Drawing Everyday Life

Tor Lindstrandtor.lindstrand@arch.kth.se

+46 (0) 70 751 572 72

Drawing Everyday Life

This seminar course will have two parts, one practical and one theoretical. Throughout the course we will question the artificial opposition between theory and practice and seek to critically engage with the discipline of architecture through both. The practical part will be to make very precise and detailed drawings of public space, based on field studies and careful first hand observations, design, materials as well as behaviors and traces of everyday use will hopefully provide us with in depth knowledge of urban spaces throughout the region of Stockholm. These drawings and observations then becomes records for a larger discussions of the history, present and future of public space. As a support for our discussions there will be a series of film screenings, text seminars and invited speakers. The outcome, drawings and discussions, will be compiled hopefully published or shown in an exhibition.

Subversive Surveys

“If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men…. There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity.”

The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt, 1958

“We need to think about what is happening around us, within us, each and everyday. We live on familiar terms with people in our own family, our own milieu, our own class. This constant impression of familiarity makes us think that we know them, that their outlines are defined for us, and that they see themselves as having those same outlines. We define them. and we judge them. We can identify with them or exclude them from our world. But the familiar is not the necessarily known. “

Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre, 1947

What interests Henri Lefebvre’s on the subject of the everyday is how it is orchestrated by the logic of the commodity, where life is lived according to the rhythm of capital.

For Lefebvre this is rooted in the postwar extension of capitalism, thoroughly penetrating the details of daily life and an inescapable fact for everyone.

As society was reconstructed after the war, modernization became synonymous with consumer culture. Blue jeans, electric cookers, fridges, washing machines, Coca-cola, television was part of what was named the “American temptation.”

However bleak Lefebvre’s view of modern everyday life became the everyday always held out the possibility of its own transformation.

“…functionality is the ability to become integrated into an overall scheme. An objects functionality is the very thing that enables it to transcend its main ‘function’ in the direction of a secondary one, to play a part, to become a combining element, an adjustable item, within a universe of signs.”

System of Objects, Jean Baudrillard, 1968

“Festivals hold an equivocal position in the everyday: it is part of popular everyday life but it is also a radical reconfiguration of daily life that is anything but ‘everyday’”

“During the feasts there was much merry-making; dancing, masquerades in which boys and girls changed clothes or dressed up in animal skins and masks - simultaneous marriages for an entire new generation - races and other sports, beauty contests, much tournaments. It is the day of excess. Anything goes. This exuberance, this enormous orgy of eating and drinking - with no limits, no rules…”

Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, Ben Highmore, 2002

“The most important issue is to meet the need of the business world for skilled labour and improved communications. Another priority task is to promote and develop Stockholm as a good city with a high quality of life, so that the workers of the future will want to live and work here. In an increasingly internationalized world, a people-friendly urban environment, a rich variety of housing and workplaces, well-developed services and a broad range of culture and entertainment are becoming ever more important in gaining a competitive advantage. Through this, the attractive metropolis of Stockholm could become an even stronger brand.”

from the Comprehensive Plan for Stockholm, 2010

“…the neoliberal ideology do not want to seize the treasures of the existing world, but rather those of a possible world. They conquer neither political nor social spaces, but rather a dimension, specifically that of social and political creativity and of the subject of this creativity, the dimension of critique…Utopia did not simply collapse in 1989 with Real Socialism, nor did it vanish into thin air. We are not living, as it is often said, in a post-utopian world, but rather in a world, in which utopia now only occurs in its neoliberal translation.”

Boris Buden 2007

“I don’t care very much about building buildings. I care about building ideas. Drawings are not only a preparation for construction — in most cases they are the project. The act of rendering is the making of a version of reality. If architects wish to avoid obsolescence, they must reverse the de-politicization of architecture by the dominance of the beautiful, but meaningless, render. As architects, our aspirations for reality must begin in our drawings.”

Lebbeus Woods