"Normal" Architecture

 

First off I would just like to state that I really enjoyed this reading, it was very well written and pointed out some gaps in architectural education that I think really need to be addressed.

First off, the fact that in architecture school, there isn’t much education on the everyday life of normal people.  As Habraken says “Teaching architectural design without teaching how everyday environment works is like teaching medical students the art of healing without teaching them how the human body functions.”  He’s making a good point with his analogy, why do we always in school have to design some grand building for a very specific occupancy?  Why don’t we learn how the life of everyday people functions during the day and design for that instead of some museum that is used by a certain type of person acting a certain way?

Habraken states that the profession is already moving this way saying that, “In the new distributed way of operation, increasingly aware of local contextual issues and often rapidly changing environments, architects are fully immersed in the everyday environment.”  He also talks about how the general idea of the architect adapting to the everyday stunts their creativity.  He fights this notion and I have to agree with him; a true creative mind is able to take on more constraints and still be able to put out something well designed without forgoing any style points.

Another section of this reading I would like to touch on is how we generally tend to gloss over the everyday architecture and don’t see it as spectacular because we are just trying to get through the “normal” to get to a “great” piece of architecture.  But “normal” architecture is built on centuries of local craftsmen knowledge and building materials and methods and this layered vernacular shouldn’t be disregarded because of its normalcy.  I can’t help but think about how I used to disregard the old tobacco barns where I grew up in middle of nowhere North Carolina, they weren’t even on my architectural radar at the time.  But now I am fascinated by them and find myself wondering why they were built with that particular shape and how they were and how they are still standing after such a long time.  I mean the fact that they are still here means that they definitely work, so why isn’t that seen as spectacular and we should really start to look at this “normal” architecture and learn some lessons from it.