This is the introduction part of my Phd. Research Proposal that I sent to the University of Trento, Faculty of Sociology and Social Sciences. Even thought not approved I would like to share it with you with the hope that it would be useful in one way or another. I am fond of discovering the relationships and variety of factors that determine certain choices related to architecture, design and even lifestyle. And I believe them to be very little connected to philosophical inclinations or extensive reading of books of the abstract kind. This luxury belongs only to a few and is understood by even fewer. The rest of the world has a much more empirical approach, which is far more intuitive and easy.
The connection between architecture and society is obvious and even though sometimes ignored, it is something that we have to keep in mind when ever we want to build or design something for people other than ourselves.
We all know people and their activities are inherent to architecture.
Buildings, essentially a social and cultural products, are influenced by the ideas, values, beliefs, activities, relationships and forms of the social organizations that they sustain. Society produces buildings, and the buildings, although not producing society, help to maintain many of its social forms.
But don’t you sometimes wonder that maybe our physical environment influences the way we live together and behave toward one another in social situations such as housing, work, school, health care, and that buildings influence and become influenced by society and its organizations, as well as by human behavior.
So what can we understand about a society by examining its buildings and physical environment? And what can we understand about buildings and environments by examining the society in which they exist?
Simon Unwin in his book, Analyzing architecture, states that people make places in which to do things they do in their lives – places to eat, to sleep, to shop, to worship, to argue, to learn, to store and so on. The way in which they organize their places is related to their beliefs and their aspirations, their world view. As world views vary, so does architecture, at the personal level, at the social level and cultural level, and between different sub-cultures within a society. I find this to be greatly subtle and inspiring. If you understand how a person relates to the world, you understand how to design for that person. And perhaps even judge less considering that all world views are valid, mainly since they are so strongly related to the variety of factors to which a certain individual is exposed.
It is more than obvious that buildings and the entire built environment are essentially social and cultural products. Buildings result from social needs and accommodate a variety of functions: social, political, economic, religious and cultural. Their size, appearance, location and form are governed not simply by physical factors but by a society’s ideas, it’s forms of economic and social organizations, it’s distribution of resources and authority, its activities, and the beliefs and values, which prevail at any one period of time. As changes in the society occur, so too does change in its build environment. New building types emerge as old ones become obsolete. Some buildings are modified, extended and take on different functions; others may simply disappear. Society produces its buildings, and the buildings, although not producing society, help to maintain many of its social forms.
And as a result if we are to understand buildings and environments, we must understand the society and culture in which they exist. Not only will this help contribute to the development of methods for designing with intent, furthermore generating design patterns for environmental and social behavior change, but it will contribute to emphasizing the importance of inter-disciplinary collaborations in general, and sociology and architecture in particular.
I believe a research related to this topic would be useful in the sense that it will try to establish what is common to all men as humans and social beings and what is unique to them as individuals, or as members of any one society or culture. The result would not only bring a possible social explanations of built form but the way in which built form can be used to understand society and its institutions. So if certain institutions are common to all societies, do they give rise to common building types? If so, how do such types vary from culture to culture? The office block, for example, may be a universal building type in modern societies, yet how does its form and internal arrangements vary between Germany and Cuba, or Canada and Indonesia?
By studying the connection between society and the built environment, we could determine how architecture as well as the larger built environment is used as an instrument of social control. It is not just a question of ‘society’s’ ideas and beliefs being incorporated into built form. True, some ideas and behavior are shared by all members of a particular society (indeed, it is partly these that distinguish them as belonging to the same culture); others, however, are not. The social distribution of ideas, knowledge or values is equally important. So I ask on the basis of whose ideas, whose beliefs, whose values or whose view of the world are decisions based? These questions can be asked equally about any aspect of the built environment today.
As a conclusion I have this question from a zen teaching that I like very much : “If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound ?” Similar to it, I ask if there were no people would the built environment still exist? The answer is not only obvious but it’s also full of meaning. Buildings are influenced by society and to some extent society can be influenced by its buildings, and I believe this is a topic worth sharing and exploring.
Further reading suggestions
Books
- Castells, M. (1978), City, Class and Power, Macmillan, London.
- Douglas, M. (1973), Rules and Meanings, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
- Duly, C. (1979), The Houses of Mankind, Thames & Hudson, London.
- Dumont, L. (1972), Homo Hierarchicus, Paladin, London.
- Eisenstadt, S.N. (1968), ‘Social institutions’, in International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, New York, pp. 409–29.
- Hurd, G. (ed.) (1978), Human Societies, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London
- Rapoport, A. (1969), House Form and Culture, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
- Rapoport, A. (1971), ‘Some observations regarding man-environment studies’, Architectural Research and Teaching, vol. 2, no. 1,4–14.
- Rapoport, A. (1976), The Mutual Interaction of People and Their Built Environment. A Cross-cultural Perspective, Mouton, The Hague.
- Rapoport, A. (1977), Human Aspects of Urban Form, Pergamon, London.
- Rex, J. and Moore, R. (1967), Race, Community and Conflict, Oxford University Press, London.
- Scheflen, A.E. (1976), Human Territories. How We Behave in Space—Time, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
- Alexander, Christopher and other, A pattern Language: Towns Buildings, Construction, Oxford UP, New York 1977
- Alexander, Christopher, The timeless way of Building, Oxford UP, New York, 1979
- Atkinson, Robert and Bagenal, Hope – Theory and Elements of Architecture, Ernest Benn, London, 1926
- Norberg-Schulz, Christian, Existence, Space and Architecture, Studio Vista, London, 1971
- Norberg-Schulz, Christian, Genius Loci, Towards a phenomenology of architecture ,Rizolli, 1979
- Gutman, Robert, Architecture from outside in, Princeton Architecture Press, 2010
- Gutman, Robert, People and Buildings. New York: Basic Books, 1972.
Articles
Gutman, Robert
“A Sociologist Looks at Housing.” In Toward a National Urban Policy, edited by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 119–32. New York: Basic Books, 1970.*
“Use of Sociology in Design Practice.” In Proceedings of the Interprofessional Council on Environmental Design: Conference on Application of Behavioral Sciences to Environmental Design, 109–14. New York: American Society of Civil Engineers, 1971.with Barbara Westergaard.
“Building Evaluation, User Satisfaction, and Design.” In Designing for Human Behavior: Architecture and the Behavioral Sciences, edited by Jon T. Lang et al., 320–29.Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, 1974.*
“The Social Function of the Built Environment.” In The Mutual Interaction of People and Their Built Environment: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Amos Rapoport, 37–49. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton Publishers, 1976
*Brisbane, multiple exposure photo by Mi Zhang
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