Just how is architecture ideological?

ABSTRACT

This research note suggests a number of ways in which architecture and the built environment more broadly might be understood as ideological.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). In the original, the chapter is entitled Ceci tuera cela. The chapter, for which he has consulted architects, was included in the second, 1832 addition; Hugo hoped for a Gothic revival at the time. See Harry Francis Malgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005), pp. 80–2.

2. Ibid., 287. For the Nazi approach, see for instance Kurt Rupli’s 1939 propaganda film Das Wort aus Stein. See also Sharon Macdonald, ‘Words in Stone? Agency and Identity in a Nazi Landscape,’ Journal of

Material Culture, vol. 11 (2006), pp. 105–26.

3. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996). For a classic Marxist approach to the question, see Heide Berndt, Alfred Lorenzer and Klaus Horn, Architektur als Ideologie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1968).

4. On the importance of ethnographic work for political theory – and, I would add, the study of political ideologies – see Lisa Herzog and Bernardo Zacka, ‘Fieldwork in Political Theory: Five Arguments for an Ethnographic Sensibility’, in: British Journal of Political Science, vol. 49 (2019), pp. 763–84.

5. Harold D. Laswell, with the collaboration of Merritt B. Fox, The Signature of Power: Buildings, Communication, and Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979).

6. Holger Kleine, Raumdramaturgie: Inszenierung und Typologie von Innenräumen (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2017)

7. As the Danish sociologist Christian Borch puts it, ‘the design of architectural atmospheres might be seen as a subtle form of power, in which behaviour, desires, and experiences are governed or managed without people being consciously aware of this.’ See Christian Borch, ‘The Politics of Atmospheres: Architecture, Power, and the Senses’, in: Christian Borch (ed.), Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2014), pp. 60–89; here 62.

8. The distinction between an approach to space focused on expression and a more behaviourist one is also developed in Charles T. Goodsell, The Social Meaning of Civic Space: Studying Political Authority Through Architecture (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1988).

9. For a notion of the built environment as ‘normative’, see Wendy Brown, ‘Power after Foucault’, in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, eds. John S. Dryzek et al. (2008), at: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34325/chapter-abstract/291328349?redirectedFrom=fulltext. Brown claims that ‘if power operates through norms, and not only through law and force, and if norms are borne by words, images, and the built environment, then popular discourses, market interpellations, and spatial organization are as much a vehicle for power as are troops, bosses, prime ministers, or police’.

10. Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Erste Fassung)“, in: Abhandlungen [Gesammelte Schriften, vol I:2], eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 431–69; here 465–6

11. Beatriz Colomina (ed.), Sexuality & Space (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), especially Colomina’s ‘The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism’.

12. According to Baukultur-Bericht Öffentliche Räume 2020/2021 (Bundesstiftung Baukultur), available at: https://www.bundesstiftung-baukultur.de/fileadmin/files/medien/8349/downloads/bbk_bkb-2021_e.pdf

13. Nelson Goodman, ‘How Buildings Mean’, in: Critical Inquiry, vol. 11 (1985), pp. 642–53.

14. Max Welch Guerra and Harald Bodenschatz (eds.), Städtebau als Kreuzzug Francos: Wiederaufbau und Erneuerung unter der Diktatur in Spanien 1938–1959 (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2021).

15. Herfried Münkler, ‘Sichtbare Macht: Das Reichstagsgebäude als politisches Symbol’ in: Ansgar Klein et al. (ed.), Kunst, Symbolik und Politik: Die Reichstagsverhüllung als Denkanstoß (Wiesbaden: VS, 1995), pp. 249–58.

16. Burkhard Fehr, Die Tyrannentöter, oder: Kann man der Demokratie ein Denkmal setzen? (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1984), 11, and Vincent Azoulay, Les Tyrannicides d’Athenes: Vie et mort de deux statues (Paris: Seuil, 2014). For the Greek notion of democracy as collective action and capacity see the work of Josiah Ober.

17. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Von deutscher Baukunst (1772)‘, in: Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 12 (Hamburg: 1960), pp. 7–15.

18. Christian Welzbacher, Monumente der Macht: Eine politische Architekturgeschichte Deutschlands 1920–1960 (Berlin: Parthas, 2016). Welzbacher writes of a tektonisierte monumentalisierte Moderne (142). See also Roger Griffin, ‘Building the Visible Immortality of the Nation: The Centrality of “Rooted Modernism” to the Third Reich’s Architectural New Order’, in: Fascism vol. 7 (2018), pp. 9–44.

19. I am grateful to Erika A. Kiss for this point.

20. Dietmar Schirmer, ‘State, Volk, and Monumental Architecture’, in: Andreas Daum and Christof Mauch (eds.), Berlin – Washington 1800–2000; Winfried Nerdinger, ‘A Hierarchy of Styles: Architecture Between Neoclassicism and Regionalism’, in: Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators.

21. Giulia Foscari, Essential Venice, with a foreword by Rem Koolhaas (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2014)

22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Considerations on the Government of Poland’, in: The Social Contract and other later political writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), pp. 177–260; here pp. 182.

23. Jörg H. Gleiter, Architekturtheorie zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2022), pp. 254–5.

24. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), pp. 142.

25. ‘Atmospheres, Art, Architecture: A Conversation between Gernot Böhme, Christian Borch, Olafur Eliasson & Juhani Pallasmaa’, in: Borch (ed.), Architectural Atmospheres, pp. 91–107; here pp. 95.

26. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 412–3.