Sociology has become an inseparable entity of architectural discourse at present and rightfully so! In modern society, architects and planners have a greater responsibility of connecting societies and building communities through design interventions. Built environments are the direct outcome of spatial relations which in turn are shaped by human behaviors as individuals and as a community. Societal functions and relations metamorphose, to a large extent, under the built environment. Despite this clear connection, in-depth study on the Sociology of Architecture in an academic and pragmatic sense has only been emerging in recent decades and remains in ambiguity. As such, the paper “Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities”, authored by Paul Jones, endeavors to contribute to a field of inquiry that is so obvious but left largely underdeveloped.
Sociology in Architecture
Paul Jones rightfully deduces that Sociology is presently a heavily contested and fragmented disciplinary label that has been used in the text to represent the critical rumination of the relationships between the architectural field with political power, construction, maintenance, and collective identities. The label “Sociology” used in the text results in bringing to highlight the social production of architectural practice from the perspective of a research tradition. The role of architecture in codifying and reproducing social identities has been justified in the text as architecture is a cultural space where political projects become socially meaningful and visions of the public are forged.
Architecture is but a part of cultural production as the social form of the era, with the socio-political characteristics of the time being frozen in the built environment of the said era. With metamorphosing socio-cultural structures, the form of the built environment also undergoes evolution. Paul Jones then attempts to provide a critical sociological perspective that would disrupt any assumptions about architecture taken for granted as the ones that identify architecture as just another insignificant and unproblematic signifier of national identity. The text successfully explores architecture’s influence on the collective consciousness of a society at any given time, along with identity and socio-cultural discourse, and re-evaluates architecture as a repertoire of cultural symbols.
Architecture, Sociology, and Collective Identity
The book has a broad scope, reiterating themes of socio-political structure, past events, and anticipation of future societies along with the architectural discourses leading up to them, architecture as a medium of forming a collective identity, commemoration, and memory in architecture as well as about regeneration. Yet the fundamental theme remains to position architecture as a cultural form, a practice that is deeply bound to the collective identity of a time. With research questions mobilizing works of architecture and their designers with political regimes, Paul Jones claims undeniable competing identity and that tensions and conflicts inherent in state-led collective identity discourses through social, political, and economic contexts of a nation are revealed in architectural expression.
Paul Jones also refers to Geertz’s anthropology that tends towards the description of cultural symbols and how his observations point towards the presence of collective identity as a result of social co-construction that exists within socio-cultural practices and actions that attribute a collective significance to things, which is also a reality of architecture as a living culture. With an example of the Millennium Dome, which he refers to as “the most politically charged piece of architecture Britain has ever seen” and how disparate and complex the discourses surrounding its construction were, he allows a peek into how collective identities are intrinsic in architectural practice. The Millenium Dome, which characterizes the early years of the New Labour Administration, is just one of several examples Jones implements in proving his point on the inevitability of collective identity as a temporal and spatial social process that draws a dialogue between the past and present of city spaces, and consequentially of the nation.
Memory and Commemoration in Architecture
Architecture and planning have undoubtedly been as much a symbol and expression of a time, a commemoration of an era, as it has been of approaching a functional need, be that physical, economic, social, political, or cultural. With chapters dedicated to deciphering architecture as having a long-established commemorative function, Paul Jones explores the modes of memorialization in the past and of the present, along with the socio-cultural reforms that followed. With Case Studies as that of Daniel Libeskind‘s master plan for Ground Zero in New York City, the text explores how architecture orients a city or a nation in time within memorial frames of reference.
According to Paul Jones, Architecture’s relationship with politics, commemoration, and the built environment proves it to be an uncontested medium of mass communication. This communicative potential of the built environment allows architecture to mark socially significant events in the material world. The large monuments and spaces devoted to the very purpose of commemoration are evident throughout all societies around the world. What deserves to be commemorated also speaks volumes about architecture’s power to disseminate what events and movements are worth immortalizing. Representation and empowerment are thus at a designer’s disposal that allows the narration of societies in the language of built environments.
In Nutshell
The sociology of architecture, especially as a medium of connecting identities, is a topic that needs no clarification and yet is very vague at the same time. Paul Jones has succeeded in the theorization of a self-evident but equally complex phenomenon in the arena of the Sociology of Architecture. With extensive case studies, critical analysis and reasoning drew plausible conclusions, and in some cases raised praiseworthy research questions that inspire further rumination and study. With an in-depth study of sociocultural, political, and economic structures, and functions, along with drawing their correlation with architecture as a practice and as a phenomenon, he has endeavored to critically raise questions that had remained overly generalized for decades in lack of proper research and rumination. The book covers a wide scope ranging from the very foundations of the sociology of architecture to the in-depth rumination of architecture as a socio-cultural symbolism of an era.
While on the one hand, the approach and content of the book remain unquestionably invaluable, the paper feels congested with information, difficult to navigate, and of complex structure. The story-telling aspect of the paper seems lacking, and the content becomes loaded with logistics and complex statements. It takes one much longer to navigate the text than anticipated and even longer, along with multiple re-reads, to completely soak in the information that has so meticulously been presented in the paper. It becomes challenging for young readers to comprehend the analysis made and to draw the conclusions one might expect to meet. The text also lacks insights and the point-of view from the designers of the case studies that the author presents, resulting in his conclusions being one-sided and incomplete. Despite these insignificant cons, through the extremely well-researched paper “Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities”, the author, Paul Jones, certainly does contribute a lot to the unexplored seas of the sociology of architecture.