Architecture, Time, and Cultural Politics

Abstract

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.

Fixing the future? How architects make time in buildings for later life care

“…Conceiving of architecture as everyday design practice means considering the work of an architect as ‘a matter not of predetermining the final forms of things and all the steps needed to get there, but of opening up a path and improvising a passage’ (Ingold, 2013, p. 69). This prompts an understanding of architecture as ‘a space of temporal experiment’ (Jones, 2020, p. 76), full of the tensions that arise from aspirations to fix the eventual functions of buildings, alongside conflicting desires to keep open their future uses for future users.…”

“…Within medical sociology, classic studies have demonstrated how the socio-spatial ordering practices within particular buildings are invariably infused by temporal regimes and organisational rhythms, such as Zerubavel's (1979) ethnography of a teaching hospital (see also Rosengren & DeVault's study of an obstetric hospital [1963]). Nonetheless, with some notable exceptions (Jones, 2020), to date more general analyses of the temporalities of architectural practice remain limited. Drawing on material from a study of building design for residential care in later life in the UK, we illustrate various relations with futurity that materialise through architectural practice.…”

Looking beyond interaction: exploring meaning making through the windows of an art gallery

“…That glass and windows, specifically shop windows, create and uphold divisions, spatialize social lives, and curate desires is well documented (Bowlby 2001 ; McQuire 2013 ; Garrison 2015 ). Glass has been studied as a significant architectural design element of landmark buildings like Crystal Palace (Jones 2020 , p. 74). Sociologists have shown domestic windows to be highly “symbolically charged” when it comes to issues of local belonging, social inequalities, and social divisions (Hirsch and Smith, 2017 , p. 230), and have explored their function as communicative devices for houses isolated by COVID-19 related lockdowns (Mosteanu 2021 ).…”

“…This can be seen in the prevalence of “starchitects” whose trademark design languages suit both shops and art galleries, creating buildings with similar outward-facing affects; or that collapse the distinction even further, such as Zaha Hadid’s Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, or Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris). Through the work of starchitects like these, glassy and glossy architectural materials (like windows and glass) have become synonymous with affects of glamor and cosmopolitanism in the contemporary city, not least because glass brings with it historical “associations of modernity” (de la Fuente 2019 , p. 559; Jones 2020 , p. 74). Therefore, the choice of the architectural materials of art galleries, such as glass, bears significance, linking the built form of an art gallery to the logics of contemporary urban spaces.…”

Concrete Culture: The Planning Hearing as a Stage for Cultural Debates

“…As Steets comments, the ‘passion with which discussions are conducted in many places around the world around erecting new buildings or reconstructing historical ones suggests that much more is involved than the actual positioning of stones, steel and glass’ (2015: 93). Both Jones and Yaneva describe how various actors link buildings to particular futures (Yaneva and Humphrey, 2012: 33; see also Jones, 2020: 76). This process will be observed in the competing visions of this concert hall, with some seeing it as an elite bastion, others as a cultural beacon.…”