Introduction

Current architectural discourse and practice place renewed emphasis on the role of the everyday, and on the experience of shared meanings in our environment. ¹ The common thread running through recent initiatives addressing a wider public, such as David Chipperfield’s ‘Common Ground’ Venice Biennale and the ‘Sensing Spaces’ exhibition at the Royal Academy, could be characterised as an implicit ethical attention to the elementary cultural foundations of architecture. ² The ways in which architecture is oriented to what we may hold in common continues to be obscured by a powerful tendency in contemporary design that privileges technological innovation and aesthetic uniqueness as ends in themselves. The profession’s efforts to vindicate itself in terms of commitment to social or environmental responsibility often remain feeble and generic, since we generally avoid engaging with the full implications of what it means to address the common good at a deeper cultural level.