"lo ordinario" by Enrique Walker

This book contains a series of articles that address the notion of the ordinary in architecture and design, through the selection of essays, a genealogy of this category in the theory of architecture over the last forty years.

The expression the ordinary is the common denominator of a series of notions that are related to the appropriation and instrumentalization of the so-called existing conditions-the banal, the everyday, the found, the popular, the existing landscape-that in architecture have been identified with objects that have exerted a certain fascination that is not without controversy: from the sign to the elevator, from the gas station to the parking lot, from the vacant lot to the suburb, from the dispersed city to the generic city, etc. In short, all that architecture that the architecture itself excludes.

The incursion of the ordinary as a formulation strategy in architecture began incipiently with the critical review of modern urbanism, being able to trace its origin to some of the proposals of Team 10 at the CIAM IX congress of Aix-en-Provence in 1953. The twelve Articles included in this compendium try to reconstruct the trajectory that the architectural discipline has followed since then to appropriate and instrumentalize the notion of the ordinary.

For architecture, the identification, dimensioning and analysis of this category has provided new instruments to investigate emerging urban phenomena and, by extension, to build a theory practice based on 'learning from the existing landscape'.