Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture

Description

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. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction I SUBJECTIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE Chapter 1 ISOTYPE and modern architecture in Red Vienna Chapter 2 Architectural handbooks and the user experience Chapter 3 Laboratory modules and the subjectivity of the knowledge worker Chapter 4 Architects, users, and the social sciences in postwar America Chapter 5 Spatial experience and the instruments of architectural theory II COLLECTIVITY, WELFARE, CONSUMPTION Chapter 6 The shantytown in Algiers and the colonization of everyday life Chapter 7 New Swedes in the New town Chapter 8 Henri Lefebvre: for and against the “user” Chapter 9 Designed-in safety: ergonomics in the bathroom Chapter 10 Intelligentsia design and the postmodern Chapter 11 WiMBY!’s new collectives III PARTICIPATION Chapter 12 Landscape and participation in 1960s New York Chapter 13 Ergonomics of democracy Chapter 14 Counter-projects and the postmodern user Chapter 15 The paradox of social architectures Notes on contributors Index