Background Buildings
“Teaching architectural design without teaching how the everyday environment works is like teaching medical students the art of healing without teaching them how the human body functions.”- Habraken
The recognition of only the extraordinary in early periods of architectural history can allude to the fact that the public’s perception of architecture is beyond the ordinary. For the most part, master builders handled the ordinary while the architect’s focused on the buildings of utmost importance. That early genesis of architectural perception could be the reason that the ordinary is for the most part disregarded by not only the public, but architectural education institutions as well. I think that it's detrimental to the practice to disregard the everyday. Extraordinary buildings compose probably one percent of society. It's of utmost importance that architects recognize the value within the everyday, even though education disregards it to some degree. I do believe that architectural education utilizes projects that are not of the everyday to allow extraordinary design to be implemented into the everyday. The care and values of designing a museum could be implemented into a house or gas station (everyday buildings) to recreate the definition of everyday in and of itself. The article quotes an MIT professor saying that “no one wants to design a background building” which I highly disagree with. I think utilizing new ways of thinking about background buildings offers an exciting opportunity to turn these buildings into forefront buildings that set the standard for not only ordinary buildings, but buildings outside the everyday category.
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