Reconstructing the ‘everyday’ for a political aesthetic in design

Despite the many studies on the everyday in social theory and in architecture, it remains wanting as to how the everyday – as an idea, concept or methodology – can be employed, if at all, for a new conceptualisation of architecture and a new ethic and aesthetic for design action. In this context, Jacques Rancière – who suggests that modern art is about daily life rather than formal abstraction and that a political aesthetic has been with us since the nineteenth century – stands out as a fresh and challenging voice that seems to have a great potential. This paper is a reading of Rancière for architecture, in the interest of searching for a new design agenda, and a new understanding of what was modern and progressive in architecture.

After a reading of Lefebvre and others’ studies on the everyday, this paper introduces Rancière's understanding of a longer-standing visibility on the common and the anonymous in everyday life since the early nineteenth-century. To explain, Rancière's main framework is introduced; this includes his basic argument of a distribution of the sensible – a subjective, perceptive and material ordering of the socio-political world that is also aesthetic, his differentiation between police and politics, and his third regime of art in the European history, the ‘aesthetic regime of art’, dominating after 1800 and ongoing today. Emphasising a few points and providing a discussion on four issues, the paper concludes with the proposal of a new approach. This paper critically revises established views on Marxist critique of commodification and of modern architecture as abstraction. It promotes a political aesthetic of ‘horizontal’ perspective, with openness, inclusivity and heterogeneity. It discusses as well how a non-western world, such as China, can and should be incorporated into a heterogenous field of discussion.