ABSTRACT
The decline of class as a category of analysis within architecture, and the building industry, has deprived architects and critics of a key tool of self-reflection. While there are attempts to understand architecture in terms of financial capital and other economic factors, class awareness is not contiguous with the logic of money. Traditional insights of class, such as ideology, allow us to grasp some of the curious inversions that characterise the symbolic manifestations of class. These are bound up in architecture’s role as a compensatory mechanism, as it were, for class anxieties.
The framing of environmentalism as class-blind, for example, has hidden the myriad ways its expression and implementation have manifested along class lines. By the same token, the provision of housing has invariably devolved along class lines, regardless of efforts to claim otherwise in the guise of urban consolidation. For architecture to reclaim a sense of social relevance, it needs to re-examine its role in demarcating, however subtly, winners and losers: otherwise, it risks a creeping marginalisation despite protestations of deep, classless social concern. The historical agency shown by class, as an analytic tool, begs that we reinvigorate its insights.
