Putting Architecture in its Social Place: A Cultural Political Economy of Architecture

Author: Paul Jones (University of Liverpool, School of Sociology and Social Policy)
Year: 2009 (paper first received August 2008; in final form March 2009)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/putting-architecture-social-place.md

Summary

Jones argues for a non-reductionist political-economic foundation to understanding architecture's production, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's field theory and cultural political economy (CPE). The paper examines how architecture is conditioned by "non-codified regulations" — normalized aspects of practice including relations to dominant political and economic actors responsible for commissioning architecture. Jones uses iconic architecture as an illustrative case, arguing that the centrality of icons in place-marketing strategies expresses a "resonance between the agendas of high-profile architects and those political and economic agencies 'selling places'." The paper develops the concept of architecture's paradoxical autonomy — not freedom from constraint, but the capacity to recast external imperatives (economic, political) into distinctly architectural ones. Jones warns against both aestheticized discourse that obfuscates architecture's function relative to broader social relations, and reductionist accounts that fail to engage with architecture's specific aesthetic and semiotic components.

Key Claims

• Frampton's challenge: "Kenneth Frampton has suggested that, relative to other forms of cultural production, architecture is 'the least autonomous' and he has compelled us to admit to the contingent nature of architecture as a practice … conditioned not only by its own technical methods but also by productive forces lying outside itself."

• Non-codified regulations: Jones focuses on "non-codified regulations that shape architectural practice, those values that emerge from normalised aspects of architects' practice, including the relation to those dominant political and economic actors responsible for the commission of architecture."

• Three-part argument:

  1. Use Bourdieu's field theory to assess architecture's autonomy (not as freedom from constraint, but as capacity to recast external imperatives into architectural ones)
  2. Use cultural political economy framework to understand how corporate and state actors mobilize architecture to make political-economic strategies socially meaningful
  3. Illustrate with iconic architecture case

• Architecture's symbiotic relationship with capital: "Within architecture, the symbiotic relationship with capital is seldom addressed explicitly and is most often recast into an aestheticised 'architectural' discourse."

• CPE's contribution: "Cultural political economy (herein CPE) opens up crucial questions in this regard as it moves us beyond the impasse that frequently sees questions of the social meaning of architecture divorced from analysis of architects' symbiotic relationships with states and economically dominant classes."

• Iconic architecture as illustration: "The centrality of so-called icons in the context of entrepreneurial place-marketing strategies is understood as one particular expression of a far broader relationship between architecture and power, which takes very different forms in different contexts."

• Silent complicity: "The suggestion is that the aesthetic and discursive dimension of icons must be considered in light of the frequently 'silent complicity' (Dovey, 2000) that exists between architects and the agendas of the politically and economically powerful."

• Stevens' definition: "Summarising his critical perspective on architecture, the Australian architect-turned-sociologist Garry Stevens defines the profession as responsible for producing those parts of the built environment that the dominant classes use to justify their domination of the social order ... buildings of power, buildings of state, buildings of worship, buildings to awe and impress."

• Larson on patronage: "Magali Safuri Larson has also foregrounded the inherent nature of architects' reliance on the economically powerful for their practice by observing that buildings cannot be mere drawings ... [they] must be realized ... architects must design for someone." Unlike artists, writers, or songwriters who can continue without market recognition, "architects are reliant on their clients' patronage in ways that other cultural producers are not."

• Bourdieu's field concept: "For Bourdieu, it is the latency of taken-for-granted assumptions about the practice of such professionals that most effectively disguises their power by imbuing it with legitimacy." The field is "a veritable social universe where, in accordance with particular laws, there accumulates a particular form of capital and where relations of force of a particular type are exerted."

• Two meanings of field: Stevens observes field has "two distinct but related meanings: that of a battlefield, a site of symbolic and material struggle; and that of a field of force, a social space whose affects shape and condition the values and practices of those operating within it."

• Habitus: Bourdieu's habitus "describes the process of socialisation into the dominant values of a field, the process whereby consecrated tastes, languages and practices of the field become learned, internalised and actually embodied by individual agents."

• Autonomy defined: "In Bourdieu's usage, autonomy is not to be considered as complete freedom from constraint, as no field has total autonomy from all others because they always exist within broader social spaces and thus are not hermetically sealed. Rather, autonomy refers to the capacity of those within one field to translate the 'rules of the game' and logics from other fields into its own distinct field logic."

• Prism metaphor: "Bourdieu himself has likened this process to how a prism refracts light" — external values are refracted into field-specific ones.

• Example — academia: Career advancement in academia is "recast into a collegiate language of commensurability, fairness and equity, regardless of the increased financial reward" — economic capital is refracted into field-specific capital (publications, citations).

• Architectural field autonomy: "When applied to the architectural field, the notion of autonomy not only reveals architects' reliance on capitalist organisations and states for funding, but also draws attention to how this symbiosis is recast into a distinct set of architectural values and practices."

• Aestheticized self-conception: "In common with other cultural fields, the architectural field's autonomy is most clearly revealed in its aestheticised self-conception. Architecture—like many other fields of cultural production, such as art, music or fashion—is a highly reflexive field that has its own specialized vocabulary, enabling critics [and others in the field] to talk seriously, technically, and precisely about the architectural object as distinct from other kinds of objects."

• Diversion tactic: "Positioning architecture within a 'sufficiently trivial' aesthetic frame leaves 'something innocuous at centre stage in order to divert attention from more serious concerns'" (Ghirado 1984). Fundamental questions about politics of architecture go unasked by "eschewing or inverting the rules and regularities that constitute the economic field."

• Field cleavage: "An entrenched tendency towards highly aestheticised discourse does not characterise the whole of the architectural field and, in fact, actually serves to cleave the field in two." Dominant part can aestheticize practice; subordinate part competes primarily over material capital.

• Gutman on scarcity: The distinction is due to scarcity of architecture's "'natural market' for the 'great, seminal, monumental buildings' representing civilisational values, the type of commissions that define the work of one group of architects but not the other."

• Romantic myth: "The romantic myth of the asocial, creative architect is particularly strong in some dominant conceptions of architecture." Field-specific discourse reinforces rules regarding aesthetic preferences, gendered practice, justification of relationships with unscrupulous clients, emergence of styles, and "'silent complicity' of many architects with regard to political and economic projects."

Connections

Concepts:
Authors: bourdieu-pierre, sklair-leslie
Debates: jencks-vs-sklair-iconic-architecture
Related source notes: sklair-towards-understanding-architectural-iconicity, mahmoud-2014-iconic-architecture-publicizing-cities

Direct Quotes

"Kenneth Frampton has suggested that, relative to other forms of cultural production, architecture is 'the least autonomous' and he has compelled us to admit to the contingent nature of architecture as a practice … conditioned not only by its own technical methods but also by productive forces lying outside itself."

"Rather, autonomy refers to the capacity of those within one field to translate the 'rules of the game' and logics from other fields into its own distinct field logic."

"Positioning architecture within a 'sufficiently trivial' aesthetic frame leaves 'something innocuous at centre stage in order to divert attention from more serious concerns'."

"The suggestion is that the aesthetic and discursive dimension of icons must be considered in light of the frequently 'silent complicity' (Dovey, 2000) that exists between architects and the agendas of the politically and economically powerful."

"Architects must design for someone." — Larson

Open Questions

• How does Jones' "paradoxical autonomy" relate to Koolhaas's "post-critical" position (Johnson 2008) — are both describing the same phenomenon of recasting economic imperatives as architectural ones?
• What is the relationship between Bourdieu's field autonomy and Sklair's transnational capitalist class — does the TCC operate across fields or is it a meta-field?
• How does "silent complicity" connect to the Situationist critique (Debord, Vaneigem) — is complicity the structural condition that tactics of resistance must navigate?
• Does Jones' framework help explain why the "Bilbao effect" is so difficult to replicate — each city's field has different habitus and capital structures?