ancient cities

classic study Architectural Practice: A Critical
View is informed by the notion that architecture’s
unique “natural market” is for those landmark,
monumental buildings that claim to reflect major
civilizational values. Gutman claims that the struggle
for such commissions—always limited in number
and so creating competition between architects
and a subsequent hierarchy of professionals—
exists in the context of architects’ attempts to
retain distinction from other related design professionals,
which is crucial to architecture’s continued
monopoly over this sphere of activity. Indeed, the
question of architects’ self-definition is significant
here, with the emergence of the profession bound
up with the capacity of renaissance architects to
frame their work as a design practice separate
from that of construction; the role of drawing is a
significant part of this story, as it allows a form
other than the finished building that can be understood
as the intellectual property of architects.
(Ongoing conceptions of the “architect as artist”
must be understood against this backdrop.)
A related concern of studies on architecture has
been to draw attention to the functions of social
reproduction and social closure performed by the
architectural field, understood in reference to
both those internal struggles for symbolic capital
(between architects and firms) and the desire for
distinction (from other designers) that characterizes
the architectural field, the very definition of
which is a fundamental site of these conflicts. The
partial, unrepresentative nature of the architectural
profession in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity
has also been a significant focus of social
science attention and provides the context for ethnographic
studies into the culture of architectural
practice, which has made valuable contributions to
the understanding of architects’ socialization into
particular offices and into the profession more
generally, including their positioning of themselves
relative to their colleagues and the profession’s
hierarchy more generally.
The Social Production of Architecture:
Power and Form
Major architectural projects in cities the world
over are testament to the widespread desire of
socially dominant individuals and organizations
to materialize their power in urban space. While
Architecture
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the exact nature of architects’ relationship with
the politically and economically powerful varies as
markedly across time and space as does the actual
form that architecture takes, the durable nature of
the relationship frames much critical inquiry on
architecture. Revealing what Kim Dovey has
called a “silent complicity” of architecture with
dominant social groups has been a major preoccupation
of urbanists, who largely have sought to
challenge the aforementioned illusion of architecture
as an autonomous, artistic practice concerned
solely with form-making and disconnected from
politics and the capitalist process. From this perspective
architecture should not be considered as a
neutral or free-floating cultural form but rather as
a social practice that expresses the close relationship
between architects and the agendas of the
politically and economically powerful. From this
perspective such “complicities” are reflected
clearly in urban space, with architecture always
and everywhere an inherently political—and thus
contested—practice.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period
in which architects and their architecture were
incorporated into state projects, illustrate something
of the ways in which the built environment is
positioned relative to political discourse. Architecture
was one space in which emerging nation-states
and the architects they commissioned sought to
communicate a wide range of values and principles
to mass publics. Major architectural projects were
often commissioned explicitly to reflect the values
and achievements of emerging states, which used
cultural artifacts and space to emphasize their distinction
from other nation-states and to develop a
cultural association with some preceding national
regimes. This context saw the emergence of national
styles of architecture as an important part of a
wider repertoire of cultural forms— including flags,
currency, anthems, art, and national dress—which
was developed and mobilized with the explicit aim
of “inventing” national cultural traditions. In many
national contexts there existed explicit architectural
and political debates concerning the discovery of a
“suitable” style for landmark public buildings.
Architectural styles associated with previous
regimes—such as Roman, Gothic, and Greek
designs—had taken on stylized qualities and crucially
had come to be read as cultural codes loaded
with meaning, representing values that emerging