Standard Details

Standard details are ubiquitous in contemporary architecture, common in many of the buildings we occupy every day. Despite this reality, there is limited scholarly attention given to theorizing their role; clearly, these types of repetitive, ubiquitous details are not what Edward Ford was concerned with in The Architectural Detail. This paper will interrogate the significant role of the standard detail in professional practice, focusing not on a technical or historical perspective, but rather a practical one focused on how standard details are put into use. Using Lawrence Busch’s expansive exploration of standards and their role in structuring our world as a broad framework, the paper will explore the connections between standard details and their relationship to power in shaping professional practice. Standard details exert their agency within the design process, setting the range of what is possible and serving as a standing reserve for the design team to use. Standard details are also materializations of much broader systems, inextricably connected to the construction industry, manufacturing processes, professional liability, and standardization. The standard detail exerts significant but anonymous power in the practice of architecture and reveals the uncomfortable relationship that the discipline has with the actual contingencies of professional practice. An adaptive reuse project by the author provides the context for the deployment of standard details as an unexceptional yet common example of much of normative contemporary architectural practice. Like many other projects, this one used the following standard details: resilient wall base, acoustical panel ceilings, and hollow metal frames. These standards are deployed in a wide variety of projects and a similar ecology structures their usefulness. Like all standards, their apparent naturalness masks the complex apparatus that created them and gives standard details their power. Their influence in the everyday makes standard details worth our consideration.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.109.73

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-37-1