Use matters: an alternative history of architecture From participatory architecture to interaction design, the question of how design accommodates use is driving inquiry in many creative fields. Expanding utility to embrace people’s everyday experience brings new promises for the social role of design. But this is nothing new. As the essays assembled in this collection show, interest in the elusive realm of the user was an essential part of architecture and design throughout the twentieth century. Use Matters is the first to assemble this alternative history, from the bathroom to the city, from ergonomics to cybernetics, and from Algeria to East Germany. It argues that the user is not a universal but a historically constructed category of twentieth-century modernity that continues to inform architectural practice and thinking in often unacknowledged ways. Kenny Cupers is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Use matters: an alternative history of architecture Edited by Kenny Cupers First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 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 1988. 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.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. Acknowledgements Introduction Kenny Cupers I SUBJECTIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE Chapter 1 ISOTYPE and modern architecture in Red Vienna Eve Blau Chapter 2 Architectural handbooks and the user experience Paul Emmons and Andreea Mihalache Chapter 3 Laboratory modules and the subjectivity of the knowledge worker William J. Rankin Chapter 4 Architects, users, and the social sciences in postwar America Avigail Sachs Chapter 5 Spatial experience and the instruments of architectural theory Brian Lonsway II COLLECTIVITY, WELFARE, CONSUMPTION Chapter 6 The shantytown in Algiers and the colonization of everyday life Sheila Crane Chapter 7 New Swedes in the New town Jennifer S. Mack Chapter 8 Henri Lefebvre: for and against the “user” Łukasz Stanek Chapter 9 Designed-in safety: ergonomics in the bathroom Barbara Penner Chapter 10 Intelligentsia design and the postmodern Plattenbau Max Hirsh Chapter 11 WiMBY!’s new collectives Michelle Provoost III PARTICIPATION Chapter 12 Landscape and participation in 1960s New York Mariana Mogilevich Chapter 13 Ergonomics of democracy Javier Lezaun Chapter 14 Counter-projects and the postmodern user Isabelle Doucet Chapter 15 The paradox of social architectures Tatjana Schneider Notes on contributors Index Acknowledgements The origin of this book lies in the April 2011 conference “Before and Beyond: Architecture and the User,” organized at the School of Architecture and Planning of the State University of New York at Buffalo as part of my tenure as the Reyner Banham Fellow. Many thanks go to the speakers and contributors who made that event a success. I would also like to thank the School—and Omar Khan and Robert Shibley in particular—for their support, financial and otherwise. Adam Levin’s editorial assistance has been crucial to the publication of this book, as was the critical feedback of Hadas Steiner, Curt Gambetta, Mariana Mogilevich, Gerard Forde, and many others. Gratitude also goes to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for its financial support of the publication and to Nienke Terspma for her graphic design work. Introduction This collection of essays examines how architecture has dealt with the question of use and how use, in turn, has shaped architectural thinking and practice over the past century. Utility is central to what architects do in practice as they deal with clients, norms, and building regulations. It is also a category of architectural theory, too often glossed over as that one part of the Vitruvian triad distinguishing architecture most clearly from art. Whether through the register of type, function, program, experience, event, or performance, the production of architecture relies on both concrete knowledge and latent imagination of how it is used. But utility also governs an unknowable universe of everyday experience that remains outside of the designer’s direct control. If a lot of architecture’s meaning is made not on the drafting board but in the complex lifeworld of how it is inhabited, consumed, used, lived or neglected, that world is at once central and peculiarly under- explored. In recent years, this blind spot of architecture has become particularly pertinent to practitioners. From the resurgence of activism and social engagement in architecture to the development of new spaces of interaction using the latest technologies, the interest in the agency of the user across many creative disciplines today delivers new promises for the social role of design.1 Against the view—still widely held—that such an agenda undermines architecture’s autonomy or its formal potentials, this volume explores instead how use has been a critical motor of architectural invention. Accepted wisdom has it that the extent to which architecture takes into account those who use it is a matter of the designer’s personal ethics, dividing the discipline into a formalist and a user-friendly camp. No matter how clear this front line may seem to contemporary observers, it is hardly an unchanging fact that transcends shared preconceptions or historical change. As this collection of essays shows, the user is neither a timeless humanist category nor a simple externality of design. It has a history of its own, both within and beyond architecture. What does it mean to talk about users rather than subjects, people, clients, inhabitants, consumers, or citizens? How do we situate “the user” vis-à-vis the realms of domesticity, the market, or government? How do those we identify as using, experiencing, or inhabiting it actually use, experience, or inhabit architecture? And how does knowledge of this trickle back into the conception and production of architecture? If use cannot be understood as a simple consequence of planning or design, it is far from clear in what ways it constitutes architecture—as a practice, a discipline, and as built space. Collectively, the chapters in this volume argue that the user is not a universal, but a historically constructed category of twentieth- century modernity that continues to inform architectural practice and thinking in often unacknowledged ways. Over the course of the past century, architecture has laid claims to the organization of life through unprecedented experimentation with new technologies, mass production, consumption, and planned urbanization. The category of the user became central to these claims because it allowed architects to address both what informs and what follows the controllable process of design. Functionalism was but one of the manifestations of architecture’s social ambitions, albeit a