Tectonic Landscape: Situating Topos and the Everyday

Architectural work is about asking the what’s, where’s and why’s of history and society alongside situating a physical form for living taken from a sense of the everyday. The contemporary urban and its phenomena have become extraordinarily complex. As the contemporary moment has made itself manifest in spaces created by a diverse range of everyday activities, architecture is increasingly encircled by a vast realm of knowledge and opinion. It is now very difficult to approach it systematically. In the wake of the great masters, various aspects of contemporary architecture have led architects to assemble somewhat unwittingly under the attractive and yet dangerous slogan ‘stand-alone’. This attitude names a particular brand of creativity that promises the liberation of architecture while also bearing within potential pitfalls in which an architect may become trapped, as one sinks into one’s personal preoccupations that are disconnected from architectural responsibilities towards society. How can abstract universals, such as common social values and individual discrete units of specificity, co-exist, and what kind of system is possible for architecture that