There is fast-growing awareness of the role atmospheres play in architecture. Of equal interest to contemporary architectural practice as it is to aesthetic theory, this 'atmospheric turn' owes much to the work of the German philosopher Gernot Boehme. Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces brings together Boehme's most seminal writings on the subject, through chapters selected from his classic books and articles, many of which have hitherto only been available in German. This is the only translated version authorised by Boehme himself, and is the first coherent collection deploying a consistent terminology. It is a work which will provide rich references and a theoretical framework for ongoing discussions about atmospheres and their relations to architectural and urban spaces. Combining philosophy with architecture, design, landscape design, scenography, music, art criticism, and visual arts, the essays together provide a key to the concepts that motivate the work of some of the best contemporary architects, artists, and theorists: from Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron and Juhani Pallasmaa to Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell. With a foreword by Professor Mark Dorrian (Forbes Chair in Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art) and an afterword by Professor David Leatherbarrow, (Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture, University of Pennsylvania), the volume also includes a general introduction to the topic, including coverage of it history, development, areas of application and conceptual apparatus.

In the decades following World War Two, and in part in response to the Cold War, governments across Western Europe set out ambitious programmes for social welfare and the redistribution of wealth that aimed to improve the everyday lives of their citizens. Many of these welfare state programmes - housing, schools, new towns, cultural and leisure centres - involved not just construction but a new approach to architectural design, in which the welfare objectives of these state-funded programmes were delineated and debated. The impact on architects and architectural design was profound and far-reaching, with welfare state projects moving centre-stage in architectural discourse not just in Europe but worldwide. This is the first book to explore the architecture of the welfare state in Western Europe from an international perspective. With chapters covering Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, the book explores the complex role played by architecture in the formation and development of the welfare state in both theory and practice. Themes include: the role of the built environment in the welfare state as a political project the colonial dimension of European welfare state architecture and its 'export' to Africa and Asia the role of welfare state projects in promoting consumer culture and economic growth the picture of the collective produced by welfare state architecture the role of architectural innovation in the welfare state the role of the architect, as opposed to construction companies and others, in determining what was built the relationship between architectural and social theory the role of internal institutional critique and the counterculture. Contributors include: Tom Avermaete, Eve Blau, Nicholas Bullock, Miles Glendinning, Janina Gosseye, Hilde Heynen, Caroline Maniaque-Benton, Helena Mattsson, Luca Molinari, Simon Pepper, Michelle Provoost, Lukasz Stanek, Mark Swenarton, Florian Urban and Dirk van den Heuvel.

Through a progressive series of exercises - accompanied by observational studies, examples and applied theory - "Conversations with Form: A Workbook for Students of Architecture" improves designers understanding, dexterity and resilience in making form. It specifically focuses on the skills needed to succeed in the everyday context in which the vast majority of architects will ultimately design and build, wherein no one designs in isolation and existing conditions never represent a "tabula rasa."

The text begins by familiarizing readers with utilizing step-by-step sequences of moves to steer the development of built form and rapidly moves to designs of increasing complexity. These design plays treat a wide-ranging series of topics including structures, patterns, types, systems and other kinds of shared form principles. "Conversations with Form" is a workbook for honing hands-on skills and tools of the architect s trade. Beautifully illustrated and focused on practical, usable information, the book provides architectural students with an accessible and useable handbook for their design practice. "

Written by a team of renowned contributors and carefully edited to address the themes laid out by the editors in their introduction, the book includes theoretical issues concerning the questions of aesthetics and politics and addresses city and urban strategies within the general critique of the "post-political". By focusing on specific case studies from Warsaw, Barcelona, Dubai, Tokyo and many more the book consolidates the contributions of a diverse group of academics, architects and critics from Europe, the Middle East and America. This collection fills the gap in the existing literature on the relation between politics and aesthetics, and its implications for the theoretical discourse of architecture today. In summary, this book provides a response to the predominant de-politicization in academic discourse and is an attempt to re-claim the abandoned critical project in architecture.

This ground-breaking book aims to take a new and innovative view on how disability and architecture might be connected. Rather than putting disability at the end of the design process, centred mainly on compliance, it sees disability - and ability - as creative starting points for the whole design process. It asks the intriguing question: can working from dis/ability actually generate an alternative kind of architectural avant-garde? To do this, Doing Disability Differently: explores how thinking about dis/ability opens up to critical and creative investigation our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and space argues that design can help resist and transform underlying and unnoticed inequalities introduces architects to the emerging and important field of disability studies and considers what different kinds of design thinking and doing this can enable asks how designing for everyday life - in all its diversity - can be better embedded within contemporary architecture as a discipline offers examples of what doing disability differently can mean for architectural theory, education and professional practice aims to embed into architectural practice, attitudes and approaches that creatively and constructively refuse to perpetuate body 'norms' or the resulting inequalities in access to, and support from, built space. Ultimately, this book suggests that re-addressing architecture and disability involves nothing less than re-thinking how to design for the everyday occupation of space more generally.

Whilst recognising that distinctly different traditions exist within the study and practice of urban design, this book advances an interdisciplinary and innovative approach, which is of direct importance to understanding the urban forms, conditions, practices and processes. It enthuses and inspires users who are grappling with urban design research problems, but who need inspiration to move from idea to methodological approach. Through the work of 32 urban researchers from the arts, sciences and social sciences, it demonstrates a wide range of problems and approaches and shows how the diverse range of complementary approaches can come together to provide a holistic understanding to the design of cities. While each of the contributors presents a particular approach to researching the field, sometimes focusing centrally on particular research methodologies, others cutting across methods, or focusing on theory, all include discussion of actual research projects to illustrate their application to 'real world' problems. This book will be valuable to everyone from the informed undergraduate student about to embark on their first dissertation, to PhD students and seasoned researchers immersed in methodological and conceptual complexity and wishing to compare available and appropriate methodological paths.

The Return of Nature asks you to critique your conception of nature and your approach to architectural sustainability and green design. What do the terms mean? Are they de facto design requirements? Or are they unintended design replacements? The book is divided into five parts giving you multiple viewpoints on the role of the relations between architecture, nature, technology, and culture. A detailed case study of a built project concludes each part to help you translate theory into practice. This holistic approach will allow you to formulate your own theory and to adjust your practice based on your findings. Will you provoke change, design architecture that responds to change, or both?

Coedited by an architect and a historian, the book features new essays by Robert Levit, Catherine Ingraham, Sylvia Lavin, Barry Bergdoll, K. Michael Hays, Diane Lewis, Andrew Payne, Mark Jarzombek, Jean-Francois Chevrier, Elizabeth Diller, Antoine Picon, and Jorge Silvetti. Five case studies document the work of MOS Architects, Michael Bell Architecture, Steven Holl Architects, George L. Legendre, and Preston Scott Cohen.

Whilst recognising that distinctly different traditions exist within the study and practice of urban design, this book advances an interdisciplinary and innovative approach, which is of direct importance to understanding the urban forms, conditions, practices and processes. It enthuses and inspires users who are grappling with urban design research problems, but who need inspiration to move from idea to methodological approach. Through the work of 32 urban researchers from the arts, sciences and social sciences, it demonstrates a wide range of problems and approaches and shows how the diverse range of complementary approaches can come together to provide a holistic understanding to the design of cities. While each of the contributors presents a particular approach to researching the field, sometimes focusing centrally on particular research methodologies, others cutting across methods, or focusing on theory, all include discussion of actual research projects to illustrate their application to 'real world' problems. This book will be valuable to everyone from the informed undergraduate student about to embark on their first dissertation, to PhD students and seasoned researchers immersed in methodological and conceptual complexity and wishing to compare available and appropriate methodological paths.

In The Empty Place: Democracy and Public Space Teresa Hoskyns explores the relationship of public space to democracy by relating different theories of democracy in political philosophy to spatial theory and spatial and political practice. Establishing the theoretical basis for the study of public space, Hoskyns examines the rise of representative democracy and investigates contemporary theories for the future of democracy, focusing on the Chantal Mouffe's agonistic model and the civil society model of Jurgen Habermas. She argues that these models of participatory democracy can co-exist and are necessarily spatial. The book then provides diverse perspectives on how the role of physical public space is articulated through three modes of participatory spatial practice. The first focuses on issues of participation in architectural practice through a set of projects exploring the 'open spaces' of a postwar housing estate in Euston. The second examines the role of space in the construction of democratic identity through a feminist architecture/art collective, producing space through writing, performance and events. The third explores participatory political democratic practice through social forums at global, European and city levels. Hoskyns concludes that participatory democracy requires a conception of public space as the empty place, allowing different models and practices of democracy to co-exist.

In the form of a critical anthology," " this book interlaces an ensemble of seminal articles by leading figures in the theory and practice of digital design with a series of original theoretical texts. It develops a meta-theory of the emerging interactions of media technologies and design in architecture. This theory is promoted as a foundation of transformations in design methods as well as a basis for the evolution of new forms of design thinking.

The development of an explication of emerging concepts in the form of a new taxonomy is an important contribution in any form of discourse analysis. "Theories of the Digital in Architecture" attempts to develop such a conceptual orientation for the growing impact of the integration of digital media technologies in design. It locates these conceptual structures within a historical perspective that identifies the coming into being of a new epistemology of the digital in architecture.

Drawing together landscape, architecture and literature, Strawberry Hill, the celebrated eighteenth-century 'Gothic' villa and garden beside the River Thames, is an autobiographical site, where we can read the story of its creator, Horace Walpole. This 'man of taste' created private resonances, pleasure and entertainment - a collusion of the historic, the visual and the sensory. Above all, it expresses the inseparable integration of house and setting, and of the architecture with the collection, all specific to one individual, a unity that is relevant today to all architects, landscape designers and garden and country house enthusiasts. Avoiding the straightforward architectural description of previous texts, this beautifully illustrated book reveals the Gothic villa and associated landscape to be inspired by theories that stimulate 'The Pleasures of the Imagination' articulated in the series of essays by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) published in the Spectator (1712). Linked to this argument, it proposes that the concepts behind the designs for Strawberry Hill are not based around architectural precedent but around eighteenth-century aesthetics theories, antiquarianism and matters of 'Taste'. Using architectural quotations from Gothic tombs, Walpole expresses the mythical idea that it was based on monastic foundations with visual links to significant historical figures and events in English history. The book explains for the first time the reasons for its creation, which have never been adequately explored or fully understood in previous publications. The book develops an argument that Walpole was the first to define theories on Gothic architecture in his Anecdotes of Painting (1762-71). Similarly innovative, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (1780) is one of the first to attempt a history and theory of gardening. The research uniquely evaluates how these theories found expression at Strawberry Hill. This reassessment of the villa and its associated l

The town hall or city hall as a place of local governance is historically related to the founding of cities in medieval Europe. As the space of representative civic authority it aimed to set the terms of public space and engagement with the citizenry. In subsequent centuries, as the idea and built form travelled beyond Europe to become an established institution across the globe, the parameters of civic representation changed and the town hall was forced to negotiate new notions of urbanism and public space. City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space utilizes the town hall in its global historical incarnations as bases to probe these changing ideas of urban public space. The essays in this volume provide an analysis of the architecture, iconography, and spatial relations that constitute the town hall to explore its historical ability to accommodate the "public" in different political and social contexts, in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas, as the relation between citizens and civic authority had to be revisited with the universal franchise, under fascism, after the devastation of the world wars, decolonization, and most recently, with the neo-liberal restructuring of cities. As a global phenomenon, the town hall challenges the idea that nationalism, imperialism, democracy, the idea of citizenship - concepts that frame the relation between the individual and the body politic -- travel the globe in modular forms, or in predictable trajectories from the West to East, North to South. Collectively the essays argue that if the town hall has historically been connected with the articulation of bourgeois civil society, then the town hall as a global spatial type -- architectural space, urban monument, and space of governance -- holds a mirror to the promise and limits of civil society.

Architectural discourse and practice are dominated by a false dichotomy between design and chance, and governed by the belief that the architect's role is to defend against the indeterminate. In Architectures of Chance Yeoryia Manolopoulou challenges this position, arguing for the need to develop a more creative understanding of chance as aesthetic experience and critical method, and as a design practice in its own right. Examining the role of experimental chance across film, psychoanalysis, philosophy, fine art and performance, this is the first book to comprehensively discuss the idea of chance in architecture and bring a rich array of innovative practices of chance to the attention of architects. Wide-ranging and through a symbiotic interplay of drawing and text, Architectures of Chance makes illuminating reading for those interested in the process and experience of design, and the poetics and ethics of chance and space in the overlapping fields of architecture and the aleatoric arts.

This early history of Team 10 and the group's emergence from CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture ) shifts the locus of the group's importance from their better-known projects of the 1960s and 70s to the group's more theoretically intense period of the late 1940s and 50s. Extensive archival research reveals another story of Team 10 thinking than the one's portrayed by CIAM and Team 10 member Alison Smithson, which historians have been echoing, in one way or another, ever since. Offered here is a theoretical framework for understanding the new values that were introduced to modern architecture in postwar CIAM and the common ground that allowed this diverse group of architects and with disparate approaches to be considered, "first and foremost," modern.

Essential reading for anyone interested in a deeper and nuanced understanding of the theoretical context architects have been practicing in since the 1950s, this account blurs the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism, and reveals the important role played by representation in establishing and changing ideologies, institutions, and power structures.

The expedited globalised process of exchange and new forms of cultural production have transformed old established notions of identity, calling into question their conceptual foundations. This book explores the spatial and representational dimension of this phenomenon, by addressing how the reshaping of the key themes of place, architecture and memory are altering the nature, as well as, our understanding of identity. Cutting across boundaries, the book drives discussion of identity beyond the well-worn concern for its loss within a globalised context, and importantly provides links between identity, place, memory and representation in architecture. Examining a range of case studies from Australia, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Turkey and Singapore, as well as with contributions cutting across geographical and temporal boundaries, this volume addresses such issues as architecture technology, place and memory - critical issues in the monitoring and mapping of identity shift within a rapidly globalising context. With contributions from renowned authors in the field including Nicholas Temple, Patsy Hely, Robert Brown, Liane Lefaivre, John Hendrix, Ana Souto, Fiona MacLaren, Stephen Walker, Nezar AlSayyad, Andrzej Piotrowski, Catherine Ettinger, Luz Marie Rodriguez, and Raymond Quek this book presents fresh insights and diverse perspectives on the evolving question of identity and globalisation.

Gathering his most compelling essays and addresses from the last fifty years in one accessible volume, this book looks at the pioneering ideas that underpin Sim Van der Ryn's ecological design philosophy. It offers a unique decade-by-decade retrospective of the key issues in environmental design, beginning with the most recent years and looking back to the 1960s. With an introductory chapter and further recommended reading for each decade, this book is key reading for any architect or designer practising today, and students will find a wealth of knowledge with which to support their studies. The author's beautiful illustrations, painted in a corresponding timescale to the chapters, offer further insight into the way he understands the challenges of humanity's stewardship of our planet.

How do digital media (mobile phones, GPS, iPods, portable computers, internet, virtual realities, etc.) affect the way we perceive, inhabit and design space? Why do architects traditionally design, draw and map the visual, as opposed to other types of sensations of space (the sound, the smell, the texture, etc.)? Architecture is not only about the solid, material elements of space; it is also about the invisible, immaterial, intangible elements of space. This book examines the design, representation and reception of the ephemeral in architecture. It discusses how architects map and examine the spatial qualities that these elements create and questions whether - and if so, how - they take them into account in the designing process. Karandinou argues that current interest in the ephemeral in contemporary culture and architecture is related to the evolution of digital media; and that it is related to the new ways of thinking about space and everyday situations that new media enables. With sound and video recording devices now being embedded in everyday gadgets and mobile phones, capturing sounds or ephemeral situations and events has become an everyday habit. New animation techniques allow designers to think about space through time, as they are able to design dynamic and responsive spaces, as well as static spaces explored by someone over time. Contemporary video games are no longer based on a simple visual input and a keyboard; they now involve other senses, movement, and the response of the whole body in space. This book therefore argues that the traditional binary opposition between the sensuous and the digital is currently being reversed. Subsequently, new media can also function as a new tool-to-think-with about space. Designers are now able to think through time, and design spaces accordingly. Time, temporality, ephemerality, become central issues in the designing process. The notion first claimed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, that the emergence of new di

The Rationalist Reader incorporates the first documentary collection of writing on rationalism in twentieth century architecture, providing an accessible introduction to the subject, direct insight into the thinking of individual architects and their critics, and a current re-evaluation of the context from which they emerged.

Key texts, including new translations, are placed within a wider historical and philosophical context by Alan Colquhoun, and considered with particular reference to nineteenth century architectural theory by Charles Rattray. Two separate documentary sections address the thinking behind rationalist architecture within the Modern Movement and Rational Architecture as its counterpart within Neo-rationalism. German architectural historian Thilo Hilpert and Dutch architect and critic Henk Engel, provide introductions to the two periods, while Cambridge historian Nicholas Bullock contributes a linking piece focused on French experience post-war. A postscript samples retrospective views.

The two sets of documents, identified with the periods 1920 1940 and 1960 1990, are arranged under comparative headings, allowing the reader to establish correspondences between the key themes of rationalist architecture.

When the historical experience of many young architects is confined to masters and iconic buildings located within the general flux of modernity, here the trajectory of rationalism in twentieth century architecture is seen to veer between a scientific methodology identified with generic models, and a formal paradigm of typological consistency. With its immediate philosophical origins in Enlightenment culture, the development of rationalism in nineteenth century architecture prefaced the volatility of later interpretations of rationalist architecture outlined and documented in this book.

Today's architecture has failed the body with its long heritage of purity of form and aesthetic of cleanliness. A resurgence of interest in flesh, especially in art, has led to a politics of abjection, completely changing traditional aesthetics, and is now giving light to an alternative discussion about the body in architecture. This book is dedicated to a future vision of the body in architecture, questioning the contemporary relationship between our Human Flesh and the changing Architectural Flesh. Through the analysis and design of a variety of buildings and projects, Flesh is proposed as a concept that extends the meaning of skin, one of architecture's most fundamental metaphors. It seeks to challenge a common misunderstanding of skin as a flat and thin surface. In a time when a pervasive discourse about the impact of digital technologies risks turning the architectural skin ever more disembodied, this book argues for a thick embodied flesh by exploring architectural interfaces that are truly inhabitable. Different concepts of Flesh are investigated, not only concerning the architectural and aesthetic, but also the biological aspects. The latter is materialised in form of Synthetic Neoplasms, which are proposed as new semi-living entities, rather than more commonly derived from scaled-up analogies between biological systems and larger scale architectural constructs. These 'neoplasmatic' creations are identified as partly designed object and partly living material, in which the line between the natural and the artificial is progressively blurred. Hybrid technologies and interdisciplinary work methodologies are thus required, and lead to a revision of our current architectural practice.

Architecture in Formation is the first digital architecture manual that bridges multiple relationships between theory and practice, proposing a vital resource to structure the upcoming second digital revolution. Sixteen essays from practitioners, historians and theorists look at how information processing informs and is informed by architecture. Twenty-nine experimental projects propose radical means to inform the new upcoming digital architecture. Featuring essays by: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Aaron Sprecher, Georges Teyssot, Mario Carpo, Patrik Schumacher, Bernard Cache, Mark Linder, David Theodore, Evan Douglis, Ingeborg Rocker and Christian Lange, Antoine Picon, Michael Wen-Sen Su, Chris Perry, Alexis Meier, Achim Menges and Martin Bressani. Interviews with: George Legendre, Alessandra Ponte, Karl Chu, CiroNajle, and Greg Lynn. Projects by: Diller Scofidio and Renfro; Mark Burry; Yehuda Kalay; Omar Khan; Jason Kelly Johnson, Future Cities Lab; Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Maider Llaguno Munitxa; Anna Dyson / Bess Krietemeyer, Peter Stark, Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE); Philippe Rahm; Lydia Kallipoliti and Alexandros Tsamis; Neeraj Bhatia, Infranet Lab; Jenny Sabin, Lab Studio; Luc Courschene, Society for Arts and Technology (SAT); Eisenman Architects; Preston Scott Cohen; Eiroa Architects; Michael Hansmeyer; Open Source Architecture; Andrew Saunders; Nader Tehrani, Office dA; Satoru Sugihara, ATLV and Thom Mayne, Morphosis; Reiser and Umemoto; Roland Snooks, Kokkugia; Philip Beesley; Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger SPAN; Michael Young; Eric Goldemberg, Monad Studio; Francois Roche; Ruy Klein; Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter.

While much has been written on Marcel Duchamp - one of the twentieth century's most beguiling artists - the subject of his flirtation with architecture seems to have been largely overlooked. Yet, in the carefully arranged plans and sections organising the blueprint of desire in the Large Glass, his numerous pieces replicating architectural fragments, and his involvement in designing exhibitions, Duchamp's fascination with architectural design is clearly evident.As his unconventional architectural influences - Niceron, Lequeu and Kiesler - and diverse legacy - Tschumi, OMA, Webb, Diller + Scofidio and Nicholson - indicate, Duchamp was not as much interested in 'built' architecture as he was in the architecture of desire, re-constructing the imagination through drawing and testing the boundaries between reality and its aesthetic and philosophical possibilities. Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire examines the link between architectural thinking and Duchamp's work. By employing design, drawing and making - the tools of the architect - Haralambidou's work performs an architectural analysis of Duchamp's final enigmatic work Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas...demonstrating an innovative research methodology able to grasp meaning beyond textual analysis. This novel reading of his ideas and methods adds to, but also challenges, other art-historical interpretations. Through three main themes - allegory, visuality and desire - the book defines and theorises an alternative drawing practice positioned between art and architecture that predates and includes Duchamp.

Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence maps out and expands upon the methodologies of architectural action and reinvigorates the concept of dissent within the architectural field. It expands the notion of dissidence to other similar practices and strategies of resistance, in a variety of historical and geographical contexts.The book also discusses how the gestures and techniques of past struggles, as well as 'dilemmas' of working in politically suppressive regimes, can help to inform those of today. This collection of essays from expert scholars demonstrates the multiple responses to this subject, the potential and dangers of dissidence, and thus constructs a robust lexicon of concepts that will point to possible ways forward for politically and theoretically committed architects and practitioners.

Gathering his most compelling essays and addresses from the last fifty years in one accessible volume, this book looks at the pioneering ideas that underpin Sim Van der Ryn's ecological design philosophy. It offers a unique decade-by-decade retrospective of the key issues in environmental design, beginning with the most recent years and looking back to the 1960s. With an introductory chapter and further recommended reading for each decade, this book is key reading for any architect or designer practising today, and students will find a wealth of knowledge with which to support their studies. The author's beautiful illustrations, painted in a corresponding timescale to the chapters, offer further insight into the way he understands the challenges of humanity's stewardship of our planet.

Architecture Post Mortem surveys architecture's encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. As the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture's symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity's guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity's debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an 'Alamo' of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture's hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture's relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death. This collection includes essays by Kazi K. Ashraf, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Peggy Deamer, Didem Ekici, Paul Emmons, Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Gevork Hartoonian, Nadir Lahiji, Erika Naginski, and Dennis Maher.

From participatory architecture to interaction design, the question of how design accommodates use is driving inquiry in many creative fields. Expanding utility to embrace people's everyday experience brings new promises for the social role of design. But this is nothing new. As the essays assembled in this collection show, interest in the elusive realm of the user was an essential part of architecture and design throughout the twentieth century. Use Matters is the first to assemble this alternative history, from the bathroom to the city, from ergonomics to cybernetics, and from Algeria to East Germany. It argues that the user is not a universal but a historically constructed category of twentieth-century modernity that continues to inform architectural practice and thinking in often unacknowledged ways.