Introduction
This book is about the meaning of buildings. It is
addressed to those who design or study them, and
to those who are frequently
puzzled both by
buildings and what is written about them. Whilst
what a building looks like, whether the roof leaks
and what it costs are matters of great concern, for
most people the first question is: 'Is it good to
use?' The answer to this depends on owners,
designers, institutions of
all kinds, and occupants,
so this must be a question about society. As
indeed are issues about its appearance, construc
tion and costs whose effects reach beyond any
individual.
The title implies the centrality of power to this
social process. I take the stand that buildings are
not
primarily art, technical or investment objects,
but
social objects. I support this by evidence and
by the ways proposed for looking beneath the
surface of both buildings and what is written
about them.
Such analysis involves taking things
apart, probing, suggesting and experimenting,
and emerging with some answers.
This is not a history book but the tools are
developed in the context of a critical period - the
Enlightenment and the first Industrial Revolution.
If they work in this familiar testbed they might
serve for a
better understanding of what we
design, build, use, read and write today.
The period is - given some latitude at either
end - the century from 1750 to 1850, the time of
the Revolutions
(American, French, Industrial
and, at its end, 1848). Europe's and America's
outer worlds were transfigured. And though
Enlightenment thought was absorbed into
science, religion, art and philosophy, it was not
till Darwin, Freud and Marx that the inner world
underwent a comparable upheaval. By then towns
and buildings had undergone their revolution.
The place is - given some latitude (or perhaps it
should be longitude!) of a few thousand miles
west across the
Atlantic or east to Russia - Britain.
The Industrial Revolution is so basic to this narra
tive that inevitably most of the evidence is found
in its cradle.
The production metropolis was mature by
1850 and had become differentiated by function
and stratified by class. Steam power and the rail
ways had liberated industry from rural, water-
powered sites. At the start of the period there
were a handful of building types. The most
ancient, religious buildings and houses, ranging
from the palace to the rural hovel, represented
levels of sacred and secular power. This was
extended into the
public sphere in theatres and
concert rooms, monasteries, colleges, schools,
libraries, almshouses and guest houses. For leisure
and travel there were clubs and inns. Buildings for
production were modest - farms, mills, ware
houses; for exchange the markets, bazaars and
shops. In the
guildhalls, bourses and exchanges are
the roots of town
halls. Some papal, religious,
civil and military infirmaries, prisons, pest houses
and institutions were of substantial size.
By 1850 there had been a typological explo
sion: a host of new industrial buildings, railway
stations, town halls, baths and wash-houses,
highly specialised urban markets; libraries, art
galleries and museums; civic universities, schools
and secular colleges; vastly expanded prisons and
hospitals out of which grew asylums and work
houses, hotels, and
offices.
Not only did buildings house new techno
logical processes, but they were products of new
technologies and they acquired commodity
xix