ARC3018HF (LEC0104) 
Instructor: Michael Piper

An industrial parking lot is surrounded by Buddhist statues to create a sanctuary for worship. A typical-looking apartment building has its structure stacked up like a house of cards. A single-family home on a cul-de-sac is converted into a rooming house for 18 students. And a big box store is transformed into a battlefield for camouflage-clad paintball players. These events are kind of strange, almost fictional, yet have actually taken place.

“The Ordinary” is a framework architects use to learn from the everyday buildings and landscapes that make up the bulk of our cities. The idea developed in response to heroic design practices that seemed to disregard the lived experience of most citizens, the political and economic contexts that shape their world, and the physical spaces they inhabit and produce.* It gave architects—who, let's admit, are prone to abstraction and jargon— a vocabulary for engaging broader publics and addressing real-life conditions. However, observing and studying ordinary things can make it difficult to think critically or design speculatively for them. And in some circumstances, that may be what is needed.

The events described above are Almost Ordinary, slightly uncanny yet entirely real, and a reminder that reality can at times be stranger than fiction. Learning from such occurrences suggests that everyday spaces may be more open to speculation and reinterpretation than they first appear. If what makes ordinary spaces so interesting in the first place is their emergence without pedigreed design, how do we as pedigreed designers engage with them? Is it possible to invent new buildings and landscapes in these places without overriding their spatial and social logics? 

To develop design methods for Almost Ordinary contexts, this thesis group will explore a conditional approach to architecture. According to this framework you can't just design a thing, you also have to research and reimagine the social, economic, political, and technical conditions that gave rise to it. Consider that your site selection is a strip mall you love because of the restaurants from around the world that sell food there. A thesis proposal that replaces it with housing, no matter how formally resolved, or socially generous it may be, won’t make sense without considering the conditions that enable its transformation. Is there a new policy, real or imagined, that incentives its transformation and what about those vendors whose wares drew you to this strip mall in the first place? A strong thesis constructs a narrative about such conditions, allowing the project to move fluidly between observed reality and imagined possibility. Think of it as a kind of magical realism for buildings and landscapes in cities; projects embedded in the real world but operating according to a slightly different set of rules.** 

In the Fall semester, students are asked to develop research and construct a narrative about the conditions that shape an ordinary space. This means defining a social, technical, political, and/or economic context—drawing on media sources, ethnographic studies, policy analysis, calculations, and/or anecdotal references. Students are then asked to define a thesis project by speculating on how that context might be transformed or reimagined. This thesis prep work will culminate in a presentation and a large format representation of a site that will be used as a starting point for the following semester’s thesis work. 

Almost Ordinary is intended as a broad umbrella for different types of thesis projects. Typological exploration lends itself to technical research and policy analysis. Ethnographic approaches suggest cultural projects. Systems thinking and scenario planning engage political economy. The ordinary as a critical idea has also been claimed by a range of ideological perspectives—which is part of what makes it worth arguing with. The goal, in each case, is to stay close enough to the real world that a speculation feels possible.

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* There is a long history of architects, theorists, and urbanists exploring the concept of the Ordinary that this course will draw from, including: Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi; Peter and Alison Smithson (As Found); Bernard Rudofsky (Non-Pedigreed Architecture); Steven Holl (the "Teeter-Totter" principle); and Margaret Crawford (Everyday Urbanism), and Atelier Bow-Wow (Made in Tokyo). 

** The term "magical realism" is most associated with Latin American literature, particularly Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths). The term is also used to describe Frida Kahlo’s paintings, pictured above. Related fictional traditions include the Southern Gothic writing of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, and the contemporary work of Haruki Murakami—all of whom situate strange or imagined events within recognizable, everyday worlds.

Image: What the Water Gave Me (1938), Frida Kahlo