ABSTRACT
Much can ride, in English, on the indefinite article. Building is an activity; it is what builders do. Add the article, however, and the activity is brought to a close. Movement is stilled, and where people had once laboured with tools and materials, there now stands a structure – a building – that shows every sign of permanence and solidity. Instead, attention shifts to what goes on in the building, to the activities – such as cooking, eating, sleeping and socialising, and perhaps worship – that are conducted under its roof. It is conventional, at least in western societies, to describe the people who engage in these activities as the residents of the building. This is to suppose, however, that their occupation is a matter of taking up, for their own use, a space that has already been constructed. Thus, even if they have put up the building with their own hands, the activities of residence are categorically distinguished from those that led to its erection in the first place. Residence begins when building ends, much as the use of an artefact follows from its making. We have already seen, however, that in the case of the artefact, to draw a line between making and using means marking a point in the career of a thing at which it can be said to be finished, and moreover that this point of completion can only be determined in relation to a totality that already exists, in virtual form, at the outset – that is, in relation to a design. It is precisely the same with the building. If the activities of residence are truly distinct from, and consequential upon, those of building, then there must be some determinate point at which the building is finished – when building yields a building – which means, in turn, that its form must be judged as the realisation of a pre-existent design. This is precisely the judgement that is entailed in regarding the building as an instance of architecture.
