power to shape society by governing
the repetitions that form its component selves. If one could control
people’s movements and control their interpretation, one could control
their identities.
Thus, we might conclude that the everyday is less a rhetorical field or
a collection of leftover activities than a heterogeneous me;lange of ideas,
sensations, emotions, and physical actions, half-conscious and half-rote.
The anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu saw this clearly. Everyday life is not
a system of representations or performances, he wrote, but a “system of
structured, structuring dispositions . . . which is constituted in practice
and is always oriented toward practical functions.”45
He called this
system the habitus, or practical sense. “Practical sense is a quasi-bodily
involvement,” he went on. It is “converted into motor schemes and body
automatisms” (66, 69). Bourdieu emphasized the “disposition of the
body and language to function as repositories of deferred thoughts that
can be triggered off at a distance in space and time by the simple effect

720
of re-placing the body in an overall posture which recalls the associated
thoughts and feelings” (69).46
His goal was to salvage the structuralist
concept of culture while responding to criticisms of structuralism’s
inability to account for change by stressing that the habitus is only a
predisposition, “a present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the
future,” a way to proceed lodged in an actor capable of thinking and
making judgments, so that in “the necessary yet unpredictable confron-
tation between the habitus and an event,” new solutions are improvised.
As both a sensorimotor and an ideological quality, the habitus is a flexible
disposition that allow one to act in a way that is at once habitual and
improvisatory, rote and novel. It is above all an “art of inventing” (54–
56).
And so we arrive at a more concrete sense of the everyday, in every
sense of the word. One definition of everyday life might be “The nexus of
spaces and times that repeatedly trigger bodily habits and cultural
memories—the habitus.” Everyday life can be oppressive or liberating,
depending on the ways it is organized temporally and spatially. Everyday
life shapes selfhood and personhood through material, and particularly
bodily, practices, but its critical quality is time, as Michel de Certeau
realized. It is the repetition and routine of everyday life that teaches our
bodies the habitus. So the power to organize space and time, to articulate
Certeau’s “organizing discourse,” those qualities of modernity that Lefebvre
identified as sources of the banality and alienation of everyday life in the
modern world, gives considerable power to shape self and society. As
Bourdieu observed, “Symbolic power works partly through the control of
other people’s bodies and belief that is given by the collectively recog-
nized capacity to act in various ways on deep-rooted linguistic and
muscular patterns of behaviour” (69). But the unpredictability of the
habitus means that no one can control the everyday.
So if we understand what the everyday is, we can also understand how
it works: through bodily memory instilled by repeated action in orga-
nized time and space. This definition gives the everyday a specificity that
is lacking in the work of Lefebvre and Certeau and their architectural
disciples, and it suggests as well why small-a architecture is critical to
understanding everyday life.
It also does something important for architecture itself, reincorporat-
ing Architecture into the larger landscape. The habitus as both a
“structured, structuring disposition” and an “art of inventing” also
accounts both for pattern and continuity and for improvisation and
change. It reunites the ordinary and the extraordinary as inseparable
aspects of experience, neither possible without the other, neither deter-
mining the other. In building an understanding of this sort from the
routine and ordinary, we can ultimately relinquish the concept of the

721
everyday. In the small field of Architecture and architectural studies, for
example, we can examine the cultural landscape without recourse to the
hierarchies and oppositions of high and low that impede understanding
and have fragmented the field for many years into advocates for and
scholars of “high” and “low” architecture, Architecture and architecture,
each with its own values, goals, and methods.
University of Virginia
NOTES
1 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, tr. Sacha Rabinovitch (New
Brunswick, N.J., 1984), pp. 14, 8; hereafter cited in text as EL.
2 Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” in Architecture of the Everyday, ed.
Steven Harris and Deborah Berke (New York, 1997), p. 34.
3 Steven Harris, “Everyday Architecture,” in Architecture of the Everyday, p. 3; hereafter
cited in text as EA.
4 Margaret Crawford, “Introduction” to Everyday Urbanism, ed. John Chase, Margaret
Crawford, and John Kaliski (New York, 1999), p. 9; hereafter cited in text as IEU.
5 Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr. and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since
1922 (New York, 1932); Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New
Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1941); Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space: How to Look at
Architecture (New York, 1957).
6 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford,
1991); hereafter cited in text as PS. For an important discussion of Lefebvre’s relevance to
Architecture, see Mary McLeod, “Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life: An Introduc-
tion,” in Architecture of the Everyday, pp. 9–29.
7 Gwendolyn Wright eloquently describes one episode in the struggle between architects
and builders in Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in
Chicago, 1873–1913 (Chicago, 1980), pp. 40–78.
8 Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, 1977),
pp. 15–18, 24, 38.
9 Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, 7th ed. (Harmondsworth, 1970),
p. 15.
10 Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed
Architecture (New York, 1964); Felicity Scott, “Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism
and Dwelling,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, ed.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), p. 215.
Rudofsky’s book remains in print, having defined the exotic realm of “the vernacular” for
several generations of Architectural teachers and students now.
11 Denise Scott Brown, “Learning from Pop” [1971], in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown, A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953–1984, ed. Peter Arnell, Ted
Bickford, and Catherine Bergart (New York, 1984), p. 27.
12 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The
Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 3; hereafter
cited in text as LV. On Venturi and Scott Brown’s implied claims for the superior
authenticity of popular aesthetics, see Deborah Fausch, “Ugly and Ordinary: The Repre-
sentation of the Everyday,” in Architecture of the Everyday, p. 104.
13 Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till, “The Everyday and Architecture,” in The Everyday

722
and Architecture, no. 134 of Architectural Design Profile, ed. Wigglesworth and Till (London,
1998), p. 7; hereafter cited in text as EVA.
14 Denise Scott Brown, “Pop Off: Reply to Kenneth Frampton” [1971], in View from the
Campidoglio, p. 34; hereafter cited in text as PO.
15 John Friedmann, “The City of Everyday Life: Knowledge/Power and the Problem of
Representation,” DISP, 136 (1999), 8.
16 For a discussion of Lefebvre’s notion of the extraordinary embedded in the ordinary,
see McLeod, “Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life,” pp. 13, 19; Rob Shields, Lefebvre,
Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (London, 1999), p. 71; hereafter cited in text as LL.
17 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendell (Berkeley, 1984), p.
48; hereafter cited in text as PEL.
18 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, tr. John Moore, vol. 1 (London, 1991), p. 182.
Italics in the original. Hereafter cited in text as CEL.
19 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, tr. Frederick Etchells (New York, 1960), pp.
23–24.
20 Norman Millar, “Street Survival: The Plight of the Los Angeles Vendors,” in Everyday
Urbanism, pp. 136–51; John Chase, “The Giant Revolving (Winking) Chicken Head and the
Doggie Drinking Fountain: Making Small Public Spaces on Private Land by Using
Commonplace Objects,” in Everyday Urbanism, pp. 110–19; Níall McLaughlin, “Shack,
Foxhall, Northamptonshire,” in The Everyday and Architecture, pp. 42–47; Phillip Hall-Patch,
“Breaking the Veil,” in The Everyday and Architecture, pp. 36–39; Günther Behnisch,
“Circumstantial Architecture,” in The Everyday and Architecture, pp. 88–95.
21 Joan Ockman, “Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture,” in Architecture of the
Everyday, p. 123. Ockman credits the notion of a major and minor architecture to Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
22 On semiotics: Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas; and Charles
Jencks and George Baird, ed., Meaning in Architecture (New York, 1970). On generative
grammar: Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic
Artifacts (Knoxville, 1975). On deconstruction: Christopher Norris and Andrew Benjamin,
What Is Deconstruction? (London, 1988); Michael Benedikt, Deconstructing the Kimbell: An
Essay on Meaning and Architecture (New York, 1991); Mark Wigley, The Architecture of
Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). For a current example of the
normative use of a discourse model, see Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s characterization of
Louis Kahn’s buildings as “intertexts” and “powerful aesthetic propositions.” (Sarah
Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism [New Haven, 2001], p. 5.)
23 John Dewey, Art as Experience [1934] (New York, 1979), pp. 24, 47.
24 Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd” [1966], in Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley, 1995), p. 155; Donald Judd, “Specific Objects”
[1965], in Minimalism, ed. James Meyer (New York, 2000), pp. 207–10.
25 James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, 2001), p. 24.
26 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part II” [1966], in Continuous Project Altered Daily:
The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 11.
27 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” [1967], in Minimal Art, pp. 116–47. The art
historian James Meyer notes that Morris’s own sculpture “orchestrated a choreographed
movement around the work and the gallery. . . . the Morris [work] was to be experienced
by an ambient body that walked around, and through, the work itself.” (Meyer, Minimalism,
p. 51.)
28 Carl Andre, quoted in Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts
Magazine, 64 (1990), 44.
29 Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), p. 119; hereafter
cited in text as HD. See also pp. 7, 10, 66.

723
30 Naomi Eilan, Anthony Marcel, and José Luis Bermúdez, “Self-Consciousness and the
Body: An Interdisciplinary Introduction,” in The Body and the Self, ed. José Luis Bermúdez,
Anthony Marcel, and Naomi Eilan (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 20.
31 Celia A. Brownell and Claire B. Kopp, “Common Threads, Diverse Solutions:
Concluding Commentary,” Developmental Review, 11 (1991), 297; John Campbell, “The
Body Image and Self-Consciousness,” in The Body and the Self, p. 34.
32 George Butterworth, “An Ecological Perspective on the Origins of Self,” in The Body
and the Self, p. 101; hereafter cited in text as EP.
33 Anthony P. Cohen, Self-Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (London,
1994), pp. 122–32.
34 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, 1966), pp. 18–19.
35 Jacques Paillard, “Motor and Representational Framing of Space,” in Brain and Space,
ed. Jacques Paillard (Oxford, 1991), p. 164.
36 On Lefebvre’s connection with surrealism, see Shields, Lefebvre, pp. 71, 76, 155;
Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, pp. 72–73, 82–83.
37 Ulric Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge,” Philosophical Psychology, 1 (1988), 35–59.
38 Neisser’s term “ecological” was borrowed from James J. Gibson, whose work under-
pins much of the contemporary philosophical and psychological work on selfhood. Gibson
stressed the ways that evolution had given animate beings direct access to necessary
information from their environments; the capacity is built into human (and other beings’)
sensorimotor systems and requires no cultural information or even life experience to
shape it. His most famous examples were drawn from the optical structure of the world.
Gibson showed that animate beings’ visual systems were attuned to the environmental
phenomena of “looming,” in which objects directly in front of us appear to grow larger as
we approach; of occlusion, in which one object appears to disappear as it passes behind
another; and of “optical flow,” the continuous “streaming” of peripheral visual images as
we move through space. These map a unique point of view, Neisser’s ecological self, at
their intersection. (James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception [Boston,
1979], pp. 78–86, 103–4, 227–29).
39 Ulric Neisser, “The Self Perceived,” in The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal
Sources of Self-Knowledge, ed. Ulric Neisser (Cambridge, 1993), p. 4.
40 Calvin O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity (New Haven, 1997), p. 61; hereafter cited
in text as SP.
41 I borrow the concepts “selfhood” and “personhood” from Cohen, Self-Consciousness.
42 Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, tr. and ed. Eleonore
Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, 1996), pp. 63–181.
43 For a fuller discussion of urban tobacco use, see Dell Upton, “Inventing the
Metropolis: Civilization and Urbanity in Antebellum New York,” in Art and the Empire City:
New York, 1825–1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New York,
2000), pp. 33–34.
44 Shaun Gallagher, “Body Image and Body Schema: A Conceptual Clarification,”
Journal of Mind and Behavior, 7 (1986), 546, 548.
45 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Stanford, 1990), p. 52;
hereafter cited in text.
46 Physiologists and anthropologists have made similar observations about the ways
particular sensory experiences trigger particular emotions or memories simply as a
product of the idiosyncratic wiring of the human brain. See for example Rodney
Needham, “Percussion and Transition,” Man, 2 (1967), 606–14; Michael Davis, “The Role
of the Amygdala in Fear and Anxiety,” Annual Review of Neuroscience, 15 (1992), 353–75.

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