2024-09-27_ovxd4iakmv

### The Binding Power of Architecture#67 (*0.678284228*) > Power itself cannot exist without a relationship to another, who is a partner. As Foucault explains: "[t]he term ‘power’ designates relationships between ‘partners’…" Architecture, also, has to be in a relationship to transmit and/or emit power. In its universal process, architecture resides in several relationships (with significant others) that usually give the architect the central role. In an interview Foucault explains such relationship: you know, I was not really attempting to describe figures of domination when I referred to doctors and people like that, but rather to describe people through whom power passed or who are important in the fields of power relations… after all, the architect has no power over me. If I want to tear down or change a house he built for me … I would say that one must take him—his mentality, his attitude—into account as well as his projects, in order to understand a certain number of the techniques of power that we invested in architecture, but he is not comparable to a doctor, a priest, a psychiatrist, or a prison warden. Michael Hays explains that Foucault does not advocate that architecture represents power. "Rather it is the techniques for practicing social relations, which are framed and modulated spatially, that allows for efficient expansion of power, or alternatively, for resistance". Clearly Hays has by passed the social relationship that architecture is in need of realization. Such a relationship is a social relationship with power. The Architecture-Power Tension The clients of pre-modern times — the church, the king, and the aristocrat, were clearly powerful figures and institutions on several levels: social, financial and, strategic decision making level. The architects were (usually) culturally and socially close to such figures and institutions and hence understood the client’s worldview and the type of cultural language that is involved with proposed projects. However, at the present time such a relationship is much more complex, blurred and diverse. Markus explains that: Up to about the middle of the eighteenth century the meanings of form, function and spaces converged in a regular and predictable way, without ambiguity… enlightenment reason, the political upheavals of the American and French revolutions, and the technical and social one of the industrial revolution fractured this stable world. Clients ceased to LEFEBVRE, H. (1991) The Production of Space; Oxford; Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell Publisher, pp. 142143. ### Architecture, Power and Parliament How do Buildings Shape Politics#8 (*0.673756301*) > This relegation of architecture and space to an unquestioned framework is the deepest linkage of built form to power. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it ‘The most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence’. 2 The more practices of power can be embedded in the framework of everyday life, the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. When we think of political power we generally refer to the power of the state over its citizens. Here we must make the key distinction between power to and power over. 3 The term ‘power’ derives from the Latin potere—‘to be able’, the capacity to achieve some end. Yet power in human affairs generally involves control ‘over’ others. This distinction between power to and power over, between power as capacity and as a relation, is fundamental. Power to is the original or ur-form of power, the capacity to act, empowerment. While less primary, power over is much more complex and incorporates a range of forms and practices such as force, coercion, manipulation, seduction and authority. These practices all have crucial connections to architecture and urbanism which I have explored elsewhere in relation to building types such as shopping malls, corporate towers, courthouses, housing enclaves and public space. 4 Authority/legitimacy ‘Authority’ is a form of power over that is integrated with the institutional structures of governance and which relies on an unquestioned recognition and compliance. It is the most pervasive, reliable, productive and stable form of power, but it rests upon a base of legitimation. 5 We recognise the authority of the state as legitimate only when it is seen to serve a larger public interest. The key linkage to architecture here is that authority becomes stabilised and legitimated through its symbols—the trappings of power. The nation state is not visible, it is what Ben Anderson calls an ‘imagined Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge UP, London, 1977, p. 188. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, Macmillan, London, 1977. Kim Dovey, op. cit., 1999; Dovey, Becoming Places, Routledge, London, 2010. Hannah Arendt, ‘Communicative power’ in S. Lukes (ed), Power, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 65. ### Architecture Demonstrates Power#0 (*0.670526624*) > Architecture Demonstrates Power Molly Glenn Acknowledgements: Thanks to my major advisor, Kathleen Wright, for suggesting that I choose the Philosophy of Architecture. Thanks to my readers, Lauren Barthold and Adam Kovach for all their critiques. Thanks to Sharon Burdick, Margaret and John deNeergaard, and Margy Manchester for helping me edit. Finally, thanks to my friends for their support, and for listening patiently. Architecture is intricately tied to political power. It provides a model for the system of structural thought used by a society to conceptualize the world. Such architecturally based structural thought includes understanding of social and political relationships. These relations of power are embodied in architecture, especially the monumental architecture created by political powers. These monuments demonstrate the power of the individuals responsible for their creation and they demonstrate the nature of that power. Axial buildings and city plans are consistently related to power from on high, divine or lineage-based power, which dominates the community. Axial architecture directs the people to the seat or the symbol of that power. Non-axial architecture and city plans, on the other hand, consistently give people choices and assert the equality of constituent parts rather than the supremacy of a single goal. Furthermore, non-axial architecture is constantly related to political power as a mandate from the masses. Even in prisons, where the warden’s power over the inmate represents the extreme of social control, architecture that embodies top-down distribution of power can be contrasted to architecture showing control vested by the community. Architecture demonstrates possession of power and the nature of that power. Part 1: How Architecture Is Tied To Power Looking at architectural history, the tie between architecture – especially monumental architecture – and political power can be consistently seen. One important step in exploring this connection is to assess how and why this tie exists. In The Domestication of the Human Species, anthropologist Peter Wilson argues that, from its very conception, architecture relates to the way we understand the world. It allows us to conceptualize reality clearly and helps societies form systems that explain their cultural and social practices. Leaders utilize this framework for understanding reality to convey the nature of their power over the populace. They express how they wish to be seen and force their particular view of that power on the populace through architecture. Architecture Defined "Architecture" can be taken to mean many things, from 1) any built structure, to 2) the design product of a specifically trained type of artist.

### The Binding Power of Architecture#67 (*0.678284228*) > Power itself cannot exist without a relationship to another, who is a partner. As Foucault explains: "[t]he term ‘power’ designates relationships between ‘partners’…" Architecture, also, has to be in a relationship to transmit and/or emit power. In its universal process, architecture resides in several relationships (with significant others) that usually give the architect the central role. In an interview Foucault explains such relationship: you know, I was not really attempting to describe figures of domination when I referred to doctors and people like that, but rather to describe people through whom power passed or who are important in the fields of power relations… after all, the architect has no power over me. If I want to tear down or change a house he built for me … I would say that one must take him—his mentality, his attitude—into account as well as his projects, in order to understand a certain number of the techniques of power that we invested in architecture, but he is not comparable to a doctor, a priest, a psychiatrist, or a prison warden. Michael Hays explains that Foucault does not advocate that architecture represents power. "Rather it is the techniques for practicing social relations, which are framed and modulated spatially, that allows for efficient expansion of power, or alternatively, for resistance". Clearly Hays has by passed the social relationship that architecture is in need of realization. Such a relationship is a social relationship with power. The Architecture-Power Tension The clients of pre-modern times — the church, the king, and the aristocrat, were clearly powerful figures and institutions on several levels: social, financial and, strategic decision making level. The architects were (usually) culturally and socially close to such figures and institutions and hence understood the client’s worldview and the type of cultural language that is involved with proposed projects. However, at the present time such a relationship is much more complex, blurred and diverse. Markus explains that: Up to about the middle of the eighteenth century the meanings of form, function and spaces converged in a regular and predictable way, without ambiguity… enlightenment reason, the political upheavals of the American and French revolutions, and the technical and social one of the industrial revolution fractured this stable world. Clients ceased to LEFEBVRE, H. (1991) The Production of Space; Oxford; Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell Publisher, pp. 142143. ### Architecture, Power and Parliament How do Buildings Shape Politics#8 (*0.673756301*) > This relegation of architecture and space to an unquestioned framework is the deepest linkage of built form to power. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it ‘The most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence’. 2 The more practices of power can be embedded in the framework of everyday life, the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. When we think of political power we generally refer to the power of the state over its citizens. Here we must make the key distinction between power to and power over. 3 The term ‘power’ derives from the Latin potere—‘to be able’, the capacity to achieve some end. Yet power in human affairs generally involves control ‘over’ others. This distinction between power to and power over, between power as capacity and as a relation, is fundamental. Power to is the original or ur-form of power, the capacity to act, empowerment. While less primary, power over is much more complex and incorporates a range of forms and practices such as force, coercion, manipulation, seduction and authority. These practices all have crucial connections to architecture and urbanism which I have explored elsewhere in relation to building types such as shopping malls, corporate towers, courthouses, housing enclaves and public space. 4 Authority/legitimacy ‘Authority’ is a form of power over that is integrated with the institutional structures of governance and which relies on an unquestioned recognition and compliance. It is the most pervasive, reliable, productive and stable form of power, but it rests upon a base of legitimation. 5 We recognise the authority of the state as legitimate only when it is seen to serve a larger public interest. The key linkage to architecture here is that authority becomes stabilised and legitimated through its symbols—the trappings of power. The nation state is not visible, it is what Ben Anderson calls an ‘imagined Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge UP, London, 1977, p. 188. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, Macmillan, London, 1977. Kim Dovey, op. cit., 1999; Dovey, Becoming Places, Routledge, London, 2010. Hannah Arendt, ‘Communicative power’ in S. Lukes (ed), Power, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 65. ### Architecture Demonstrates Power#0 (*0.670526624*) > Architecture Demonstrates Power Molly Glenn Acknowledgements: Thanks to my major advisor, Kathleen Wright, for suggesting that I choose the Philosophy of Architecture. Thanks to my readers, Lauren Barthold and Adam Kovach for all their critiques. Thanks to Sharon Burdick, Margaret and John deNeergaard, and Margy Manchester for helping me edit. Finally, thanks to my friends for their support, and for listening patiently. Architecture is intricately tied to political power. It provides a model for the system of structural thought used by a society to conceptualize the world. Such architecturally based structural thought includes understanding of social and political relationships. These relations of power are embodied in architecture, especially the monumental architecture created by political powers. These monuments demonstrate the power of the individuals responsible for their creation and they demonstrate the nature of that power. Axial buildings and city plans are consistently related to power from on high, divine or lineage-based power, which dominates the community. Axial architecture directs the people to the seat or the symbol of that power. Non-axial architecture and city plans, on the other hand, consistently give people choices and assert the equality of constituent parts rather than the supremacy of a single goal. Furthermore, non-axial architecture is constantly related to political power as a mandate from the masses. Even in prisons, where the warden’s power over the inmate represents the extreme of social control, architecture that embodies top-down distribution of power can be contrasted to architecture showing control vested by the community. Architecture demonstrates possession of power and the nature of that power. Part 1: How Architecture Is Tied To Power Looking at architectural history, the tie between architecture – especially monumental architecture – and political power can be consistently seen. One important step in exploring this connection is to assess how and why this tie exists. In The Domestication of the Human Species, anthropologist Peter Wilson argues that, from its very conception, architecture relates to the way we understand the world. It allows us to conceptualize reality clearly and helps societies form systems that explain their cultural and social practices. Leaders utilize this framework for understanding reality to convey the nature of their power over the populace. They express how they wish to be seen and force their particular view of that power on the populace through architecture. Architecture Defined "Architecture" can be taken to mean many things, from 1) any built structure, to 2) the design product of a specifically trained type of artist.

### The Binding Power of Architecture#67 (*0.678284228*) > Power itself cannot exist without a relationship to another, who is a partner. As Foucault explains: "[t]he term ‘power’ designates relationships between ‘partners’…" Architecture, also, has to be in a relationship to transmit and/or emit power. In its universal process, architecture resides in several relationships (with significant others) that usually give the architect the central role. In an interview Foucault explains such relationship: you know, I was not really attempting to describe figures of domination when I referred to doctors and people like that, but rather to describe people through whom power passed or who are important in the fields of power relations… after all, the architect has no power over me. If I want to tear down or change a house he built for me … I would say that one must take him—his mentality, his attitude—into account as well as his projects, in order to understand a certain number of the techniques of power that we invested in architecture, but he is not comparable to a doctor, a priest, a psychiatrist, or a prison warden. Michael Hays explains that Foucault does not advocate that architecture represents power. "Rather it is the techniques for practicing social relations, which are framed and modulated spatially, that allows for efficient expansion of power, or alternatively, for resistance". Clearly Hays has by passed the social relationship that architecture is in need of realization. Such a relationship is a social relationship with power. The Architecture-Power Tension The clients of pre-modern times — the church, the king, and the aristocrat, were clearly powerful figures and institutions on several levels: social, financial and, strategic decision making level. The architects were (usually) culturally and socially close to such figures and institutions and hence understood the client’s worldview and the type of cultural language that is involved with proposed projects. However, at the present time such a relationship is much more complex, blurred and diverse. Markus explains that: Up to about the middle of the eighteenth century the meanings of form, function and spaces converged in a regular and predictable way, without ambiguity… enlightenment reason, the political upheavals of the American and French revolutions, and the technical and social one of the industrial revolution fractured this stable world. Clients ceased to LEFEBVRE, H. (1991) The Production of Space; Oxford; Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell Publisher, pp. 142143. ### Architecture, Power and Parliament How do Buildings Shape Politics#8 (*0.673756301*) > This relegation of architecture and space to an unquestioned framework is the deepest linkage of built form to power. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it ‘The most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence’. 2 The more practices of power can be embedded in the framework of everyday life, the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. When we think of political power we generally refer to the power of the state over its citizens. Here we must make the key distinction between power to and power over. 3 The term ‘power’ derives from the Latin potere—‘to be able’, the capacity to achieve some end. Yet power in human affairs generally involves control ‘over’ others. This distinction between power to and power over, between power as capacity and as a relation, is fundamental. Power to is the original or ur-form of power, the capacity to act, empowerment. While less primary, power over is much more complex and incorporates a range of forms and practices such as force, coercion, manipulation, seduction and authority. These practices all have crucial connections to architecture and urbanism which I have explored elsewhere in relation to building types such as shopping malls, corporate towers, courthouses, housing enclaves and public space. 4 Authority/legitimacy ‘Authority’ is a form of power over that is integrated with the institutional structures of governance and which relies on an unquestioned recognition and compliance. It is the most pervasive, reliable, productive and stable form of power, but it rests upon a base of legitimation. 5 We recognise the authority of the state as legitimate only when it is seen to serve a larger public interest. The key linkage to architecture here is that authority becomes stabilised and legitimated through its symbols—the trappings of power. The nation state is not visible, it is what Ben Anderson calls an ‘imagined Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge UP, London, 1977, p. 188. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, Macmillan, London, 1977. Kim Dovey, op. cit., 1999; Dovey, Becoming Places, Routledge, London, 2010. Hannah Arendt, ‘Communicative power’ in S. Lukes (ed), Power, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 65. ### Architecture Demonstrates Power#0 (*0.670526624*) > Architecture Demonstrates Power Molly Glenn Acknowledgements: Thanks to my major advisor, Kathleen Wright, for suggesting that I choose the Philosophy of Architecture. Thanks to my readers, Lauren Barthold and Adam Kovach for all their critiques. Thanks to Sharon Burdick, Margaret and John deNeergaard, and Margy Manchester for helping me edit. Finally, thanks to my friends for their support, and for listening patiently. Architecture is intricately tied to political power. It provides a model for the system of structural thought used by a society to conceptualize the world. Such architecturally based structural thought includes understanding of social and political relationships. These relations of power are embodied in architecture, especially the monumental architecture created by political powers. These monuments demonstrate the power of the individuals responsible for their creation and they demonstrate the nature of that power. Axial buildings and city plans are consistently related to power from on high, divine or lineage-based power, which dominates the community. Axial architecture directs the people to the seat or the symbol of that power. Non-axial architecture and city plans, on the other hand, consistently give people choices and assert the equality of constituent parts rather than the supremacy of a single goal. Furthermore, non-axial architecture is constantly related to political power as a mandate from the masses. Even in prisons, where the warden’s power over the inmate represents the extreme of social control, architecture that embodies top-down distribution of power can be contrasted to architecture showing control vested by the community. Architecture demonstrates possession of power and the nature of that power. Part 1: How Architecture Is Tied To Power Looking at architectural history, the tie between architecture – especially monumental architecture – and political power can be consistently seen. One important step in exploring this connection is to assess how and why this tie exists. In The Domestication of the Human Species, anthropologist Peter Wilson argues that, from its very conception, architecture relates to the way we understand the world. It allows us to conceptualize reality clearly and helps societies form systems that explain their cultural and social practices. Leaders utilize this framework for understanding reality to convey the nature of their power over the populace. They express how they wish to be seen and force their particular view of that power on the populace through architecture. Architecture Defined "Architecture" can be taken to mean many things, from 1) any built structure, to 2) the design product of a specifically trained type of artist.

### The Binding Power of Architecture#67 (*0.678284228*) > Power itself cannot exist without a relationship to another, who is a partner. As Foucault explains: "[t]he term ‘power’ designates relationships between ‘partners’…" Architecture, also, has to be in a relationship to transmit and/or emit power. In its universal process, architecture resides in several relationships (with significant others) that usually give the architect the central role. In an interview Foucault explains such relationship: you know, I was not really attempting to describe figures of domination when I referred to doctors and people like that, but rather to describe people through whom power passed or who are important in the fields of power relations… after all, the architect has no power over me. If I want to tear down or change a house he built for me … I would say that one must take him—his mentality, his attitude—into account as well as his projects, in order to understand a certain number of the techniques of power that we invested in architecture, but he is not comparable to a doctor, a priest, a psychiatrist, or a prison warden. Michael Hays explains that Foucault does not advocate that architecture represents power. "Rather it is the techniques for practicing social relations, which are framed and modulated spatially, that allows for efficient expansion of power, or alternatively, for resistance". Clearly Hays has by passed the social relationship that architecture is in need of realization. Such a relationship is a social relationship with power. The Architecture-Power Tension The clients of pre-modern times — the church, the king, and the aristocrat, were clearly powerful figures and institutions on several levels: social, financial and, strategic decision making level. The architects were (usually) culturally and socially close to such figures and institutions and hence understood the client’s worldview and the type of cultural language that is involved with proposed projects. However, at the present time such a relationship is much more complex, blurred and diverse. Markus explains that: Up to about the middle of the eighteenth century the meanings of form, function and spaces converged in a regular and predictable way, without ambiguity… enlightenment reason, the political upheavals of the American and French revolutions, and the technical and social one of the industrial revolution fractured this stable world. Clients ceased to LEFEBVRE, H. (1991) The Production of Space; Oxford; Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell Publisher, pp. 142143. ### Architecture, Power and Parliament How do Buildings Shape Politics#8 (*0.673756301*) > This relegation of architecture and space to an unquestioned framework is the deepest linkage of built form to power. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it ‘The most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence’. 2 The more practices of power can be embedded in the framework of everyday life, the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. When we think of political power we generally refer to the power of the state over its citizens. Here we must make the key distinction between power to and power over. 3 The term ‘power’ derives from the Latin potere—‘to be able’, the capacity to achieve some end. Yet power in human affairs generally involves control ‘over’ others. This distinction between power to and power over, between power as capacity and as a relation, is fundamental. Power to is the original or ur-form of power, the capacity to act, empowerment. While less primary, power over is much more complex and incorporates a range of forms and practices such as force, coercion, manipulation, seduction and authority. These practices all have crucial connections to architecture and urbanism which I have explored elsewhere in relation to building types such as shopping malls, corporate towers, courthouses, housing enclaves and public space. 4 Authority/legitimacy ‘Authority’ is a form of power over that is integrated with the institutional structures of governance and which relies on an unquestioned recognition and compliance. It is the most pervasive, reliable, productive and stable form of power, but it rests upon a base of legitimation. 5 We recognise the authority of the state as legitimate only when it is seen to serve a larger public interest. The key linkage to architecture here is that authority becomes stabilised and legitimated through its symbols—the trappings of power. The nation state is not visible, it is what Ben Anderson calls an ‘imagined Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge UP, London, 1977, p. 188. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, Macmillan, London, 1977. Kim Dovey, op. cit., 1999; Dovey, Becoming Places, Routledge, London, 2010. Hannah Arendt, ‘Communicative power’ in S. Lukes (ed), Power, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 65. ### Architecture Demonstrates Power#0 (*0.670526624*) > Architecture Demonstrates Power Molly Glenn Acknowledgements: Thanks to my major advisor, Kathleen Wright, for suggesting that I choose the Philosophy of Architecture. Thanks to my readers, Lauren Barthold and Adam Kovach for all their critiques. Thanks to Sharon Burdick, Margaret and John deNeergaard, and Margy Manchester for helping me edit. Finally, thanks to my friends for their support, and for listening patiently. Architecture is intricately tied to political power. It provides a model for the system of structural thought used by a society to conceptualize the world. Such architecturally based structural thought includes understanding of social and political relationships. These relations of power are embodied in architecture, especially the monumental architecture created by political powers. These monuments demonstrate the power of the individuals responsible for their creation and they demonstrate the nature of that power. Axial buildings and city plans are consistently related to power from on high, divine or lineage-based power, which dominates the community. Axial architecture directs the people to the seat or the symbol of that power. Non-axial architecture and city plans, on the other hand, consistently give people choices and assert the equality of constituent parts rather than the supremacy of a single goal. Furthermore, non-axial architecture is constantly related to political power as a mandate from the masses. Even in prisons, where the warden’s power over the inmate represents the extreme of social control, architecture that embodies top-down distribution of power can be contrasted to architecture showing control vested by the community. Architecture demonstrates possession of power and the nature of that power. Part 1: How Architecture Is Tied To Power Looking at architectural history, the tie between architecture – especially monumental architecture – and political power can be consistently seen. One important step in exploring this connection is to assess how and why this tie exists. In The Domestication of the Human Species, anthropologist Peter Wilson argues that, from its very conception, architecture relates to the way we understand the world. It allows us to conceptualize reality clearly and helps societies form systems that explain their cultural and social practices. Leaders utilize this framework for understanding reality to convey the nature of their power over the populace. They express how they wish to be seen and force their particular view of that power on the populace through architecture. Architecture Defined "Architecture" can be taken to mean many things, from 1) any built structure, to 2) the design product of a specifically trained type of artist.

### The Binding Power of Architecture#67 (*0.678284228*) > Power itself cannot exist without a relationship to another, who is a partner. As Foucault explains: "[t]he term ‘power’ designates relationships between ‘partners’…" Architecture, also, has to be in a relationship to transmit and/or emit power. In its universal process, architecture resides in several relationships (with significant others) that usually give the architect the central role. In an interview Foucault explains such relationship: you know, I was not really attempting to describe figures of domination when I referred to doctors and people like that, but rather to describe people through whom power passed or who are important in the fields of power relations… after all, the architect has no power over me. If I want to tear down or change a house he built for me … I would say that one must take him—his mentality, his attitude—into account as well as his projects, in order to understand a certain number of the techniques of power that we invested in architecture, but he is not comparable to a doctor, a priest, a psychiatrist, or a prison warden. Michael Hays explains that Foucault does not advocate that architecture represents power. "Rather it is the techniques for practicing social relations, which are framed and modulated spatially, that allows for efficient expansion of power, or alternatively, for resistance". Clearly Hays has by passed the social relationship that architecture is in need of realization. Such a relationship is a social relationship with power. The Architecture-Power Tension The clients of pre-modern times — the church, the king, and the aristocrat, were clearly powerful figures and institutions on several levels: social, financial and, strategic decision making level. The architects were (usually) culturally and socially close to such figures and institutions and hence understood the client’s worldview and the type of cultural language that is involved with proposed projects. However, at the present time such a relationship is much more complex, blurred and diverse. Markus explains that: Up to about the middle of the eighteenth century the meanings of form, function and spaces converged in a regular and predictable way, without ambiguity… enlightenment reason, the political upheavals of the American and French revolutions, and the technical and social one of the industrial revolution fractured this stable world. Clients ceased to LEFEBVRE, H. (1991) The Production of Space; Oxford; Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell Publisher, pp. 142143. ### Architecture, Power and Parliament How do Buildings Shape Politics#8 (*0.673756301*) > This relegation of architecture and space to an unquestioned framework is the deepest linkage of built form to power. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it ‘The most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence’. 2 The more practices of power can be embedded in the framework of everyday life, the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. When we think of political power we generally refer to the power of the state over its citizens. Here we must make the key distinction between power to and power over. 3 The term ‘power’ derives from the Latin potere—‘to be able’, the capacity to achieve some end. Yet power in human affairs generally involves control ‘over’ others. This distinction between power to and power over, between power as capacity and as a relation, is fundamental. Power to is the original or ur-form of power, the capacity to act, empowerment. While less primary, power over is much more complex and incorporates a range of forms and practices such as force, coercion, manipulation, seduction and authority. These practices all have crucial connections to architecture and urbanism which I have explored elsewhere in relation to building types such as shopping malls, corporate towers, courthouses, housing enclaves and public space. 4 Authority/legitimacy ‘Authority’ is a form of power over that is integrated with the institutional structures of governance and which relies on an unquestioned recognition and compliance. It is the most pervasive, reliable, productive and stable form of power, but it rests upon a base of legitimation. 5 We recognise the authority of the state as legitimate only when it is seen to serve a larger public interest. The key linkage to architecture here is that authority becomes stabilised and legitimated through its symbols—the trappings of power. The nation state is not visible, it is what Ben Anderson calls an ‘imagined Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge UP, London, 1977, p. 188. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, Macmillan, London, 1977. Kim Dovey, op. cit., 1999; Dovey, Becoming Places, Routledge, London, 2010. Hannah Arendt, ‘Communicative power’ in S. Lukes (ed), Power, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 65. ### Architecture Demonstrates Power#0 (*0.670526624*) > Architecture Demonstrates Power Molly Glenn Acknowledgements: Thanks to my major advisor, Kathleen Wright, for suggesting that I choose the Philosophy of Architecture. Thanks to my readers, Lauren Barthold and Adam Kovach for all their critiques. Thanks to Sharon Burdick, Margaret and John deNeergaard, and Margy Manchester for helping me edit. Finally, thanks to my friends for their support, and for listening patiently. Architecture is intricately tied to political power. It provides a model for the system of structural thought used by a society to conceptualize the world. Such architecturally based structural thought includes understanding of social and political relationships. These relations of power are embodied in architecture, especially the monumental architecture created by political powers. These monuments demonstrate the power of the individuals responsible for their creation and they demonstrate the nature of that power. Axial buildings and city plans are consistently related to power from on high, divine or lineage-based power, which dominates the community. Axial architecture directs the people to the seat or the symbol of that power. Non-axial architecture and city plans, on the other hand, consistently give people choices and assert the equality of constituent parts rather than the supremacy of a single goal. Furthermore, non-axial architecture is constantly related to political power as a mandate from the masses. Even in prisons, where the warden’s power over the inmate represents the extreme of social control, architecture that embodies top-down distribution of power can be contrasted to architecture showing control vested by the community. Architecture demonstrates possession of power and the nature of that power. Part 1: How Architecture Is Tied To Power Looking at architectural history, the tie between architecture – especially monumental architecture – and political power can be consistently seen. One important step in exploring this connection is to assess how and why this tie exists. In The Domestication of the Human Species, anthropologist Peter Wilson argues that, from its very conception, architecture relates to the way we understand the world. It allows us to conceptualize reality clearly and helps societies form systems that explain their cultural and social practices. Leaders utilize this framework for understanding reality to convey the nature of their power over the populace. They express how they wish to be seen and force their particular view of that power on the populace through architecture. Architecture Defined "Architecture" can be taken to mean many things, from 1) any built structure, to 2) the design product of a specifically trained type of artist.

### The Binding Power of Architecture#67 (*0.678284228*) > Power itself cannot exist without a relationship to another, who is a partner. As Foucault explains: "[t]he term ‘power’ designates relationships between ‘partners’…" Architecture, also, has to be in a relationship to transmit and/or emit power. In its universal process, architecture resides in several relationships (with significant others) that usually give the architect the central role. In an interview Foucault explains such relationship: you know, I was not really attempting to describe figures of domination when I referred to doctors and people like that, but rather to describe people through whom power passed or who are important in the fields of power relations… after all, the architect has no power over me. If I want to tear down or change a house he built for me … I would say that one must take him—his mentality, his attitude—into account as well as his projects, in order to understand a certain number of the techniques of power that we invested in architecture, but he is not comparable to a doctor, a priest, a psychiatrist, or a prison warden. Michael Hays explains that Foucault does not advocate that architecture represents power. "Rather it is the techniques for practicing social relations, which are framed and modulated spatially, that allows for efficient expansion of power, or alternatively, for resistance". Clearly Hays has by passed the social relationship that architecture is in need of realization. Such a relationship is a social relationship with power. The Architecture-Power Tension The clients of pre-modern times — the church, the king, and the aristocrat, were clearly powerful figures and institutions on several levels: social, financial and, strategic decision making level. The architects were (usually) culturally and socially close to such figures and institutions and hence understood the client’s worldview and the type of cultural language that is involved with proposed projects. However, at the present time such a relationship is much more complex, blurred and diverse. Markus explains that: Up to about the middle of the eighteenth century the meanings of form, function and spaces converged in a regular and predictable way, without ambiguity… enlightenment reason, the political upheavals of the American and French revolutions, and the technical and social one of the industrial revolution fractured this stable world. Clients ceased to LEFEBVRE, H. (1991) The Production of Space; Oxford; Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell Publisher, pp. 142143. ### Architecture, Power and Parliament How do Buildings Shape Politics#8 (*0.673756301*) > This relegation of architecture and space to an unquestioned framework is the deepest linkage of built form to power. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it ‘The most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence’. 2 The more practices of power can be embedded in the framework of everyday life, the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. When we think of political power we generally refer to the power of the state over its citizens. Here we must make the key distinction between power to and power over. 3 The term ‘power’ derives from the Latin potere—‘to be able’, the capacity to achieve some end. Yet power in human affairs generally involves control ‘over’ others. This distinction between power to and power over, between power as capacity and as a relation, is fundamental. Power to is the original or ur-form of power, the capacity to act, empowerment. While less primary, power over is much more complex and incorporates a range of forms and practices such as force, coercion, manipulation, seduction and authority. These practices all have crucial connections to architecture and urbanism which I have explored elsewhere in relation to building types such as shopping malls, corporate towers, courthouses, housing enclaves and public space. 4 Authority/legitimacy ‘Authority’ is a form of power over that is integrated with the institutional structures of governance and which relies on an unquestioned recognition and compliance. It is the most pervasive, reliable, productive and stable form of power, but it rests upon a base of legitimation. 5 We recognise the authority of the state as legitimate only when it is seen to serve a larger public interest. The key linkage to architecture here is that authority becomes stabilised and legitimated through its symbols—the trappings of power. The nation state is not visible, it is what Ben Anderson calls an ‘imagined Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge UP, London, 1977, p. 188. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, Macmillan, London, 1977. Kim Dovey, op. cit., 1999; Dovey, Becoming Places, Routledge, London, 2010. Hannah Arendt, ‘Communicative power’ in S. Lukes (ed), Power, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 65. ### Architecture Demonstrates Power#0 (*0.670526624*) > Architecture Demonstrates Power Molly Glenn Acknowledgements: Thanks to my major advisor, Kathleen Wright, for suggesting that I choose the Philosophy of Architecture. Thanks to my readers, Lauren Barthold and Adam Kovach for all their critiques. Thanks to Sharon Burdick, Margaret and John deNeergaard, and Margy Manchester for helping me edit. Finally, thanks to my friends for their support, and for listening patiently. Architecture is intricately tied to political power. It provides a model for the system of structural thought used by a society to conceptualize the world. Such architecturally based structural thought includes understanding of social and political relationships. These relations of power are embodied in architecture, especially the monumental architecture created by political powers. These monuments demonstrate the power of the individuals responsible for their creation and they demonstrate the nature of that power. Axial buildings and city plans are consistently related to power from on high, divine or lineage-based power, which dominates the community. Axial architecture directs the people to the seat or the symbol of that power. Non-axial architecture and city plans, on the other hand, consistently give people choices and assert the equality of constituent parts rather than the supremacy of a single goal. Furthermore, non-axial architecture is constantly related to political power as a mandate from the masses. Even in prisons, where the warden’s power over the inmate represents the extreme of social control, architecture that embodies top-down distribution of power can be contrasted to architecture showing control vested by the community. Architecture demonstrates possession of power and the nature of that power. Part 1: How Architecture Is Tied To Power Looking at architectural history, the tie between architecture – especially monumental architecture – and political power can be consistently seen. One important step in exploring this connection is to assess how and why this tie exists. In The Domestication of the Human Species, anthropologist Peter Wilson argues that, from its very conception, architecture relates to the way we understand the world. It allows us to conceptualize reality clearly and helps societies form systems that explain their cultural and social practices. Leaders utilize this framework for understanding reality to convey the nature of their power over the populace. They express how they wish to be seen and force their particular view of that power on the populace through architecture. Architecture Defined "Architecture" can be taken to mean many things, from 1) any built structure, to 2) the design product of a specifically trained type of artist.