On Lo-Fi Architecture

Till recalls an (apocryphal?) anecdote told by Elvis Costello during a radio interview in which the musician claims “After recording a song, I get the engineers to play it back through a cheap radio. I need to hear how it sounds in real life. How it sounds over the noise of a breakfast table.” (p.136)

I like the analogy a lot. Till uses it to make a point about the importance of the everyday in architecture. He calls out the tendency to see it as the boring side of architecture, the ordinary aspects of living that fail to contribute to the aspirational idea of architecture as avant-garde. Referencing French philosopher Henri Lefebvre:

To put it simply, an architecture that ignores the everyday will be ignored every day. But this does not mean a collapse into the everyday as a mere repetition of the architectural dross that is already there. Nor does it mean a sardonic display of popular motives in the patronizing hope that this will meet the demands of the everyday populace. What Lefebvre essentially does is to banish the fear that the everyday is merely ordinary; rather, it is the site that contains the extraordinary within the ordinary, if one is prepared to look, the place where “creative energy is stored in readiness for new creations.” (p.139)

So, what might design principles of the everyday look like? Till has his own term to describe the idea, playing off the Elvis Costello radio analogy: lo-fi architecture. The term actually ends up tying together many of his core themes in the book, but its elevation of the everyday stands out to me.

He calls out four principles of lo-fi architecture, which I’ll quote in full here:

First is the sense that it is much more than an aesthetic issue alone, but brings in the social and the ethical. Attention is thus displaced from architecture as object and into the negotiating of a much more complex set of relationships. Second is the sense that its production is collective and thus dependent on far more that the guiding hand of the single architect. The intentionality of the production is thus a matter of negotiation, not of imposition, and the tenor of that intent is laying the ground for possible consequences rather than the positivist expectation of certain ends. Third, lo-fi architecture, as an intentional hybrid, transgresses conventional boundaries, both in terms of content and in terms of cultural categories. It is neither precisely high nor determinedly low, but can accommodate the highest and lowest moments. Fourth, lo-fi architecture is always alert to the context, physical and social, in which it will be played out. Generalized or abstracted solutions will be quickly unraveled by the particulars of those contexts, which means that the lo-fi architect has to work with and within them. (p.145)

Embracing the everyday thus lessens the authority of the designer and introduces the unknown of context, but rewards us with more meaningful impacts that actually get adopted in real use. This approach to architecture “is open to changing use—not in terms of a literal flexibility of moving parts and sliding gizmos, but in terms of providing a frame for life to unfold within…[it] operates more as a robust background than a refined foreground.” (p.134)

As a designer who works with digital things in physical environments, I’m in a unique position to interpret Till’s ideas. I’m not an architect and don’t have the traditional concerns of architects; there is no expectation for me to design the “foreground” of our physical environment. But my work does involve space and the way people interact in space. My default is thinking in terms of designing the “background” of human interaction. So, in some ways, I have the advantage of designing for space without the architectural baggage that Till describes throughout his book. Of course, it comes with the disadvantage of being an “outsider” to architectural work. But, in a lot of ways, I feel like interaction design is positioned well to fulfill Till’s vision for architecture.