Thoughts on the Everyday/Deborah Berke

Introduction
- The usurpation of the everyday by advertising, which extends to its prevalence of “name-brand
architects” and “signature buildings”, trends that have grown even stronger in the first century.
Berke offers possible characteristics of an an everyday architecture including “generic”,
”common”, and “vulgar”-terms that recall Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s pleas for
“ugly and ordinary architecture”. The language used through her “thoughts” leaves little doubt
as to Berke’s allegiance; for while architecture everyday “may” be “banal”, “crude”, and
“visceral”, such architecture “is functional”. Above all, “the architecture of the everyday is built.”
Berke acknowledges as much, leaving the reader to struggle with the lingering-and perhaps
unanswerable-question of what, indeed, is an architecture of the everyday?”

The built environment is strewn with these high profile celebrity products-heroic gestures neither made
nor commissioned by heroes. We may call the result an architecture every day, through an architecture
of the everyday resists strict definition; any rigorous attempt at a concise delineation will inevitably lead
to contradictions.

Architecture of the everyday may be generic and anonymous, may be banal, may therefore be quite
ordinary, may be crude, may be sensual, may also be vulgar and visceral, acknowledges domestic life,
may take on collective and symbolic meaning but it is not necessarily monumental, responds to
program and is functional, may change as quickly as fashion, but it is not always fashionable, is built.

We realized that the replacement of the ordinary by the brand-nameable was not an innocent
transformation of the everyday, but rather the usurpation of the everyday by advertising. For architects
this is a cautionary tale and a genuine opportunity. We are invited to enter into the real and the good
aspects of everyday life, but we must do so without destroying it. The every day is not naïve and
architecture is not innocent, to assume so would be to confuse it with a sugary and debased notion of
the vernacular-with nostalgia for some state of original purity or innocence. The everyday flirts,
dangerously at times, with mass culture. But the everyday remains that which has not yet been co-
opted.