Working Within the Generic

Working across built practice and digital representation, this session explores how architecture engages the ordinary as a critical ground rather than a limitation. A slight shift—formal, constructive, or visual—is enough to unsettle it: in Yanfei Architects, banal landscapes produced by economic efficiency and everyday building logics become a field from which to read and reconfigure the contemporary environment in China; in Éric Lapierre, typologies and conventions are displaced just enough to produce a surprise that holds over time; in Jean-Jacques Balzac, digitally generated images introduce a subtle misalignment in recognizable environments, altering their reading and making their underlying codes visible. Taken together, the session examines how small deviations within the everyday can produce new architectural meaning without relying on spectacle.