The Everyday: A Celebration of Human Nature

 

Margaret Crawford’s introduction to “Everyday Architecture” is a study in defining, sorting, and searching for collision. It is those collisions that are most fascinating, to architects and philosophers alike. First, the definition: everyday life is the “lived experience shared by urban residents, banal and ordinary routines. The utterly ordinary reveals a – the sorting- fabric of space and time defined by a complex realm of social practices – and the search for collision – a conjuncture of accident, desire, habit.”

An undercurrent just as important to this is a study of rhythms. Crawford uses key words like repetitive, linear, cyclical to sort our movements and habits. Everyday time is defined as an intersection between the cyclical and the linear – the natural processes of the world and the rational habits of people. And yet, a third category to sort time: “the discontinuous, spontaneous moments that punctuate daily experience… fleeting sensations of love, play, rest…” If the cyclical and linear were legato notes on the piano, this third category is the staccato, bright notes puncturing the rhythm of a song, unexpected and fleeting.

Where the differences collide. The moments in time where these rhythms come together, where routines amongst different people intersect, a harmony in intent and movement. Eileen Gray’s Tempe a Pailla in France exemplifies this notion in architecture. Her design allowed for these intersections of the non-synchronous: architecture in the nick of time. It allows for adaptability, acknowledging that these rhythms are changing and the everyday is habit and the divergence from it.

To me, these studies are a celebration of human life and rhythm. They are an acknowledgement that human nature can be beautiful in its everyday habits, and architecture does not always need to elevate, but to simply allow. In other words, it is architect as composer: creating the spaces that best allow for the music to be played, for the collisions to occur.