ABSTRACT
This collection of essays examines how architecture has dealt with the question of use and how use, in turn, has shaped architectural thinking and practice over the past century. Utility is central to what architects do in practice as they deal with clients, norms, and building regulations. It is also a category of architectural theory, too often glossed over as that one part of the Vitruvian triad distinguishing architecture most clearly from art. Whether through the register of type, function, program, experience, event, or performance, the production of architecture relies on both concrete knowledge and latent imagination of how it is used. But utility also governs an unknowable universe of everyday experience that remains outside of the designer’s direct control. If a lot of architecture’s meaning is made not on the drafting board but in the complex lifeworld of how it is inhabited, consumed, used, lived or neglected, that world is at once central and peculiarly under-explored.
