Architecture

The Study of Architecture as Practice

One of the distinctive elements of architecture as a profession is the reliance on clients for the resources— including land and other capital—necessary for its practice. At one level this client dependency can be explained by the inherently expensive endeavor of the design and realization of buildings, but this connection must also be understood in light of the desire of the powerful to materialize their status in urban space. Studies of the architectural profession have frequently sought to develop this theme through revealing the extent to which architects' reliance on commissions from dominant political and economic actors conditions—and is subsequently legitimated through—their practice. This has been a particularly major concern in the urban studies tradition, where research on the political economy of architectural practice is among the most successful of social science contributions on the subject, not least because such studies can be situated in established “sociology of the professions” frameworks. By and large such research suggests that, in spite of the aforementioned dependence on capitalists and states for commissions and other resources, architects frequently reveal a highly ambiguous relationship with such social forces. In interviews and discussions of their practice, architects tend toward emphasis of their role in the production of socially meaningful buildings that connect to place, identities, and broader social values at the expense of a foregrounding of the interconnections between architecture and the states and capitalist enterprises that commission it. Commenting on this tension, the architectural theorist Diane Ghirardo suggests that positioning architecture within an aesthetic frame serves to divert attention away from the politics of architecture, including its symbiotic relationship with economic and political elites and their projects.

Research that situates architectural practice within particular urban contexts, political regimes, and capitalist models problematizes architecture's claims to autonomy from these processes; the profession's position somewhere between an art, primarily concerned with aesthetics and the creation of socially meaningful forms and spaces, and as a primarily functional response to material issues, such as shelter, is an important consideration in this regard. American sociologist Robert Gutman's [Page 37]classic study Architectural Practice: A Critical View is informed by the notion that architecture's unique “natural market” is for those landmark, monumental buildings that claim to reflect major civilizational values. Gutman claims that the struggle for such commissions—always limited in number and so creating competition between architects and a subsequent hierarchy of professionals— exists in the context of architects' attempts to retain distinction from other related design professionals, which is crucial to architecture's continued monopoly over this sphere of activity. Indeed, the question of architects' self-definition is significant here, with the emergence of the profession bound up with the capacity of renaissance architects to frame their work as a design practice separate from that of construction; the role of drawing is a significant part of this story, as it allows a form other than the finished building that can be understood as the intellectual property of architects. (Ongoing conceptions of the “architect as artist” must be understood against this backdrop.)

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