Kenny Cupers

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.

An Alternative History of Architecture

Use Matters

Markus Miessen

Wie hat sich die Berliner Stadtlandschaft im Laufe der Verwandlung von einer geteilten Stadt zur Kreativmetropole verändert? Trotz des gewaltigen Erbes und großer Entwicklungsprojekte ruft Berlin immer noch Bilder von Lücken und innerstädtischer Brachen hervor. Das Buch macht die leicht veränderlichen und komplexen politischen Zusammenhänge dieser unbestimmten Orte deutlich. Fotografien von Orten aus den Jahren 2001 und 2016 zeigen, wie aus Niemandsland neue Wohnbauten und wie aus Untergrundtreffpunkten Geschäftszentren geworden sind. Sie zeigen aber auch verbliebene Nischen unerwarteter Wildnis und Freiheit. Die begleitenden Texte renommierter Urbanisten untersuchen diese wichtigen und oft stillen Reserven und fordern dazu auf unseren Einsatz für die Zukunft der Stadt zu hinterfragen.

Potenziale urbaner Nischen

Spaces of Uncertainty - Berlin revisited

How has Berlin’s urban landscape changed in its remarkable transformation from divided city to creative capital? Despite the monumental heritage and grand development projects, Berlin still conjures up images of urban fragmentation and vacant inner-city land. The book reveals the changing nature and complex politics of this open space. A rephotographing of sites between 2001 and 2016 shows how no man’s land has made way for new apartments and underground hangouts have changed into commercial hubs, but it also transports us to remaining pockets of urban wilderness and unexpected freedom right next to the city’s most iconic squares. The accompanying essays by noted urban thinkers explore this little-known but vital reserve—forcing us to reflect on our unrelenting efforts to chart the future of the city at large.

Catharina Gabrielsson

Helena Mattsson

Architecture and urbanism have contributed to one of the most sweeping transformations of our times. Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has been not only a dominant paradigm in politics but a process of bricks and mortar in everyday life. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this volume examines the multivalent role of architecture and urbanism in geographically variable yet interconnected processes of neoliberal transformation across scales—from China, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. Analyzing how buildings and urban projects in different regions since the 1960s have served in the implementation of concrete policies such as privatization, fiscal reform, deregulation, state restructuring, and the expansion of free trade, contributors reveal neoliberalism as a process marked by historical contingency. Neoliberalism on the Ground fundamentally reframes accepted narratives of both neoliberalism and postmodernism by demonstrating how architecture has articulated changing relationships between state, society, and economy since the 1960s.

Kenny Cupers

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