Five Ways to Make Architecture Political

Heterotopic sites of knowledge production: Notes on an architectural analysis of lecture halls

“…The architecture of such spaces regulates the politics of teaching and directly impacts the way we communicate. For example, while discussing the political dimension of design, Albena Yaneva (2017: 69–71) refers to the architecture of auditoriums as encompassing their form, size, spatial arrangement, acoustics, eye contact, spatial distance between the audience and speaker, and the speaker’s authority and argues that they create different types of connections, activities, and social relations. Similarly, this article suggests that the spatial organization of lecture halls—as places in which knowledge is rendered visible and articulable—facilitates the construction of certain subjectivities such as a lecturer and a student.…”

Sklair, L.The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities and Capitalist Globalization2017New York: Oxford University Press352 pp. £26.49 (hardback) ISBN: 9780190464189

“…It is thus that a symbiosis between a totemic architecture and capitalism creates a socially and culturally complicated picture. To go with a thought experiment for a moment, whereas Sklair's analysis of iconic architecture necessarily contains analysis of the workings of the global capitalist moment that yields it, the pragmatist‐analytic tradition within which a major figure in sociological studies of architecture Albena Yaneva () works is more closely associated with an empirical approach that may eschew statements concerning the functioning of global capitalism, should its operation not be empirically visible there . For Yaneva, and the others in this STS‐inspired tradition, normative judgements about wider structural realities are forestalled in favour of deep, site‐specific description of practices and technologies.…”

“…For Yaneva, and the others in this STS‐inspired tradition, normative judgements about wider structural realities are forestalled in favour of deep, site‐specific description of practices and technologies. In fact, scale is perhaps a further marker of distinction between these approaches; Sklair's analysis of global capitalism is at odds with Yaneva's study of the practical role of models and conceptual representation in one firm (Yaneva ). Accordingly, The Icon Project stands distinct from the more site‐specific studies of practice that some other sociologies of architecture adopt.…”

“…My sense is that this approach forms the starting point of sociology and architecture collaborations underpinning excellent graduate research in universities such as Manchester, Darmstadt, Brno, and Sydney (these are places with which I am familiar; I am sure there are far more groupings than these who draw on this approach to illuminating effect). In general terms – and rather impressionistically – this group of studies includes a new wave of sociologies of architectural practice that takes cues from STS, ANT, and assemblage thinking (Fallan ; Yaneva ).…”

“…In foregrounding (pun intended) this issue one can miss the additional cultural force added to these processes by architecture if not careful (an argument made variously in King ; Larson ; Jones ). In short, critical approach to architecture may flatten out some distinctively architectural elements that are irreducible to capitalism (an issue raised in different ways by King ; Larson ; Markus ; Yaneva ). The existence of architecture as a stable ‘making’ is necessarily assumed in these accounts; there is little here of the studio or the ways in which architectural objects are actually assembled (Fallan ), but the book has much to contribute to our sociological understandings of the ways in which global capitalism operates and is embedded ‘locally’ (albeit often in ostensibly international styles).…”