Introduction

Landmark building projects have a complex relationship with broader social forces. This contention is clearly evidenced by the major architectural projects the world over that in addition to their primary function also serve a memorial purpose. In such cases architects seek to reconcile a range of competing contingent functions and meanings, with their work taking on characteristics akin to monuments in an early modern age, a period of time when the built environment was one of the few spaces in which socially significant memories could be communicated widely across society (see Heynen 1999b; Tonkiss 2005). The desire of states and other polities to communicate social messages across rapidly expanding nineteenth-century urban citizenry led to the ascription of messages onto the built environment via a whole range of monuments and statues and major public buildings designed to have a memorial function; the countless monuments and plaques that characterize capitals and other large cities the world over are testament to this tendency (Therbon 2002) (Ruskin's notion of buildings as ‘storehouses of memory’ (1992 [1849]) is to be understood in this context).

However, ethnocentric associations – including, but not limited to, the close links with the nationalisms and fascisms of the twentieth century (Young 1992; 1993) – became bound up with the forms and functions of such traditional monuments, a context that has led to states and memorial designers to pursue increasingly reflexive approaches to commemoration in the built environment. But far from leading to a decline in the monumental impulse, this shift has seen the commemoration of significant losses of life in wars or other socially significant events increasingly transposed onto major architectural projects. As we have seen with cases in previous chapters, architecture not only provides an important space for ‘remembering’ but also, just as crucially, for ‘forgetting’.

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…

Introduction

It has been argued in previous chapters that states’ strategies to foster belonging among their citizens have led to the built environment being mobilized in a variety of ways in differing political contexts. The focus of this chapter is on two distinct but related developments in contemporary Europe: first, the European Union's attempts to embed their political project in cultural forms from architecture and the built environment (discussed with reference to the Brussels Capital of Europe project), and second, coexistent projects in member nation states to reposition and ‘Europeanize’ existing national architectural symbols (illustrated with reference to Norman Foster's reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin). An overarching concern of the chapter is to develop an understanding of the role of architects in the cultural construction of what can broadly be understood as ‘transnational’ European political projects. As such, the focal point is not so much the emergence or otherwise of a distinctly European style of architecture, but rather the extent to which the ongoing work of high-profile architects to embed the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) of Europe into socially meaningful forms reveals something about the wider politics of architecture in the contemporary European context.

After a brief contextualization of EU cultural politics, the first substantive discussion in the chapter addresses the EU's Brussels, Capital of Europe project, which drew together a number of high-profile European cultural commentators – including the leading architects Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel – to suggest a range of interventions both in Brussels’ built environment and in the EU's ‘branding’ more generally in order better to reflect the institution's ‘European’ values. The spatial and architectural projects that emerged from the project meetings and the subsequently published report (European Commission 2001) are explicit engagements with the cultural form that political Europeanization, a highly contested project in search of democratic legitimacy and popular support, should take. As a result, the Brussels Capital of Europe project reveals a number of the tensions associated with both the political mobilization of architects and, more broadly, the ambiguous relationship between architectural form and social meaning.

A central claim of this book has been that architecture should not be considered a neutral or free-floating cultural form, but rather as an inherently social production that reflects one way in which those with political power attempt both to materialize this status and to make it socially meaningful. Revealing the coincidence of interest between the architectural field and the socially dominant, what Kim Dovey (2000) has referred to as a ‘silent complicity’, means retaining a sense that architectural production is always and everywhere a political practice that has deep-rooted connections with social order. Doing this makes necessary challenging those dominant accounts that position architecture primarily as a practice characterized by autonomous form-making. A shift away from the architectural object at the centre of critique, to be replaced with engagement with the social function of architecture – including its wider politics and economy – would pave the way for a more critical architecture that, connected to wider social and political realities, could contribute to social action that challenges existing social relations rather than assisting in the legitimation of their reproduction. Capturing the essence of this argument succinctly, the architect Mark Rakatansky has surmised ‘[a]ll architecture is social architecture. All architecture is political architecture’ (1995: 13).

The focus of this book has been on some of the ways in which highprofile architects’ professional practice – including but not limited to the design of built forms – has been mobilized in the context of state and wider political projects. Generally speaking, architects and their designs have historically had a key role to play in the construction, maintenance and mobilization of social categories such as the nation, with attempts to materialize national identities a hallmark of the major European stateled projects of the nineteenth century.

Introduction

Political agencies’ recent embrace of what has come to be known as ‘iconic’ architecture can be understood as a continuation of longstanding attempts to mobilize major building projects, first, to materialize wider discourses of major social change, and second, to generate surplus value from urban space. The desire to commission sufficiently persuasive and socially resonant architectural forms with which to attract various forms of mobile capital – especially from the private sector and tourism – while at the same time symbolizing an upward trajectory for a place, has seen iconic architecture incorporated enthusiastically into UK cultural policy strategies. The ‘visually consumable’ (Urry 2002) nature of such attention- grabbing buildings, allied to a hope that iconic forms will help create instantly recognizable ‘brand images’ for places, has led Charles Jencks to claim a renewed function for statement architecture. He has observed that in ‘the last ten years a new type of architecture has emerged. Driven by social forces, the demand for instant fame and economic growth, the expressive landmark has challenged the previous tradition of the architectural monument’ (2004: 7). This chapter suggests that the attempts to embed particular urban regeneration projects within socially meaningful components in the form of iconic architecture mean that a major challenge for academic research lies in connecting the aesthetic forms and social and political discourses that characterize icons to broader strategies of capitalist accumulation (Jones 2009). The suggestion is that such buildings are a reflection of a particular moment in regeneration discourse and practice which resonated with the emergence and consolidation of a subfield of ‘starchitects’, whose celebrity transcends the parameters of the architectural field and whose reputation adds weight to place marketing initiatives that their buildings are designed to symbolize.

That iconic architectural projects are a fertile ground for sociological analysis is illustrated with reference to an ultimately unrealized development project with an iconic building at its centre: the ‘Fourth Grace’ project on Liverpool's waterfront was intended as a symbol of – and catalyst for – the city's renaissance, but a number of tensions eventually led to its collapse.

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.

This chapter focuses on but one aspect of the process through which buildings become socially meaningful (or not), namely the role of architects’ public utterances in positioning their buildings relative to identity projects and social values. Those architects competing in architecture's ‘natural market’ (Gutman 1992) are compelled by the rules of this part of the field to engage with competing value and identity claims, not only in the actual forms and styles of their buildings (discussion of which is a traditionally understood concern of architectural theory) but also through the identity discourses within which they situate their work.