ABSTRACT
This text revisits the “housing question” as posed by Friedrich Engels in 1872 through the category of the “specific intellectual” proposed by Michel Foucault in 1977. In the one hundred years that separates these interventions, architecture developed a discourse of expertise around housing which has shaped the historiography on the subject to a considerable degree. Rather than continuing to reproduce this discourse, historians must revise its terms. For architects as well as for scholars, housing offers a specific point of entry into “universal” political and economic concerns. Reading key texts in a manner that puts Foucault in dialogue with Engels (and Marx) allows historians to revisit the discourse of expertise and rewrite its assumptions, in order to pose the housing question with greater precision, and in a manner that heightens its urgency and reinforces its contemporary relevance.
