I recently watched an interesting lecture on YouTube delivered by Dietmar Eberle at the 2013 World Architecture Festival in Singapore. Eberle is the principal of the Austrian architectural firm Baumschlager Eberle. During his talk he referred metaphorically to Weekday Architecture and Sunday Architecture. The former are the places where we spend most of our lives, the places where we live, work, and shop. The latter, by contrast, are the special buildings that we use on weekends: museums, concert halls, casinos, and of course places of worship. In the past, “Architecture” was synonymous with Sunday Architecture, churches, civic monuments, royal palaces. Weekday Architecture was left to vernacular builders. By the early twentieth century, architects had made inroads into Weekday Architecture, and they were designing housing, factories, and department stores. The early modernists went so far as to try and abolish Sunday Architecture, with the result that it was often hard to distinguish a city hall from a warehouse. Today, it feels like we have moved in the opposite direction: we have abolished Weekdays—as if every day could be Sunday. Sunday Architecture is what the public expects, what the media covers, and what the schools teach.
On Culture and Architecture
I have numerous books on architecture. Few of these deal exclusively, or even predominantly, with single family house architecture. I wonder why that is. The most direct and frequent experience most of us have with architecture is in our homes, and many of those are single family houses. Why so few books on just that?
Your library probably reflects your interests, because my own impression is that the majority of architecture books deal with houses. My first architecture book, bought as a teenager, was by Wright, and it was almost entirely illustrated by his houses. I wrote the introduction to a book about Robert A. M. Stern’s work (Houses and Gardens, 2005) and I remember being told that this was one of Monacelli’s bestsellers that year. I think people like to see domestic work because it is something they can relate to. Looking at my bookshelf I can see several monographs on the domestic work of Stern, Ike Kligerman Barkley, Marc Appleton, Peter Pennoyer, and Allen Greenberg. All fine architects.