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.