Everyday Matters: Contemporary Approaches to Architecture maps the shift underway in architectural practice — from monument-making toward the quotidian: maintenance, basic resources, race, gender, and the routines that structure daily life for those whom overbuilding has failed.
About This Book
Architecture's obsession with the new and the spectacular has long sidelined a more pressing question: how do built environments serve — or ignore — the majority of the world's population? Everyday Matters assembles architects, historians, theoreticians, and scholars from cultural geography, environmental anthropology, political philosophy, and sociology to trace a decisive turn in contemporary architectural thinking. Rather than treating urbanism as a problem of form, the contributors examine how everyday life — its objects, routines, and social structures — is reshaping architectural ethics and aesthetics. The result is a genuinely cross-disciplinary account of why the ordinary has become the most urgent site of architectural inquiry.
Key Features
- 208 pages of cross-disciplinary essays, critical texts, and architectural theory
- Foreword by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley; contributions by Caitlin DeSilvey, Geisa Garibaldi (Concreto Rosa), Vanessa Grossman, Anna Heringer, Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation), Guillermo López and Anna Puigjaner (MAIO), Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Markus Miessen (Studio Miessen), Ciro Miguel, Mouraria 53, Djamila Ribeiro, Renzo Taddei, Ilze and Heinrich Wolff (Wolff Architects)
- Published by Ruby Press, ISBN: 9783944074399
What You'll Discover
- How architects are reorienting practice toward quotidian objects and daily maintenance rather than landmark construction
- The relationship between architectural production and structural inequalities of race and gender in the built environment
- Why basic infrastructure and resources — not formal innovation — define the most pressing challenges in contemporary urbanism
- How scholars outside architecture, including sociologists, environmental anthropologists, and political philosophers, are informing a new architectural ethics and aesthetics
About the Author
Vanessa Grossman and Ciro Miguel are the editors of this volume, and both contribute essays to its contents. Further biographical details are not provided in the available source material.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 208
- Dimensions: 120 x 200 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783944074399
- Publisher: Ruby Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and urbanists questioning the social contract of their practice, academics working across architectural theory and the social sciences, and design students engaging with questions of equity, infrastructure, and the politics of everyday space.