Use matters:

Use matters
From participatory architecture to interaction central yet rarely acknowl-
design, the question of how design accommo- edged actor in architecture,
the user. Its cutting-edge
dates use is driving inquiry in many creative

an alternative
scholarship reveals as unex-
pectedly complex those
usually depicted as generic.
With users no longer hidden in
plain sight, Use Matters opens
up a fascinating new arena of

history of
investigation and research.”
Margaret Crawford, University
of California, Berkeley
show, interest in the elusive realm of the user
“Buildings are not static
was an essential part of architecture and objects, and yet how do we

architecture
Use access their dynamic position
in culture? This collection
Matters

Edited by
answers that question by
historicizing and theorizing
history, from the bathroom to the city, from use in a wide range of areas,
from modernist planning and
ergonomics to cybernetics, and from Algeria to systems theory to ergonom-
ics and even philosophy. In
the process, it generates an

universal but a historically constructed category exciting and new perspective

Edited by Kenny Cupers

Kenny Cupers
on modern architecture.”
of twentieth-century modernity that continues Mark Jarzombek, Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology
to inform architectural practice and thinking in
“To a century during which
much of the widely admired
architecture is self-referential,
Use Matters offers an urgently
Kenny Cupers is Assistant Professor of Architectural needed reminder. From the
early-twentieth-century
housers to the postwar
champions of social science,
modern architecture was
shaped by a sustained—if

with the nature and demands

of its clientele. Use does
indeed matter, as the essays
demonstrate so elegantly.”
Dell Upton, University of
California, Los Angeles
Figure 9.1 Alternative
“sitting” method of entering
and leaving a high bathtub.
From Alexander Kira,
The Bathroom (1967), 64.

HISTORY
First published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2013 selection and editorial material, Kenny Cupers; individual chapters,

the contributors

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial

material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or regis-

tered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Use matters : an alternative history of architecture / edited by Kenny Cu-
pers. -- First edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
1. Architecture and society--History. 2. Functionalism (Architecture) I.
Cupers, Kenny, editor of compilation.
NA2543.S6U84 2014
724’.6--dc23
2013015537

ISBN: 978-0-415-63732-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-63734-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-88414-1 (ebk)

Book design by Nienke Terpsma, typeset in Neue Helvetica

and Letter Gothic Std.
 Kenny Cupers

I SUBJECTIVITY II COLLECTIVITY, III PARTICIPATION

AND WELFARE,
KNOWLEDGE CONSUMPTION

15 Chapter 1 103 Chapter 6 201 Chapter 12

and Landscape and
modern architecture participation
in Red Vienna
Eve Blau Mariana Mogilevich
Sheila Crane
35 Chapter 2 215 Chapter 13
121 Chapter 7 Ergonomics of
democracy
the user experience
Paul Emmons and Jennifer S. Mack
Andreea Mihalache 233 Chapter 14
139 Chapter 8
51 Chapter 3 and the postmodern
for and against user
the “user” Isabelle Doucet

249 Chapter 15
William J. Rankin 153 Chapter 9

69 Chapter 4 ergonomics in the Tatjana Schneider

Barbara Penner
sciences in 264 Notes on
169 Chapter 10
Avigail Sachs
and the postmodern
85 Chapter 5 Plattenbau
Max Hirsh
and the instruments
183 Chapter 11
theory
Brian Lonsway
Michelle Provoost
Introduction

1
For instance Nishat
with the question of use and how use, in turn, has shaped
Awan, Tatjana Schneider,
and Jeremy Till, Spatial
Agency: Other Ways of
Doing Architecture
(London: Routledge,
2011); Bryan Bell and
Katie Wakeford,
Expanding Architecture:
Design as Activism (New
experience, event, or performance, the production of architecture York: Metropolis Books,
2008); Andres Lepik,
Small Scale, Big Change:
New Architectures of
Social Engagement
(Basel: Birkhäuser,
2010); Michael Fox and
Miles Kemp, Interactive
Architecture (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton Architec-
tural Press, 2009).

the interest in the agency of the user across many creative

an unchanging fact that transcends shared preconceptions or

1 Introduction
2 Use Matters
 2
Bernard Rudofsky, Archi-
tecture without Archi-
tects: A Short Introduc-
tion to Non-pedigreed
Architecture (New York:
Museum of Modern Art,
1965).
3
architects” 2 Charles Jencks and
Nathan Silver, Adhocism:
The Case for Improvisa-
tion (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1973).
3 4
Stewart Brand. How
How Buildings Learn Buildings Learn: What
Happens After They’re
Built (New York: Viking,
1994).
4
5
Jonathan Hill, Actions
of Architecture: Archi-
tects and Creative Users
(London: Routledge,
5
2003).
6
For instance Dell Upton,
requires paying attention to a more diverse set of actions and “Form and User: Style,
Mode, Fashion and the
Artifact,” in Living
in a Material World:
Canadian and American
Approaches to Material
Culture (St. John’s
Nfld: Memorial Univer-
sity of Newfoundland,
1991).
7
Jorge Otero-Pailos,
Architecture’s Histori-
cal Turn: Phenomenology
and the Rise of the
Postmodern (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2010).

3 Introduction
 8
Henri Lefebvre, The
Production of Space
(Oxford: Blackwell,
1991). For its influ-
8 ence on contemporary
discourse in archi-
tecture and urbanism,
see Everyday Urbanism,
9 eds. John Chase, Mar-
garet Crawford, and
John Chalks (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1999).
For its influence in
architectural history,
see, for instance, Iain
Borden, Skateboarding,
Space, and the City:
Architecture and the
Body (New York: Berg
Publishers, 2001);
Eve Blau, The Architec-
ture of Red Vienna
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1999).
9
and the third with the advent of participation in the 1960s and Harald Rohracher, The
Mutual Shaping of Design
and Use: Innovations for
Sustainable Buildings
as a Process of So-
cial Learning (München:
Profil Verlag, 2006);
Thomas Gieryn, “What
Buildings Do,” Theory
and Society 31 (2002):
35‾74; Monica Mulcahy,
“Designing the User/
I Using the Design,”
Social Studies of
Science 28, no. 1
(1998): 5‾37; Steve
Woolgar, “Configuring
the User: The Case of
Usability Trials,” in
A Sociology of Monsters:
Essays on Power, Techno-
logy, and Domination
representations of (London: Routledge,
1991).
actual production 10
See, for instance,
Johanna Drucker, “Archi-
10 tecture and the Concept
of the Subject,” in
Architects’ People, eds.
Russell Ellis and Dana
Cuff (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989).

4 Use Matters
 11
See Susan Henderson,
“A Revolution in the
architecture and use, from the emergence of new types of archi Woman’s Sphere: Grete
Lihotzky and the Frank-
furt Kitchen,” in Archi-
tecture and Feminism
(New York: Princeton
Architectural Press,
1996); K. Michael Hays,
Modernism and the Post-
humanist Subject: The
Architecture of Hannes
Meyer and Ludwig Hilber-
seimer (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 1992).
12
The notion of systemiza-
tion of architectural
knowledge is borrowed
from a forthcoming book
by Gernot Weckherlin
about Ernst Neufert.
See Walter Prigge and
Wolfgang Voigt, eds.,
Ernst Neufert: Normi-
11 erte Baukultur im 20.
Jahrhundert (Frankfurt
am Main: Campus Verlag,
1999).

12

Architects’ Data
Bauentwurfslehre

that served rather than dictated use and informed new strategies

5 Introduction
 American Graphic
Standards

6 Use Matters
 13
The consequences of this
evolution are analyzed
in my forthcoming book
The Social Project:
Housing Postwar France
(Minneapolis, MN: Min-
nesota University Press,
forthcoming 2014).
14
See Jonathan Hill,
Actions of Architec-
II ture: Architects and
Creative Users (London:
Routledge, 2003).

matic in the economies of the postwar decades in Europe and

the context of growing economic prosperity, the notion of users

13

14

7 Introduction
 15
Adrian Forty, “Flex-
ibility,” in Words and
Buildings: A Vocabulary
of Modern Architecture
(New York: Thames & Hud-
son, 2000).
15

8 Use Matters
in the automotive industry, was meant to accommodate for a

matters of safety in private use and consumption, however, was

9 Introduction
 III

16
See, for instance,
Peter Blunder Jones,
Doina Petrescu, and
Jeremy Till, Architec-
ture and Participation
(London: Spon Press,
2005); Felicity Scott,
Architecture or Techno-
Utopia: Politics after
Modernism (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press,
2007).

16

10 Use Matters
impasse of naivety and apathy to which much of contemporary

11 Introduction
awareness that something is constructed a certain way is a

12 Use Matters