Nothing is more urgent in China today than a critique of the everyday; and a social analysis of the conditions and prospects of ordinary individuals vis-à-vis – or despite – the achievements of the nation and the state. Jia Zhangke's film, Still Life (2006), reveals this urgency vividly, describing the destruction of local settlements and the dislocation of ordinary people amidst the great engineering feat of dams and bridges over the Yangtze River. A husband and a wife, having lost contact with each other for years because of hectic careers and radical socio-spatial dislocation, finally meet and agree to divorce. With sounds of music flowing down distantly, they dance for a minute and bid farewell, with one watching and the other walking away, disappearing into the distance against a vast landscape of debris and magnificent structures building-up behind them. This scene was followed immediately by another depicting a tourist cruise on the river with a loudspeaker reciting a Li Bai poem from the eighth century: poetic words about a scenic spot that would soon be flooded for the building of the Three Gorges Dam, to power an industrial China on the rise.

Western fascination with Japan and Japanese design is long established. The popularity of the recent exhibition The Japanese House: Architecture and Life After 1945 at London's Barbican illustrates that this fascination remains. This ‘blockbuster’ review of postwar domestic Japanese Architecture, supported by The Japan Foundation and previously hosted at MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome, responds to an enormous challenge: to try to account for the range and diversity of architectural approaches to domestic design within the broader contexts of traditional Japanese architecture and national life after 1945.

The seven decades covered in the exhibition span postwar reconstruction, rapid economic expansion, bubble-era boom and bust, and deflationary stagnation, brought up to the present day. Material is organised ‘genealogically’ rather than chronologically, drawing together certain threads and traditions. It makes connections across time periods to suggest how the design of the Japanese house has dealt with sociological changes over this period, from the fracturing of the nuclear family and an increase in single-person households to an ageing population.

In China, although the ‘everyday’ should be studied as one of the most fundamental architectural issues, it is frequently neglected by Chinese architects. A consciousness for the ‘everyday’ is marginalised by the prevailing ‘non-everyday’ backed by a top-down way of reasoning. Under this circumstance, it is constructive to reconsider the ‘everyday’ in order to open up new potentials for the design practice and discourse in architecture.

From phenomenal observation to value recognition, from design strategy to concrete methodology, the everyday world brings direct inspiration to Atelier Archmixing's architectural practice. Through participant observation of the urban and rural built environment, together with various design experiences from different projects, the practice defines the neutral spatial phenomenon of constant accumulation, change and adjustment as ‘Spatial Redundancy’; they respond with design strategies that flexibly apply various concepts, technologies and approaches without prejudice, describing their consequences as ‘Unrecognisable System’. Both concepts aim at opening up new possibilities for architecture drawn from the everyday world and rooted in China's rapid urbanisation.

This paper highlights the theoretical and critical implications of the everyday for contemporary Chinese architecture on two levels. On the one hand, against the background that – ever since the formation of the profession of architecture in the early twentieth century – there has been a recurrent preference for high definitions of Chinese architecture either in terms of its outer form or style, or its essential and metaphysical meanings. This paper thus aims to identify a quiet yet compelling awareness of the significance of the everyday to architecture in China over the past 15 years. Beginning with Jiakun Liu's declaration of Here and Now, illustrated by his recently completed project in Chengdu, Xicun Big Yard, this consciousness has been made apparent through architectural practice, research and education. To borrow Roland Barthes’ terminology, it is a ‘degree zero’ agenda that rests on the multiple yet ostensible unobtrusiveness of everyday reality in Chinese cities rather than the hot definition of form and overladen historical and metaphysical meanings. In the context of contemporary Chinese architecture, on the other hand, this agenda can also be seen as a resistance arising in response to the dramatic construction of large-scale urban redevelopments that have, in many cases, resulted in devastating consequences. As a ‘degree zero agenda’, the concern of the everyday not only offers a way to see around architecture's obsessions with buildings as autonomous objects but also calls for bottom-up urban processes in contrast to the top down approach that has prevailed in China. The paper calls for a Chinese architecture that, by transforming the purpose and activity of design, would better fulfil its social and architectural potentials through practical, poetic and critical operations.

Everyday life has gradually become an important thinking method of urban and architectural spatial practice. This article hopes to introduce the practice of rural research in south China through a design project, illustrating instructive characteristics of space on everyday reading. Through the introduction of everyday observation, systematic objects, place association based on the order and structure, and the image of space triggered by textual construction, this article finally shows the instructive meaning of everyday space practice which is an indispensable topic and method for spatial engendering leading to another everyday life.

Despite the many studies on the everyday in social theory and in architecture, it remains wanting as to how the everyday – as an idea, concept or methodology – can be employed, if at all, for a new conceptualisation of architecture and a new ethic and aesthetic for design action. In this context, Jacques Rancière – who suggests that modern art is about daily life rather than formal abstraction and that a political aesthetic has been with us since the nineteenth century – stands out as a fresh and challenging voice that seems to have a great potential. This paper is a reading of Rancière for architecture, in the interest of searching for a new design agenda, and a new understanding of what was modern and progressive in architecture.

After a reading of Lefebvre and others’ studies on the everyday, this paper introduces Rancière's understanding of a longer-standing visibility on the common and the anonymous in everyday life since the early nineteenth-century. To explain, Rancière's main framework is introduced; this includes his basic argument of a distribution of the sensible – a subjective, perceptive and material ordering of the socio-political world that is also aesthetic, his differentiation between police and politics, and his third regime of art in the European history, the ‘aesthetic regime of art’, dominating after 1800 and ongoing today. Emphasising a few points and providing a discussion on four issues, the paper concludes with the proposal of a new approach. This paper critically revises established views on Marxist critique of commodification and of modern architecture as abstraction. It promotes a political aesthetic of ‘horizontal’ perspective, with openness, inclusivity and heterogeneity. It discusses as well how a non-western world, such as China, can and should be incorporated into a heterogenous field of discussion.

This is a paper about the architecture of a concept: the concept of the political. Through the built environment, we come to re-imagine the concept of the political not as a set of institutions, or as an array of governmental forms, or even a series of rational choices, but in terms of affective energy flows. It is in interrogating this that I will turn to the built environment and analyse two ways of regulating the cadence of affective flows in relation to the political, through two machines: Britain's nineteenth century Crystal Palace and the Landlord Manor House Museum of Liu Wencai.

If Liu Wencai's Manor House Museum turned affective energy flows into political intensities that could drive the Maoist revolution, the Crystal Palace dissipated these same energy flows by turning them into commodity desires that would drive market growth. With the Crystal Palace, our attention is focused on how the channelling of energy into dissipated market desires produced a dispersal that, in turn, contributed to a political quietism. Such political quietism appeared as, at best, a ‘side-effect’ of an economic relation but, in placing this machine next to the Maoist Manor House Museum, we realise the centrality of this ‘side-effect’ in the formation of the political. The built environment, therefore, offers a set of heuristic devices that, read alongside each other, reveal two quite distinct modes of being political.

Despite their radical differences, these two machines share a ‘family resem-blance’ insofar as they exemplify how the built environment contributes to political discourse through the disciplining of social subjects. What these two sets of machinery open onto is a new understanding of the discursive field of modernity and the treatment of affective elements within any modern concept of the political.