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
2 - The Public Discourse of Architecture: Socializing Identities
- 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 architect is a thoughtful person, a person who is able to think in situations in which other people cannot think, and a person who is able to allow other people to think differently. This is why the architect talks so much … The architect is a certain kind of communicator, a certain kind of public intellectual … the role of the architect is not to make buildings, but to make discourse about buildings, and to make buildings as a form of discourse, and this is the most fascinating form of social commitment.
Mark Wigley, Architecture Australia (2005) www.architectureaustralia.com (emphases added).Introduction
As well as a material construction, architecture also represents a distinctly social production, whose cast of characters is far more extensive than those professionals who formally inhabit the architectural field. Works of architecture are used and conceptualized by a wide range of citizens, who not only organize their spatial practices in response to them (Hillier 1996) but who also come to understand buildings as symbols of wider social order (Scruton 1977). Accordingly, architects' attempts to make their work resonate with publics outside of the architectural field go far beyond what is actually built, with the work of high-profile architects in part concerned with discursive strategies to make their architecture socially meaningful to non experts. However, owing to the ambiguous nature of the architectural object relative to the construction and stabilization of social meaning, those operating in the part of the architectural field that demands engagement with questions of social identity tread on uncertain political terrain.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Sociology of ArchitectureConstructing Identities, pp. 27 - 48Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011