Architectural frontier/spatial story : the problematic of representing the everyday

The "tools" of architectural discourse—maps, plans, sections, elevations, photographs—are one way of representing an architecture of the everyday. In this article, the theoretical problematic of representing the everyday is investigated through a specific site, Zavoj, a village in the Republic of Macedonia. How do we look at, document, and analyse a place that is outside the map of western architectural interest? The tools of architecture are staged as the mechanics of an architectural frontier against the narratives that describe the processes of dwelling, the spatial stories of the inhabitants of the village. Stories and words of a fictive reality intervene in the clear geometry of architectural representation and thereby produce a complexity to the representation of the everyday. The article, however, does not settle within this hypothesis; rather, it invests the siting of a particular place as a struggle for the discourse.