Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- 1 Architecture, Power and Identities: Surveying the Field
- 2 The Public Discourse of Architecture: Socializing Identities
- 3 Architecture and the Nation: Building an ‘Us’
- 4 Modernity and Mega-Events: Architecturing a Future
- 5 Architecture and Commemoration: The Construction of Memorialization
- 6 Iconic Architecture and Regeneration: The Form is the Function
- 7 ‘European’ Architecture: Politics in Search of Form and Meaning
- 8 Conclusion: Sociology, Architecture and the Politics of Building
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Architecture, Power and Identities: Surveying the Field
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- 1 Architecture, Power and Identities: Surveying the Field
- 2 The Public Discourse of Architecture: Socializing Identities
- 3 Architecture and the Nation: Building an ‘Us’
- 4 Modernity and Mega-Events: Architecturing a Future
- 5 Architecture and Commemoration: The Construction of Memorialization
- 6 Iconic Architecture and Regeneration: The Form is the Function
- 7 ‘European’ Architecture: Politics in Search of Form and Meaning
- 8 Conclusion: Sociology, Architecture and the Politics of Building
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to these power relations.
P. Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977), 4.Introduction
In his discussion of military architecture, the British sociologist Paul Hirst (2005) positions those buildings emerging from the architectural profession as being both configured by social power relations and a resource for their consolidation and legitimation. Framing architecture in this way is a useful starting point, as it expresses a sense of, first, the durable, structural relationship between architects and the powerful actors and institutions that commission buildings, and, second, the ways in which this relationship is normalized through practices within the architectural field. Pierre Bourdieu's work, broadly within the ‘sociology of culture’ research tradition, allows for development of this initial observation by providing a framework that facilitates analyses of architecture's relationship to commissioning elites while avoiding the reductionisms associated with economistic explanation on the one hand and overly culturalized approaches on the other.
Bourdieu researched widely on the links between culture and social values, which for him were never neutral or unproblematic but rather ways in which social reproduction and the legitimation of existing power relations were practised (1989a; 1989b; 1993; 1996; 2000). A major concern of Bourdieu's widely influential research is to reveal the ways in which culture maps onto social inequalities, all the time legitimating them as natural, fair and taken for granted. Within his broader project, and crucially for this context, Bourdieu attempts to clarify the role that state institutions have in constituting and reproducing the existing social order (see, for example, Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1989a; 1993; 2003; Bourdieu and Wacquant 2000). As such, Bourdieu's work has become a crucial reference point for those concerned with the ways in which cultural discourses and hierarchies are mobilized by socially dominant institutions and individuals.
Thanks to its application into a number of empirical studies by scholars working in the tradition, Bourdieu's work has also contributed greatly to our understanding of how power functions in the architectural field itself and also of how architectural production is implicated in wider social relations.
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- The Sociology of ArchitectureConstructing Identities, pp. 11 - 26Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011