Architecture of the Everyday

"Not surprisingly, since everyone  is potentially an expert on everyday life, everyday life has never been of much interest to experts.  Lefebvre pointed out that although experts and intellectuals are embedded in everyday life, they prefer to think of themselves as outside and elsewhere.  Convinced that everyday life is trivial, they attempt to evade it.  They use rhetoric and metalanguage as permanent substitutes for experience, allowing them to ignore the mediocrity of their own condition." (11)

Your life occurs in the everyday.  24/7, 365 days a year.  It seems as designers, we get increasingly obsessed with the extraordinary rather than the ordinary of everyday life.  Good architecture seems to have developed the ideals that in order to have access to good architecture, one must have an extraordinary experience within, or the architectural effort has been wasted.  Rather, we should celebrate the mundane instances through architectural endeavors; smaller plugs of architectural greatness in order to enrich the everyday little experiences.

Architecture has become obsessed with being a business, with meeting a deadline, and making a paycheck.  We often forget about the main reason architecture exists in the first place; the user.  People are the only reason architecture or the need for shelter exists in the first place.  And often we become consumed with designing for the masses; with trying to make our projects touch the widest swath of people possible, to make what we believe is the largest impact.  However, it's more intimate than that.  Architecture isn't about touching as many people's lives as possible; it's about touching every singular person's life and leaving it better than the way it was before.