ABSTRACT
All built form has inertia, it ‘fixes’ a great deal of economic capital into a certain form in a certain place, stabilizing spatial ‘order’ and ‘identity’. And it inevitably carries ‘authority’ as symbolic capital; as Hollier (1989:ix) puts it: ‘Architecture is society’s superego’. The complicities of built form with practices of power are inevitable. They are to be understood, recognized, theorized, critiqued and debated. But the attempt to avoid such complicity is often fraught with new forms of deception. As a means of opening up such issues I shall briefly discuss four well-known contemporary architectural projects. They are chosen because they are each infused with a certain liberating intent, fine architectural talent, and certain complicities with practices of power.
