Type
Broadsheet
Location
Siteless
Size
0.3629 sm / 3.906 sf
Date
Fall 2017
Editor’s Statement
In almost every design studio at the Yale School of Architecture, we find ourselves designing for programs that most of us rarely encounter on a daily basis. Our education molds us to design extra-ordinarily for the extraordinary, but an important question to ask is: should we be designing extra-ordinarily for the ordinary? The ordinary and everyday often carry negative connotations in academia and professional practice. ‘Ugly and ordinary’ were Philip Johnson and Gordon Bunshaft’s pejoratives of choice when criticizing Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s submission in a Brighton Beach Housing competition1, equating aesthetic displeasure with the quotidian. Yet Venturi and Scott Brown turned the criticism into provocation: ‘boring’ buildings are, in fact, important.
Our daily spaces are shaped by forces of money, politics, culture, technology, and most importantly, people. Our daily exposure to mass media, instant imagery, and peer groups affect our designs, whether implicitly or explicitly. Rather than provide answers, our issue explores latent questions implicit to the notion of the everyday—backgrounded elements so ubiquitous as to be completely forgotten. As students of architecture, acknowledging this multiplicity of factors is the starting point to building the agency to contend with such influences every day.
1 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture or the Decorated Shed,” Architectural Forum, 1971, 64-67.
Yale School of Architecture
Paprika! Volume 3 Issue 4
Co-edited with Kevin Ting-Yu Huang
Graphic Design by Ingrid Chen
Paprika! Volume 3 Issue 4
Co-edited with Kevin Ting-Yu Huang
Graphic Design by Ingrid Chen