PLAY IN THE CITY

03. REFLECTION
THEORISING SPACE AND PLACE
WEEK 4, 06.02.18
In his seminal text, The Production of Space, Lefebrve draws a
comparison between the relationship of the festival and the everyday
to the relationship of the monument and the building. 12 Lefebvre
understands these relationships to both be dialectical in nature. We are
led to consider this situation by imagining the effect of the monument’s
absence in the city:
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Turmoil is inevitable once a monument loses its prestige, or can only
retain it by means of admitted oppression and repression. When the
subject – a city or a people – suffers dispersal, the ‘building’ and its
functions come into their own; by the same token, ‘housing’ comes to
prevail over ‘residence’ within that city or amidst that people. The
building has its roots in warehouses, barracks, depots and rental
housing. Buildings have functions, forms and structures, but they
do not integrate the formal, functional and structural ‘moments’
of social practice. And inasmuch as sites, forms and functions
are no longer focused and appropriated by monuments, the city’s
contexture or fabric – its streets, its underground levels, its frontiers
– unravel, and generate not concord but violence. Indeed space as a
whole becomes prone to sudden eruptions of violence. 13
Within this extract, buildings can be appreciated for their utility alone;
that they serve a purpose in accommodating the basic functions of
society but not beyond necessity. Lefebvre notes the shift in use of
language from ‘residence’ to ‘housing’; this observation shows a shell
space for living privileged over a place to dwell on a long-term basis. 14
Lefebvre explains that it is this switch in feeling, for the building as a
space for utility, which shows its inability to accommodate ‘moments of
social practice’. Leferbrve’s description of the city is as a fabric, within
which the monument binds all other elements; the buildings, the roads
12. Henri Lefevbre, “The Production of Space (extracts)”, in Leach, Neil. Rethinking Architecture: A
Reader in Cultural Theory. (London: Routledge), 1997, p.141.
13. Lefevbre, “The Production of Space (extracts)”, pp. 140- 141.
14.”residence, n.1”. Oxford English Dictionary Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/163559?rskey=nq8OXt&result=1&isAdvanced=false
(accessed March 20, 2018).
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