In this article, I claim that the issue of the ordinary/everyday cannot simply come to a conclusion, because one’s way of encountering the surrounding world always produces differences, which is most often entangled with his/her ever-shifting perceptual and affective resonances that exist beyond imposed representations and are left autonomous. The term ‘ordinary/everyday’ has been one of the contending issues in architectural studies, in which it is often used in reference to the Marxist critiques that emphasize the spectacular and alienating conditions of the city in the postwar capitalist society. However, the everyday is a more complex phenomenon in which one is at once skeptical and receptive, resonating with the myriad affective and perceptive instances in aleatory but consistent ways. In this respect, this article investigates how the seemingly chaotic cityscapes might actually be the terrain where meaning unfolds. In doing so, I take Aron Vinegar’s book entitled I am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (2008) as a threshold to explore the multiplicity of the everyday in contemporary South Korean cities. Vinegar’s book is not a simple review of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’ book on Las Vegas originally published in 1972. Instead, it offers an opportunity to rethink the implications of the ordinary in commercial environments with new lights. What follows is a case study of a roadside commercial building located in the Sinchon commercial district of Seoul, which this article refers to as ‘Seodaemun-gu Changcheon-dong 33-9 Building’ according to its administrative address. By analyzing the building that represents a typical keunseng typology in urban Korea, the article explores how one resonates oneself with the commercially saturated field of everyday life that is at once spectacular and ordinary, rule-following and deviant, and alienating but still sense-provoking.
See the full text of this paper in the attached file.