Mundane vs. Monumental

What would have happened if architects never took over designing the everyday environment? Who would do it? My first instinct is to say that the people building the everyday environment would “design” it. My second guess would be the users. However, if we imagine builders or users designing the everyday environment, we cringe. We think they would design banal buildings that one could barely consider “architecture”. I know for a fact my mom or my roommate would struggle to do this. But really we could end up with something much more interesting and dynamic. A hodgepodge of buildings that reflect the users, their cultures, their lives. Habraken mentions Venice, Cairo, Damascus, Kyoto, old Beijing, and Pompeii as amazingly rich and beautiful everyday environments. From personal experience I would cite Rome and Madrid as successful everyday environments. Personally, I enjoy these organic, convoluted urban growths to planned layouts of L’Enfant’s Washington D.C. or Cerdà’s Barcelona. Is it the combination of theory and the academic, the assumption that we as architects know better, that pollutes the design of the everyday environment?

We don’t remember Egyptian or Greek homes; we only remember their monuments. Does this relate to last week’s readings? As Giancarlo de Carlo argued, without the mundane we would not have the monumental; albeit, he referred to the mundane as a kind of knock-off imitation of the well-known architects by lesser known ones whereas I think the meaning of mundane could expand to refer to the opposite of what architects used to design as discussed in Habraken’s first paragraph. When did the distinction between mundane and monumental get so muddled? Probably sometime when building typologies increased exponentially. We don’t study Roman housing insula and we study their temples but we study Modernist housing projects and Modern civic buildings and Modern office buildings. It probably also happened when architects took over designing the mundane (mundane in the sense of a building encountered in the everyday environment as opposed to a building with a specialized function and infrequent use).