Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic domination and the controversy between modernism and postmodernism in architecture

This paper aims to explain why Pierre Bourdieu’s “Le marché des biens symboliques” is useful for deconstructing the solidity of the various architects’ positions in relation to their ideological, political, aesthetic, marketing, and academic ambitions. To grasp how symbolic domination affects their ambitions, it suffices to bring to mind Bourdieu’s remark that “[s]ymbolic domination . . . is something you absorb like air, something you don’t feel pressured by; it is everywhere and nowhere, and to escape from that it is very difficult” (Bourdieu cited in Grenfell 2014, p. 192). In “Le marché des biens symboliques”, Bourdieu highlights that “[t]he field of production and circulation of symbolic goods is defined as the system of objective relations between different instances characterized by the function they fulfill in the division of labor of production, reproduction and distribution of symbolic goods” (Bourdieu 1971, p. 54). The paper will place particular emphasis on the reasons for which Bourdieu’s reflections, in “Le marché des biens symboliques”, are pivotal for grasping how the understanding of the controversy between modernism and postmodernism in architecture was conceived by the architects and architecture critics, theorists, and historians  “are mediated by the structure of the field” and “depend on the position occupied by the category in question within the hierarchy of cultural legitimacy” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 24) Bourdieu also argues that “[a]ll relations among agents and institutions of diffusion or consecration are mediated by the field’s structure” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 25), drawing a distinction between subjective and social representation. Another distinction that is at the centre of Bourdieu’s thought is that between the “field of restricted production” and the “field of large-scale cultural production” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 17)

Architectural Drawings Exposed: Rise of Artefactual Value vs Archives’ Democracy

Architecture exhibitions are vehicles of architectural knowledge dissemination and constitute sites of methodological innovation. Pivotal for comprehending the place of drawings in architecture exhibitions are: firstly, the rise of architectural drawings’ artefactual value, triggered by a series of exhibitions at Max Protetch, Leo Castelli and Rosa Esman galleries, as “Architecture I: Architectural Drawings” (1977), “Architecture II: Houses for Sale” (1980), “Architecture III: Architectural ‘Follies’” (1983), held at Leo Castelli Gallery; secondly, the digitization effect of architectural drawings. Special attention is paid to the role that Aldo Rossi’s drawings played for the transformation of the status of architectural drawings. Rossi’s drawings constitute an important part of major collections of institutions as the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (CCA), Getty Research Institute (GRI), the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI) and the Fondazione Aldo Rossi. The original drawings still remain significant points of reference for researchers and indispensable components of exhibitions that contribute to the capacity of the above-mentioned institutions to energize current debates concerning the status of architectural knowledge. Both CCA and GRI provide an ensemble of scholars’ programs for in-situ researches on original drawings as part of their politics for vitalising current debates. The democratization accompanying the digitization grants an increase of the fascination for the mysteries of the access to the original. The conviction that knowledge, power and subjectivity are by no means contours given once and for all, but series of variables which supplant one another, is a starting point for understanding the complexity of the double agency of democratizing and fetishizing architectural drawings. Michel Foucault’s distinction between knowledge, power and subjectivity is instrumentalized for analysing the paradoxes of these phenomena

Overlapping Temporal Layers and Non-Zeitgeist Architectural and Urban Histories: On How to Challenge Eurocentrism

The starting point of this paper is the idea that models of architectural and urban historiography that intend to challenge Eurocentrism should place particular emphasis on revealing the different agents that contributed to the realization of architectural and urban projects under study. Archival research plays a major role in bringing to light the aspects concerning these different agents. Moreover, the study of primary sources should include investigation in archival sources that represent both western and non-western as well as both Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric perspectives. Europe, as a concept, represents the potential for an enlightened resistance in a world that is progressively becoming dominated by the mono-perspectivism of globalism. The educational mission of the nineteenth century university should be interpreted in relation to the ideals of Enlightenment, which are at the core of the task of the historian to challenge the articulations between will, authority, and the use of reason. The paper places particular emphasis on Immanuel Wallerstein’s conception of and on Reinhart Koselleck’s overlapping temporal layers

Italian Neorealist and New Migrant films as dispositifs of alterity: How borgatari and popolane challenge the stereotypes of nationhood and womanhood?

The article explores the place of women and migrants in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant cinema, arguing that New Migrant cinema continues and reworks key Neorealist tropes and tendencies. It intends to render explicit how an ensemble of films challenge the stereotypes concerning gender, national and cultural identities. Among the figures that are scrutinized are the borgatari, extracomunitari, popolane and terrone. Its main objective is to demonstrate how the cinematic expression of these figures in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant cinema enhanced the reinvention of italianità and the generalised understanding of gender. It also aims to explain why the cross-fertilisation between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies is indispensable for comprehending this reinvention. Particular emphasis is placed on the shared interest of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta and Vittorio De Sica’s Il tetto in the plight over housing and the special character of the urban landscape of Rome. The article also sheds light on certain common concerns of Italian Neorealist and New Migrant cinema, especially as far as national and gender narratives are concerned. Pivotal for the reflections developed here are the roles of Anna Magnani in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta, Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma

Constantinos Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti’s urban politics and democracy: Ekistics as condisciplinary science and communities as concrete utopias

The paper is developed around the following axes: firstly, it focuses on the examination of Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti’s respective understanding of democracy; secondly, it presents their respective reconstruction models; thirdly, it analyses their respective stance vis-à-vis centralised and decentralised models of governing; finally, it examines their respective involvement in the European Recovery Program (ERP). The paper sheds light on how Doxiadis and Olivetti contributed to societal transformation, on the one hand, and the formation of national identity within the Greek and Italian post-war context respectively, on the other hand. Important for grasping ERP’s impact on Greece is Doxiadis’s role as undersecretary and director-general of the Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction between 1945 and 1948, as coordinator of the Greek Recovery Programme and as undersecretary of the Ministry of Coordination between 1948 and 1950. Pivotal for understanding the Marshall Plan’s impact on Italy is Olivetti’s role within the study centre of the UNRRA-CASAS housing committee, which was responsible for the development settlement schemes based on the model of the communitarian aggregation. In many cases, renowned architects, who worked outside the agency’s technical staff, were invited to design these settlement schemes. The paper provides a terrain of investigation situated at their intersection with architectural design and urban planning, taking into account the interaction between social history, political history, economic history and transnational studies. The way it is developed aims to provide an understanding of the dominant models of urban planning, during the post-war years, both in Greece and in Italy. The paper places particular emphasis on the role of holism and interdisciplinarity in Doxiadis’s approach, on the concepts of “Ekistics” and “condisciplinary science” in Doxiadis’s thought and practice

Urban scale digital twins and commoning practices: Mobility justice and sharing ground resources

The paper aims to explore how the reflection on urban scale digitals twins and the debates about the role of commoning practices in architecture and urban design could be combined in a way that would address climate justice and social justice simultaneously. At the core of the arguments developed in the paper is the idea that sustainable environmental design and regenerative design necessarily involves an exploration of how one can reconceive the redistribution of wealth, land, and power. Useful for understanding how architecture and urban planning can act as actors connecting planning, infrastructure, and land is the ‘negotiated planning’ approach given that it places particular emphasis on “the actions and agendas of a whole range of stakeholders who together work to configure a fragile system which is constituted through and co-constitutive of each urban context.” The paper also intends to examine the role of commoning practices in data-driven society, placing particular emphasis on urban scale digital twins, which are virtual replicas of cities that are used to simulate environments and develop scenarios in response to policy problems. Among the main objectives of the paper is the exploration of how issues related to social and spatial mobility can be tackled simultaneously through the use of concepts such as “motility”, which is employed by urban sociologist Vincent Kaufmann, and “mobility justice”, which is used by sociologist Mimmi Sheller. The specificity of the notion of “motility” lies in the intention to understand social and spatial mobility as capital, and the endeavour to address the displacement of both concrete entities (e.g. consumables, machinery or people) and abstract entities (e.g. information, ideas or norms) simultaneously, on the other. Sheller coined recently the term “mobility justice” to respond to the dilemma whether the term migration or mobility is more socially equitable

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics

Non-hegemonic or ‘other’ voices in the urban design process: Advocacy Planning and Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the late 1960s

The paper takes as its point of departure advocacy planning approaches' consideration that urban renewal is incompatible with equitable socially effective urban planning strategies. It focuses on analyzing the activities of the Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), which was the first organization solely devoted to advocacy planning in the United States. In parallel, it explains how the critiques of urban renewal in the late 1960s in the NorthEastern American context is related to the emergence of groups that aimed to struggle for the civil rights of African Americans. It also investigates how ARCH provided technical and design advice to communities who could otherwise not afford it, on the one hand, and how it contributed democratization of urban planning, on the other. It pays special attention to ARCH's program entitled "Architecture in the Neighborhoods" (1970), which aimed to recruit local black youth to become architects, and compares the strategies of ARCH with those of other groups that also struggled over the rights of minorities and the democratization of urban planning, such as The Architects' Resistance (TAR), National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS), Black Workshop, and City Planning Forum. TAR was a group formed in 1968 by architecture students from Columbia University's GSAPP, MIT's Department of Architecture, and Yale School of Architecture and was "concerned about the social responsibility of architects and the framework within which architecture is practiced." The objective of the paper is to present how the aforementioned groups emerged within the context of the struggles for civil rights and how they explored new concepts, roles and tools for participation and community design, reshaping urban planning models in order to respond to the call for a more democratic society

Henri Lefebvre and Cornelius Castoriadis’s autogestion: Reinventing the relationship between public space and collective imaginary

The paper focuses on Cornelius Castoriadis and Henri Lefebvre’s approaches and sheds light on imaginary dimension in the politics of self-governance. It shows how tactics of self-governance and the imaginary accompanying them revive all the contradictions between the State reason, on the one hand, and human reason and freedom, on the other hand. Castoriadis, in The Imaginary Institution of Society (L'institution imaginaire de la société), emphasizes the internal relation between what is intended (the development of autonomy) and that through which it is intended (the exercise of this autonomy). He notes that these are two moments of a single process and defines as revolutionary politics “a praxis which takes as its object the organization and orientation of society as they foster the autonomy of all its members and which recognizes that this presupposes a radical transformation of society, which will be possible, in its turn, only through the autonomous activity of individuals.” Particular emphasis is placed on the text entitled “Autogestion et hiérarchie” (1974) that Castoriadis co-authored in 1974. My paper treats the following questions: How might a politics like this exist? On what could it be based and what would its implications be for the tactics of formation of urban design tools? Henri Lefebvre, in “Theoretical Problems of Autogestion” (“Problèmes Théoriques de l'Autogestion”), which was published in Autogestion in 1966, underscores the fact that autogestion introduces and stimulates a contradiction with the State. Autogestion, according to Lefebvre, calls into question the State's functioning as a constraining force erected above society as a whole, capturing and demanding the rationality that is inherent to social relations and practice. At the centre of the paper is the colloquium “Pour un urbanisme . . .” held in Grenoble in April 1974

Towards a critique of technocracy in the thought of Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti: Democracy, urban sociology and Marshall Plan politics

The paper is built upon the general understanding that the Marshall Plan played a crucial role in the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. Architecture and urbanism were very important in this respect. A starting point for the paper is the identification of certain key players regarding the connection between the politics of the Marshall Plan and agendas for urban design, such as those of the Greek architect and town planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis and the Italian industrialist Adriano Olivetti. Doxiadis and Olivetti played an important role in the evolution of the interactions between urban planning and Marshall Plan policy. The paper is based on the hypothesis that Doxiadis could be considered a representative of a "technocratic fundamentalism", while Olivetti of a "capitalist paternalism". At the core of the paper is the intention to analyze the technocratic perception of Doxiadis and Olivetti. The paper also attempts to highlight how Doxiadis and Olivetti perceive the relationship between politics and technocracy. Weber's view on the division of labor between professional staff and political leadership, and the technocratic model of the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas are used as an interpretive tool. The different origins of Doxiadis and Olivetti and the particular character of Greece and Italy in the post-war period contributed to the formation of different principles regarding the mission and vision of their political action and their relationship to the way each of them perceived the issue of national identity, and the possibility of urban planning strategies to contribute dynamically to the formation of new terms of understanding the issue of national identity. Relating urban planners approaches in Greece and Italy and the Cold War geopolitical conflicts, the paper examines how Olivetti and Doxiadis perceived the relationship between democracy and community is one of the aspects explored in the context of this proposal