Architecture

Western architecture literally shaped the now-distinct public domains of consumption and production by designing buildings for specific purposes, so-called building types. There is a whole range of consumption-related building types, like the shop, department store, shopping mall, café, and bar. The factory, however, is the only production-related building type. In the age of the Industrial Revolution, the factory as a building type was developed to house machines and laborers for the mechanical mass production of goods. Although the first factory buildings referred in their scale and shape to older building types, such as the mansion, castle, or even the church, they gradually developed into the iconic building type of the factory, with a high chimney and highly pitched or slanted roof as its main architectural characteristics. The domains have grown apart territorially as well; consumption-related public buildings have been mainly erected in city centers, whereas factories were first built in the countryside, later on the outskirts of town, and are now concentrated within the confines of industrial zones. Over time, this has resulted in the present geographical imbalance in the main zones of production in our global economy. A large part of Western consumer products are produced elsewhere, mainly in Asian countries that are profiting from an economic boom but are also paying the price of environmental pollution due to the concentration of production, mining, and heavy industry.

The divide between the domains of consumption and production has been the result of an age-old process, characteristic of not only Western civilizations but civilizations worldwide. In the twentieth century, the process was more or less completed, witnessed in the distinct domains of production and consumption as the dominant spheres of our global economy. If, in some remote corner of this world, an isolated, self-sufficient community still exists that produces all it needs for its collective consumption, be it food, cloth, or shelter, it will most certainly be on the verge of extinction. However, the desire for and the illusion of self-sufficiency is very much alive today, especially in the West among citizens who criticize the waste of resources and the social evils of a consumer society. They long for an autarchic lifestyle in the splendid isolation of the countryside, growing their own food and collecting solar power to fuel their electric consumer products.

However, even in primordial times, most self-sufficient communities depended on barter and trade for their survival to get essential foodstuffs, such as salt and water. Barter and trade are at the root of all civilizations, for they imply traffic and meeting, which eventually resulted in roads and marketplaces. As such, they mark the beginning of the age-old process of diverging domains of production and consumption. This process was paralleled by a development toward specialization in the domain of production: for instance, the blacksmith did not need to grow his own food anymore, the farmer did not need to forge his tools, and both traded their products in the market. Specialization in production, however, created not only interdependency between producers and consumers for the necessary exchange of products but also social hierarchy and brutal exploitation of [Page 61]farmers and wage laborers, as witnessed in the social turmoil of nineteenth-century industrial society. It was no coincidence, for that matter, that nineteenth-century utopian movements idealized self-sufficient egalitarian communities.

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