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).