Review: Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture by Kenny Cupers, ed.

In Use Matters, Kenny Cupers gathers a group of talented historians and practitioners to reflect on the historical origins of the “user” and its implications for contemporary design practice. The book’s fifteen concise essays explore architectural manifestos, design handbooks, buildings, urban design, and landscape architecture in pursuit of an alternative to existing histories of twentieth-century architecture. In this effort, the volume joins a growing body of scholarship—including the collections Anxious Modernisms, edited by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, and Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean, edited by Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino—that breaks down rigid characterizations of iconic architectural movements, styles, and figures.¹Use Matters extends beyond earlier collections that...