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).

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.

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.

Introduction

The historian Bo Stråth has argued that a central concern of European nation states in the nineteenth century ‘was to mobilise and monumentalise national and universal pasts in order to give legitimacy and meaning to the present and to outline the future culturally, politically, socially’ (2008: 26). Certainly states in this period were incredibly active in commissioning culture so as to embed their political projects and values into socially meaningful forms designed to help create/mobilize national publics. Illustrating something of the general argument of this book, architecture was central to the cultural self-understanding of nation states in this period, as it provided an opportunity for emerging states to give material form to their political power, while at the same representing one way in which the national community was presented as a continuous and ‘natural’ entity. In other words, architecture was a part of a broader historicist repertoire (that included flags, currency, anthems and art), which was mobilized to ‘invent’ national traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) in order to forge feelings of belonging.

The attempt to use culture to sustain the nation as ‘natural’ and ‘continuous’ raises interesting sociological questions about the political construction and mobilization of culture; approaching this question from a constructivist perspective – and drawing particularly on the work of Benedict Anderson and Michael Billig – architecture can be framed as part of a broader repertoire of cultural symbols that states have long mobilized to construct and maintain national identities.

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).

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).

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).

Introduction

States have long sought to embed their political-economic projects within socially meaningful forms, with the architectural field being mobilized to this end in a wide variety of socio-political contexts. As was discussed in the previous chapter, the desire to forge a sense of coherent national community with its roots in antiquity saw historical motifs and discourses as key frames for major British state-led architectural projects in the nineteenth century. But, quite aside from the mobilization of historicist architecture to stress lineage in this way, the latter half of the twentieth century saw nation states' repertoires of architectural representation characterized by the dominance of rationalist, future-oriented and technologically driven modernist forms. Seeking to benefit from the ostensibly progressive promises implied by modern architecture's broader social programme and aesthetic, many states in the post-Second World War period sought to use architecture to signify a self-conscious rupture with the immediate past. In short, the promise of modernist architecture, unencumbered by tradition, was to play a central role in symbolic and material social reconstruction of societies.

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.