There's Glass Between Us: The user-centric implications of Latourian Materialism for Thinking and Making Architecture

This is part of the Graveyard of Dead Abstracts project

Architectural theory tends to speak of buildings at one of two scales, the scale of the technical detail or the scale of the idea / concept. This paper takes as its starting point the ‘materialist’ writings of sociologist Bruno Latour, specifically two of his essays, “Where Are the Missing Masses: The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts” (1992), and “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik - or How to Make Things Public” (2005). From these two papers the author infers the implication that when thinking and making architecture we should shift our focus away from the detail and the concept to the scale in-between, the mundane middle-ground of architecture. This middle-ground, this realm of things being where the user interacts with the built world, the author interprets Latour’s work as being supportive of a user-centric, if not strictly anthropocentric, methodology. Proceeding from this, the paper concludes with a case study of two sets of domestic windows drawn from the history of Western Architecture: the windows of The Hexenhaus, designed by Allison and Peter Smithson (1986-2002), and of E.1027, by Eileen Gray (1929). In keeping with the materialism gleaned from Latour, the case study discusses the windows neither in technical terms, nor solely from a human or cultural perspective. Rather, to use the phrasing of Braun and Whatmore (2010), what is of interest is how the human and the physical, the user and the window in this case, together constitute value.