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
Introduction
- 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
The question is not whether architecture constructs identities and stabilizes meanings, but how and in whose interests.
Kim Dovey, Becoming Places: Urbanism/Architecture/Identity/Power (2009), 45.The architect-sociologist Garry Stevens suggests it would take one day to read sociology's contribution to our understanding of architecture (1998: 12), and while this is an exaggeration it is only a slight one. With the exception of some of the notable contributions assessed throughout this book, the relationship between architects, their work, and social order has not been subject to sustained scrutiny by academic sociologists. In the light of this book's title it is perhaps unsurprising that I feel this represents something of a missed opportunity, and what follows here is my attempt to contribute to this underdeveloped field of inquiry. A central contention of The Sociology of Architecture is that the application of a critical ‘sociological imagination’ (Wright-Mills 1959) to architects and their work is one way in which the tensions associated with the political mobilization of culture can be revealed.
By using ‘sociology’ in the title of the book, and elsewhere, I am ascribing some significance to the term. Sociology, by now a heavily contested and increasingly fragmented disciplinary label, is used here as a proxy for a critical approach to the connections between the architectural field, political power, and the construction, maintenance and mobilization of collective identities. Using the label ‘sociology’ represents one way to foreground the social production of architectural practice and form from the perspective of a research tradition that can make a distinctive contribution to such questions. Here I suggest that a central task of a sociology of architecture should include situating architectural practice, and the objectified results of that practice, within the political-economic conditions that give rise to it.
A major concern of sociology, in its critical manifestations at least, involves revealing the ways in which power is socialized in the cultural sphere, with such an approach seeking to question how structures of power come to be taken for granted as legitimate and ‘natural’. From this perspective, addressing the role that architecture has in codifying and reproducing social identities requires analysis…
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- Information
- The Sociology of ArchitectureConstructing Identities, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011