Common Sense
Within the first few paragraphs of Margaret Crawford's Everyday Urbanism, Crawford titles it as between philosophy and common sense. This had me thinking about the idea of common sense within the design profession. Architects go to school to learn how to prepare spaces for a typical person. As experts, I believe that architects must recognize that what we expect from a space is most likely different to "uneducated" people. It would be interesting to experiment what a typical person would design and an architect creating a design to suit the same needs? Are they fundamentally all that different?
So, do architects have a different version of common sense when it comes to our built environment? Does it cause a lack creativity when we are trying to mend our common senses together?
I think you raise some really poignant questions here. I agree that architects often see a space behaving much differently than it is likely to become in reality, simply because they will never "be" the user, at least not for long. Common sense is innate, but is definitely not common, like your quote suggests, it is completely dependent on the person who senses the everyday. Maybe as architects, we can try to humble ourselves to that perspective of the everyday, without that hat of false superiority, so that spaces transform and create themselves as everyone changes (regardless of intellectual position)?
ReplyDeleteInteresting thought. It would be interesting to see how the "average joe" would design a space versus how we are trained because some "common sense" things for us might not be for others and I feel as if it can be said the other way around as well. I'm sure during our studies we have forgotten some common sense stuff.
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