HOW ARCHITECTURE IS SOCIAL ART

(Tom Markus 1993): I take the stand that buildings are not primarily art, technical or investment objects, but social objects.

Places are often very complex in terms of the opportunities they afford us for analysis. Two people visiting the same place at different times in their lives may be able to extract quite different character from it.

Of course buildings can be seen in many different ways. For instance be viewed as works of art, as technical achievements, as the wallpaper of urban space and as behavioral, cultural, psychological, social and partly cultural phenomena. One of the intriguing and endlessly fascinating things about the study of architecture is that one may come at it from so many different angles. Some authors, and regrettably very many architects, will try to have you believe that their perspective is somehow right and superior to all others.

This is not new; Putin claimed his ‘Gothic’ architecture to be the only truly Christian one (Putin, 1841). Gropius thought his new architecture to be ethically necessary (Gropius 1935), and James Stirling had a deep conviction of the ‘moral rightness’ of the path he followed (Stirling 1965). That path was at the time one of modernism, although by the time he died Stirling’s work was viewed by critics as ‘post-modern’! Some commentators have argued that modernism inevitably led architects away from their consumers

 Whilst there may be some truth in this argument, the curious paradox remains that along with its stylistic outcome in the International Style, modernism had its roots deeply interconnected with social intentions, if not even Socialism.

However, Jenks in particular invented and defended post-modernism on the grounds that it was more readable by the general public (Jenks 1977). Whether this is really true has hardly been tested. However, recent studies have shown empirically what many have thought intuitively. Architects as a group think about architecture in a distinctly different way to the rest of humanity.

This is not surprising, since all professional groups begin to develop highly sensitized and specialized ways of both conceptualizing and evaluating the work in their field. They develop jargon as shorthand for some of these concepts, and communicate in ways that make it difficult for outsiders to penetrate.

What I know about architecture, is extremely limited! It presents one way of looking at the forms and spaces that comprise architecture. It views them not as abstractions but as expressions of us. It explores the deep needs and compulsions we feel, which frequently we are unable to express in more explicit and conventional language. Indeed, it views our behavior in space and the architecture that contains it as part of a vital language that is central to human communication.