An Architecture of
Everyday Ritual

Redefining the City through
Architectural Engendering

Sophie Ruha

Climate change and living within ecological boundaries are prevailing challenges of this generation. Because architecture is a material manifestation of social ideas and practices, it must hold two ideas simultaneously, addressing both immediate ecological harm and the root causes of that harm, which are ultimately social. Architecture also inherently operates at a unique timescale, so it must situate its actions in a temporal context that extends beyond immediate effects to encompass its future impacts, including those that are entangled with social connection to environmental harm. American residential urbanism becomes the site for architectural intervention to shift societal ways of life towards a relationship of mutual care with the living environment.

Narratives of American nationalism, and the paradigms of residential urban development they support, have created infrastructure for daily life patterns that promote a lack of place connection, a dependence on fossil fuels, and a resistance to density. The resulting American residential urban fabric is stuck between two narratives: dense and vibrant urban possibility, and the American dream of the single family home. This current form of American urbanism is a direct result of the introduction of fossil fuels intersecting with these national identity narratives.

Elisa Iturbe identifies that when the built environment adapted to the introduction of fossil fuels it became a force that reinforces daily patterns of life relying on those fuels—creating an American fabric of ‘carbon form.’ As argued by Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara, in addition to building this world of carbon form, colonialism intentionally built systems and narratives that discourage forming deep place connections. Anthony Giddens terms this process ‘disembedding,’ and argues it is a hallmark of modernity that continues to this day. Carbon forms and disembedding processes reinforce one another—and both stem from colonialism and capitalism’s tenent of extraction for production. In this way, present American residential urbanism is trapped in carbon form and environments of disembedding.

Carbon Form

“...we cannot think of the built environment as passively receiving energy from the grid but rather as actively giving form to energy-intensive ways of life, from individual consumption to the larger dynamics of global capitalism.

…Regardless of increases in energy efficiency and reductions in the carbon emissions of individual buildings, the built environment as we know it will be fundamentally unable to supplant the current energy paradigm or to address the climate crisis as long as its core is constituted by carbon form.”

— Elisa Iturbe

Architecture validates social barriers and narratives and, through formalizing them, legitimizes them. The present-day urban fabric is overrun by rigid, top-down planning that homogenizes city functions into discrete zones, impels individuals to engage in constant transit between these zones, and ultimately legitimizes and reinforces these patterns of fossil fuel consumption and environmental degradation that are the inevitable consequences of carbon form and disembedding. Carbon form and disembedding are phenomena that describe the removal of individuals and practices from social and temporal contexts, and in that way are associated with the decontextualized production of goods enforced by capitalism and modernism. In contrast, Bruno Latour defines the process of engendering as an alternative form of production that is situated in spatial and temporal contexts, focuses attention on contributions to present and future generations, and creates holistic well being and life enrichment. Although Latour’s concept is not an explicitly architectural one, the architectural application of this concept introduces the possibility of architectural form that actively encourages place entanglement and the deconstruction of carbon form through its social appropriation, ultimately creating a foothold for the process of transformation across urban patterning to begin an architecture of engendering.

By increasing local agency over the built environment more opportunities are presented for place entanglement and the social appropriation of carbon form. Through his concept ‘designing for disorder,’ Richard Sennett calls for architecture to intentionally design for agency by mixing dissimilar constituents and uses and reducing rigid spatial programming in order to actively encourage people to appropriate space. However, the local agency needed is not just physical, it also calls for a form of local place narrative agency. Place narratives combine to become people’s way to collectively construct a city together. This relationship is reciprocal: just as stories influence built form, the built form influences the stories people can live and therefore which stories feel possible. By creating space for a multiplicity of plural place narratives, architecture can engage in the creation of the kind of heterogeneous community identified by Giorgio Agamben as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—a community where the conception of community identity is centered on difference, and where what is held in common must be produced over time through social agreement, rather than programmatic prescription. This heterogeneous community supported through an architecture of plural place narratives works against the rigidity of the current capitalist urban fabric and validates individuals’ belonging and placemaking, encouraging local agency, place entanglement, and the appropriation of urban form.

disembedding

“By disembedding I mean the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”

“The separating of time and space from their formation into standardised, ‘empty’ dimensions cut through the connections between social activity and its ‘embedding’ in the particularities of contexts of presence.”

— Anthony Giddens

Engendering

“...since the dawn of time, communities have procured their own wellbeing, have known relative abundance, have enriched themselves and prospered without their practices being qualified as the ‘production of goods.’ On the contrary, resisting the pressure of economization has been essential. Hence, the idea that ‘we are not producing, we are

participating in the engendering of combinations of lifeforms’ would not be a bad way to describe that resistance.”

Engendering “...is based on the idea of cultivating attachments… we are not seeking agreement among all these overlapping agents, but we are learning to be dependent on them.”

— Bruno Latour

Architecture can create space for a multiplicity of place narratives by shifting the patterns of daily life. Michel de Certeau argues that through enacting small moments of agency in daily life, individuals are able to make meaning even within the context of modernity. These small moments of agency in daily routine are opportunities to shift routines into meaningful performances enacted in everyday life—to transform them into everyday rituals.

Modernity and capitalism force individuals to engage in routinized actions that lack inherent meaning because they are only enacted as a means to other ends. These routines serve to disembed individuals from place by subordinating these sites to the production of capital, and in doing so, pressuring the sites of daily routines to obey the same logics of efficiency as sites of capitalist production. In contrast, the concept of ‘everyday ritual’ can be defined as an action that transforms an individual’s interactions with daily repetition through shifting attention to the act in and of itself, creating embodied presence in the present, and imbuing the act with inherent meaning. This creates deep place grounding, embedding individuals in the places they live.

An architecture that introduces excess affords individuals the opportunity to appropriate that excess for themselves, allowing the transformation of routinized actions into the meaningful performance of everyday rituals of diverse, personal significance. The enactment of these everyday rituals made possible by this architecture of excess is the basis for grounding oneself in place and developing meaningful place narratives. Thus, an architecture of everyday ritual becomes a method of architectural engendering—a way to socially appropriate carbon form, create place entanglement, and encourage local agency.