Bourdieu for Architects

Author: Helena Webster
Year: 2011 (Routledge, "Thinkers for Architects" series, ed. Adam Sharr)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/webster-2011-bourdieu-for-architects.md

Summary

Bourdieu for Architects is a pedagogical survey introducing Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture and practice to an architectural readership. Webster argues that although Bourdieu is virtually unknown in architecture, his concepts — habitus, capital (economic, cultural, social, symbolic), field, distinction, taste, and reflexivity — offer architects a critical lens for understanding the social, political and professional milieu in which they operate. The book works chronologically through Bourdieu's oeuvre — from his Algerian fieldwork and the Kabyle house, through Distinction and the theory of cultural production, to his late political activism — mapping each stage onto architecture's concerns with space, taste, cultural production, and the profession's social reproduction.

Key Claims

• Architects' professional socialization refracts their view of outsiders: students learn "through a gradual process of making of the tacit knowledge beliefs and values of the discipline," so that "architects come to see the world refracted, or interpreted, through an architectural lens" and become frustrated with outsiders who see it differently.
• Fields construct their own beliefs for group cohesion and compete for power: social groups ("fields") "construct their own particular beliefs and values as a means of reinforcing group cohesion... and compete for the power in society to dictate what is legitimate."
• Space as a means of oppression: from Bourdieu's Algerian work on resettlement camps — "the structure of habitation is the symbolic projection of the most fundamental structures of cultures, to reorganize it is to provoke a general transformation of the whole cultural system itself."
• The modern city apartment as "a system of demands": "having been made for the 'modern man', the apartment demands the behaviour of a modern man."
• Architecture as a field of restricted production: the field of restricted production (high art, "art for art's sake," and architecture) "tended to hide its beliefs and value systems under a veil of idealism and mythology, as a means of protection."
• The theory of practice as a formula: "([habitus] (capital)) + field = practice."
• Habitus derives from Panofsky's Gothic architecture: "the term habitus accounted for the modus operandi capable of generating both the thoughts of the theologian and the schemes of the architect."
• Taste is class-based and legitimates hierarchy: those with more cultural, economic, and social capital take part in the game of "pure," "disinterested" aesthetics, whereas "those with few capital resources had no choice but to create a resource-bound aesthetics — which he subsequently termed the 'taste of necessity.'"
• Symbolic capital and the power to define objects as rare: fashion houses (and by extension signature architects) possess "in the highest degree the power to define objects as rare by means of their signature, their label."
• Housing developers exploit the symbolic dimension of the home, marketing "traditional" houses whose "traditional" elements are "little more than ersatz add-ons."
• Museums are not "open to all": the least-educated groups "effectively excluded themselves."
• The profession reproduces itself through education: the education system "fairly discriminated against those who did not have the initial cultural competence to participate," ensuring "the reproduction of the cultural elite."

Connections

Concepts: Habitus · Symbolic Capital · Star Architecture · Iconic Architecture · Authorship · Everyday Life
Authors: Pierre Bourdieu · Henri Lefebvre · Michel de Certeau · Michel Foucault · Dell Upton · Charles Jencks
Debates: The Everyday vs. Iconic Architecture · Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) · The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990) · Architecture in Everyday Life (Upton 2002) · Starchitects, Starchitecture, and the Symbolic Capital of World Cities (Knox 2016)

Direct Quotes

"having been made for the 'modern man', the apartment demands the behaviour of a modern man."

"the field of restricted production, which included high art, or art for art's sake, and architecture, tended to hide its beliefs and value systems under a veil of idealism and mythology, as a means of protection."

"in the highest degree the power to define objects as rare by means of their signature, their label, those whose label has the highest price."

Open Questions

• How far can Bourdieu's concepts — developed for fields of cultural production and social reproduction — illuminate the specificity of the architectural field, where the "object" is simultaneously a commodity, a public good, and a site of symbolic capital, without reducing architecture to an epiphenomenon of social position?