The Power of the Background: Architecture as Human Infrastructure

Abstract

Whereas architecture is usually appraised in terms of its outstanding singular pieces, we have yet to find an effective way to describe larger, more unremarkable configurations of the built. In this essay, I provide a phenomenological approach that outlines how things shuttle from the perceptual foreground to the background (and vice-versa), and how architecture, for the most part, provides a baseline of normalcy, against which all of our other concerns can play out.