Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture

ISBN-13: 9780415637329 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 280 str.

Kenny Cupers

Opis

From participatory architecture to interaction design, the question of how design accommodates use is driving inquiry in many creative fields. Expanding utility to embrace people s everyday experience brings new promises for the social role of design. But this is nothing new. As the essays assembled in this collection show, interest in the elusive realm of the user was an essential part of architecture and design throughout the twentieth century. "Use Matters" is the first to assemble this alternative history, from the bathroom to the city, from ergonomics to cybernetics, and from Algeria to East Germany. It argues that the user is not a universal but a historically constructed category of twentieth-century modernity that continues to inform architectural practice and thinking in often unacknowledged ways.

Recenzje

"Use Matters critically interrogates the engagement of "user" in architectural design. It puts the user/occupant/inhabitant as the core of the value premise." - Leonard Bachman, Journal of Architectural Education, University of Houston

Spis treści

Introduction  Part 1: Subjectivity and Knowledge  1. Isotype and Modern Architecture in Red Vienna  2. Architectural Handbooks and the User Experience  3. Laboratory Modules and the Subjectivity of the Knowledge Worker  4. Architects, Users, and the Social Sciences in Postwar America  5. Spatial Experience and the Instruments of Architectural Theory  Part 2: Collectivity, Welfare, Consumption  6. The Shantytown of Algiers and the Colonization of Everyday Life  7. New Swedes in the New Town  8. Henri Lefebvre, For and Against the “User”  9. Designed-in Safety: Ergonomics in the Bathroom  10. Intelligentsia Design and the Postmodern Plattenbau  11. WiMBY!’s New Collectives  Part 3: Participation  12. Landscape and Participation in 1960s New York  13. Ergonomics of Democracy  14. Counter-projects and the Postmodern User  15. The paradox of Social Architectures

O autorze

Kenny Cupers is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.