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The curious case of atrium urbanism: voids in and of capitalism
Effectively a double-height or larger void internal to a building, the atrium is a familiar architectural feature the world over. The global popularity of the space in contemporary urban buildings – including hotels, shopping malls, casinos, hospitals, museums, galleries, libraries, schools, office blocks, and universities – is a somewhat puzzling development, and one ripe for sociological analysis.
Cultural political economy (CPE) helps to explain this affinity. Using this perspective guards against reductionisms of various stripes, while rigorously situating the atrium vis-a-vis the production and circulation of material and symbolic surplus value. By facilitating inquiry into how this architectural form stabilises and furthers capitalist arrangements, CPE allows for interrogation of the atrium’s distinctive role in adding momentum and cultural meaning to contemporary urban accumulative strategies.
In particular, the article draws out the atrium space’s paradoxical relationships to (i) the intensification of rentiership in very tall buildings, and (ii) with respect to the demarcation of insider–outsider boundaries underpinning elite consumption. Positioning the atrium as being reflective of attempts to both intensify and embed capitalism in the built environment, key arguments concern the meaningful, experiential and out-of-the ordinary nature of the space, As such, the article contributes to and draws from sociologies of architecture, reconciling the atrium’s materiality and meaning in a way that does not reduce either to the other.
It has become an academic self-evidence that space can only inadequately be conceptualized as a material or earth-bound base for social processes. This could commend a theoretical view of space as the outcome of action, which brings both social production practices and bodily deployment into focus. The action-theoretical perspective allows the constitution of space to be understood as taking place in perception. Not only are things alone perceived but also the relations between objects. This article develops a space-theoretical concept according to which space is constituted through acts as the outcome of synthesis and positioning practices. This opens up a theoretical perspective defining atmospheres as an external effect, instantiated in perception, of social goods and human beings in their situated spatial order/ing. Exclusion and inclusion are accordingly comprehended in terms of perception of the attunement of places. With reference to Anthony Giddens, this article discusses how space can be understood as a duality of structural ordering and action elements.
As well as being shaped by bureaucratically codified state regulations, architecture is also fundamentally conditioned by the broader political-economic context in which it is commissioned, designed and understood. However, drawing attention to these noncodified regulations can be controversial, as it necessitates questioning the complex social production of architecture, in the process challenging those discourses that position architecture as a practice concerned primarily with the design of socially meaningful form and meaning. Such discourses have been problematised elsewhere and, building on these contributions, this paper suggests a framework for taking seriously architecture’s distinctive relationship with aesthetics and semiotics while also maintaining a sense of architects’ position as a cultural élite working in definite political-economic contexts. Drawing primarily on theories associated with Pierre Bourdieu and cultural political economy, the paper uses the case of iconic architecture to illustrate this argument. The central role of architecture in recent place-marketing strategies is understood as a resonance between the agendas of high-profile architects and those political and economic agencies ‘selling places’. The role of architecture in providing a culturalised frame within which economic transformation is embedded is a crucial consideration here. In short, this paper suggests the necessity of a non-reductionist, political-economic foundation to the regulation and built environment research agenda.
The West Edmonton Mall, situated on the northwestern extremities of the Canadian Prairies, and the largest shopping-leisure complex at the time of writing, draws shoppers from all over North America and even Japan. As a privatized public space which diverts consumers from other urban areas it has occasioned much civic boosterism. It presents a fascinating set of interventions in the local social spatialization of a regional capital on the North American cultural periphery. Building upon the work of Benjamin and Bakhtin, an analysis of liminality and carnival in the Mall's reunion of the rational and the ludic provides a critical perspective from which to evaluate recent work by Gottdiener on shopping malls. This leads to a veiw which pays close attention to users' resistance to the above suggestions through refunctioning and "hijacking' the mall space for their own purposes. -from Author
The focus of this article is on the role of the transnational capitalist class (TCC) in and around architecture in the production and marketing of iconic buildings and spaces, in global or world cities. The TCC is conceptualized in terms of four fractions: (1) Those who own and/or and control the major transnational corporations and their local affiliates (corporate fraction). In architecture these are the major architectural, architecture-engineering and architecture-developer-real estate firms. In comparison with the major global consumer goods, energy and financial corporations the revenues of the biggest firms in the architecture industry are quite small. However, their importance for the built environment and their cultural importance, especially in cities, far outweighs their relative lack of financial and corporate muscle. (2) Globalizing politicians and bureaucrats (state fraction). These are the politicians and bureaucrats at all levels of administrative power and responsibility who actually decide what gets built where, and how changes to the built environment are regulated. (3) Globalizing professionals (technical fraction). The members of this fraction range from the leading technicians centrally involved in the structural features of new building to those responsible for the education of students and the public in architecture. (4) Merchants and media (consumerist fraction). These are the people who are responsible for the marketing of architecture in all its manifestations. (There is obviously some overlap between the membership of these fractions.). My conclusion is that many global and aspiring global cities have looked to iconic architecture as a prime strategy of urban intervention, often in the context of rehabilitation of depressed areas. The attempt to identify the agents most responsible for this transformation, namely the TCC, and to explain how they operate, suggests that deliberately iconic architecture is becoming a global phenomenon, specifically a central urban manifestation of the culture-ideology of consumerism.
L’article porte sur la classe capitaliste transnationale (TCC) au sein et à la périphérie de l’architecture, et sur son rôle dans la production et la commercialisation de constructions et espaces iconiques dans les villes mondiales ou planétaires. Cette classe se conceptualise en quatre fractions: (1) Ceux qui détiennent et/ou contrôlent les principaux groupes transnationaux et leurs sociétés affiliées locales (fraction économique): En architecture, il existe de grands cabinets d’architecture, d’ingénierie en architecture et d’architectes promoteurs immobiliers. Par rapport aux grosses sociétés multinationales de la finance, de l’énergie ou des biens de consommation, les recettes des plus importants cabinets sont assez faibles; pourtant, leur place dans l’environnement construit et la culture, notamment en milieu urbain, compensent largement leur impact relativement mince sur le plan financier et économique. (2) Les acteurs politiques et bureaucratiques de la mondialisation (fraction étatique): Il s’agit des politicients et bureaucrates à tous les niveaux de responsabilié et de pouvoir administratifs qui décident effectivement de ce qui est construit et où, ainsi que de la régulation des changements apportés à l’environnement construit. (3) Les acteurs professionnels de la mondialisation (fraction technique): Leur diversité va des techniciens de renom, surtout impliqués dans les caractéristiques structurelles des nouveaux bâtiments, à ceux qui sont chargés d’enseigner l’architecture aux étudiants et d’éduquer le public. (4) Marchands et médias (fraction consumériste): Ce sont les personnes responsables de la commercialisation de l’architecture dans toutes ses manifestations. Ces quatre fractions présentent bien sûr des intersections. On peut déduire que bon nombre de villes planétaires — ou aspirant à le devenir — ont opté pour une architecture iconique comme première stratégie d’intervention urbaine, souvent dans un contexte de réhabilitation de zones en déclin. Identifier les principaux agents responsables de cette transformation (la TCC) et expliquer leur mode de fonctionnement conduit à suggérer qu’une architecture délibérément iconique devient un phénomène mondial, plus précisément une manifestation urbaine essentielle de l’idéologie-culture du consumérisme.
Architecture is inextricably entangled with time. Illustrating this point, the article explores two moments of architectural production centred on London in the mid-19th century: the ‘Battle of the Styles’, a struggle over the social meaning of historicist architectural design and its suitability for state-funded public buildings; and the proto-modernist Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. While ostensibly involving different cultural orientations to pasts-presents-futures, both cases reflect how political claims can involve the mobilisation of temporalised architectural forms. The general contention is that architecture is a culturally experimental space through which nation-states and architects seek to orientate otherwise abstracted notions of temporality. While there is no straightforward or singular correspondence between temporality and architectural sites, the built environment is pushed and pulled by states’ politicised claims regarding time and temporality. Architecture always involves the materialisation of particular and partial visions of the world as is, as was, and as could be; temporal registers in the built environment involve the stabilisation of some ways of being and the displacement of others. The political basis of these processes can be illuminated sociologically.
In this fourth and final paper in a series for City addressing the vertical politics of cities, Stephen Graham explores the politics of contemporary skyscrapers. Emphasising the changing geo-economics, geopolitics and political symbolism of skyscrapers, the paper critically interrogates their increasingly central contemporary role as purported signifiers and logos of ‘global’ cityness and seeks to underline the essential violence involved in their construction—and their demise. The discussion falls into three parts. The first contrasts the proliferation of elite-driven ‘super-tall’ skyscrapers as anchors of huge real-estate projects in the Gulf, Middle East and Asia with the historical ‘race’ between real estate, urban and corporate elites in North American downtowns to build skyscrapers which embodied highly masculinised notions of vertical corporate power. The second deconstructs the current construction of skyscrapers as ‘gigantic logos’ signifying wannabe or actual ‘global’ city status—promissory towers camouflaged behind specious greenwash, which anchor major nodes within intensely globalised circuits of leisure, tourism, finance, business and real-estate investment. The discussion turns, finally, to the role of the skyscraper as the detested symbol par excellence of the aggressively centripetal pull of the modern, secular, alpha-level global or world city. Exploring the central role of Western skyscraper architecture in motivating Al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York’s World Trade Center in 2011, the paper finishes by speculating on the connections linking the violence inherent in skyscraper construction with that which targets skyscrapers in terrorist violence.
Architectural models are representational forms that can be used in such a way as to make visions of capitalist futures more meaningful. This paper explores the additional resonance afforded by the deployment of digital architectural models to the Liverpool Waters project, a planned £5.5 billion development of that city's waterfront. Analysing the models of Liverpool Waters as interpretive representations whose practical use generates context and rationale for the project, the argument is that models allow for: (i) visual connections to be forged between Liverpool and waterfront ‘global cities’ elsewhere; (ii) a foregrounding of the dramatic scale and character of the transformation proposed by the project (including via a problematisation of the site's present uses); and (iii) a basis for other sets of claims concerning Liverpool Waters to cohere, as illustrated by the public consultation exercises in which models became presentational devices allowing for the visualisation of social claims concerning the development. Accordingly, architectural models here become consequential in effect, with the display and presentation of models allowing for the coordination and integration of other, otherwise disparate, claims and data. Precisely due to the other types of mobilisations that such modelling makes possible, critical research must engage with the interpretative frames that architectural models seek to establish and exploit.
This book frames a contextual appreciation of Henri Lefebvre’s idea that space is a social product. The book explicitly confronts both the philosophical and the empirical foundations of Lefebvre’s oeuvre, especially his direct involvement in the fields of urban development, planning, and architecture. Countering the prevailing view, which reduces Lefebvre’s theory of space to a projection of his philosophical positions, the book argues that Lefebvre’s work grew out of his concrete, empirical engagement with everyday practices of dwelling in postwar France and his exchanges with architects and planners. The book focuses on the interaction between architecture, urbanism, sociology, and philosophy that occurred in France in the 1960s and 1970s, which was marked by a shift in the processes of urbanization at all scales, from the neighborhood to the global level. Lefebvre’s thinking was central to this encounter, which informed both his theory of space and the concept of urbanization becoming global. The book offers a deeper and clearer understanding of Lefebvre’s thought and its implications for the present day. At a time when cities are increasingly important to our political, spatial, and architectural world, this reassessment proposes a new empirical, and practical, interpretation of Lefebvre’s ideas on urbanism.
Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is the first publication in any language of the only book devoted to architecture by Henri Lefebvre. Written in 1973 but only recently discovered in a private archive, this work extends Lefebvre’s influential theory of urban space to the question of architecture. Taking the practices and perspective of habitation as his starting place, Lefebvre redefines architecture as a mode of imagination rather than a specialized process or a collection of monuments. He calls for an architecture of jouissance—of pleasure or enjoyment—centered on the body and its rhythms and based on the possibilities of the senses.Examining architectural examples from the Renaissance to the postwar period, Lefebvre investigates the bodily pleasures of moving in and around buildings and monuments, urban spaces, and gardens and landscapes. He argues that areas dedicated to enjoyment, sensuality, and desire are important sites for a society passing beyond industrial modernization.Lefebvre’s theories on space and urbanization fundamentally reshaped the way we understand cities. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment promises a similar impact on how we think about, and live within, architecture.
Assuming merit both in critiques of utopianism, such as those leveled by Jane Jacobs, and defences of utopian visions by David Harvey among others, this paper addresses what seems the dilemma that one must choose between visionary but unrealistic utopianism and stultifying submission to a status quo in the interests of realism and draws a solution from aspects of the views of Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Manfredo Tafuri. Key dimensions of their approaches employed are, respectively, the 'dialectical structure of awakening', 'transduction' and the ideological dimension of utopianism. The paper concludes by indicating implications for urban theory and practice suggested by its putative escape from a realism/visionary dilemma.
Based on the Annual Wreford Watson Lecture, delivered in Edinburgh in December 1995. With thanks to the Department of Geography at Edinburgh University for its invitation and hospitality. I should also like to thank Allan Findlay, an anonymous referee, Steve Pile and John Allen, for their comments.
How do states make the built environment more flexible and responsive to the invest-ment criteria of real estate capital? Spatial policies, such as urban renewal funding for slum clearance or contemporary financial incentives, depend on discursive practices that stigmatize properties targeted for demolition and redevelopment. These policies and practices have become increasingly neoliberalized. They have further distanced themselves from those "long turnover" parts of the city where redevelopment needs are great but where the probability of private investment and value extraction is slight. They have become more entwined in global financial markets seeking short-term returns from subsidized property investments. They have shifted their emphasis from compromised use values (embodied in the paternalistic notion of "blight") to diminished exchange values (embodied in the notion of "obsolescence"). I argue that obsolescence has become a neoliberal alibi for creative destruction and, therefore, an important component in contemporary processes of spatialized capital accumulation.
Amazon Country: Platform Urbanism and Landscapes of Fulfilment
- J J Maddock-James
The Production of Space
- H Lefebvre
- Lefebvre H.
The Production of Urban Space
- M Gottdiener
- Gottdiener M.