Conclusion: Sociology, Architecture and the Politics of Building

To make architecture is to map the world in some way, to intervene, to signify; it is a political act. Architecture, then, as discourse, practice, and form operates at the intersection of power, relations of production and culture, and representation, and it is instrumental to the construction of our identities. Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann, ‘Problems in Theorizing “The Political” in Architectural Discourse’ (2000), 117. A central claim of this book has been that architecture should not be considered a neutral or free-floating cultural form, but rather as an inherently social production that reflects one way in which those with political power attempt both to materialize this status and to make it socially meaningful. Revealing the coincidence of interest between the architectural field and the socially dominant, what Kim Dovey (2000) has referred to as a ‘silent complicity’, means retaining a sense that architectural production is always and everywhere a political practice that has deep-rooted connections with social order. Doing this makes necessary challenging those dominant accounts that position architecture primarily as a practice characterized by autonomous form-making. A shift away from the architectural object at the centre of critique, to be replaced with engagement with the social function of architecture – including its wider politics and economy – would pave the way for a more critical architecture that, connected to wider social and political realities, could contribute to social action that challenges existing social relations rather than assisting in the legitimation of their reproduction. Capturing the essence of this argument succinctly, the architect Mark Rakatansky has surmised ‘[a]ll architecture is social architecture. All architecture is political architecture’ (1995: 13).