Anthropology for Architects

Social Relations and the Built Environment

Ray Lucas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474241519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

What can architects learn from anthropologists? This is the central question examined in Anthropology for Architects – a survey and exploration of the ideas which underpin the correspondence between contemporary social anthropology and architecture. The focus is on architecture as a design practice. Rather than presenting architectural artefacts as objects of the anthropological gaze, the book foregrounds the activities and aims of architects themselves. It looks at the choices that designers have to make – whether engaging with a site context, drawing, modelling, constructing, or making a post-occupancy analysis – and explores how an anthropological view can help inform design decisions. Each chapter is arranged around a familiar building type (including the studio, the home, markets, museums, and sacred spaces), in each case showing how anthropology can help designers to think about the social life of buildings at an appropriate scale: that of the individual life-worlds which make up the everyday lives of a building's users. Showing how anthropology offers an invaluable framework for thinking about complex, messy, real-world situations, the book argues that, ultimately, a truly anthropological architecture offers the potential for a more socially informed, engaged and sensitive architecture which responds more directly to people's needs. Based on the author's experience teaching as well as his research into anthropology by way of creative practice, this book will be directly applicable to students and researchers in architecture, landscape, urban design, and design anthropology, as well as to architectural professionals.

1

Introduction: Typologies of Social Relation

Introduction

In framing this book around typologies of social relation, the intention is to discuss building types and the theories derived from social anthropology best suited to understanding them. Some of these relationships are tightly intertwined, as in the case of dwelling or performance, whilst others are broader theories such as exchange or practice. The book’s intention is to present anthropology as directly relevant to architectural design and theory. In some instances, this gives further elaboration to tacit knowledge within architecture, the embedded knowledges passed down through studio cultures but rarely made explicit, whilst in other cases the theories will offer new perspectives on the ways we interpret architecture.

The broader intention of the book is to propose a productive relationship between architecture and anthropology, with the ideas developed through anthropology taken seriously as prompts for architectural design and theory. In short, architects and others can benefit greatly from reading ethnographic works and the theories derived from them. Most architects will not have the opportunity to engage directly in ethnographic research, so closely tied to anthropology as a discipline, but other opportunities present themselves: as Ingold reminds us, anthropology is not ethnography and vice versa. Architects can engage in alternative anthropological enquiries more suited to their skillset and resources. The discipline of anthropology is opening up beyond its well-established textual and lens-based practices of ethnography, and other ways of knowing are being developed. The key lesson is that one must not take the social world for granted: that the most everyday occurrences have complexity and variation, open to analysis and heavy with further implications for the worldview of participants.

Anthropology offers us the potential for an architecture of broader ecologies, where skills and practices provide insights into the ways people understand the world in a broad range of mutually inclusive ways. Anthropology offers architects ways of understanding materials and their life stories; economies and their networks of trust and obligation; how conservation strategies can be understood through museum studies and the critique of the collection; how practices of maintenance define ideas of cleanliness and the concept of dwelling as a perpetually unfinished project; and the co-production of people with their environments, how roles are performed in both dramatic and religious contexts as well as everyday encounters. The architectural implications of this are broad, suggesting the architectural humanities might turn their eye away from both the canon of Western antiquity and the othering practices of vernacular architecture, and towards understanding the full range of our deliberate environmental adaptations that might be considered as architectural.

Architecture and the lifeworld

Anthropology is a well-established and defined discipline in which a concern for the social and cultural lifeworlds of people is described. This concern with being human is central to the discipline and lies at the root of the possible collaboration between the disciplines of architecture and anthropology.

The lifeworld is a fundamental concept when considering how architecture and anthropology inform one another. This concept allows anthropologists to consider the intermingled nature of people with their environment: context in this case is inextricable from being. Conventionally, this is presented by the anthropologist as a series of encounters with people who live their lives in a way which is different to the anthropologist themselves: this space of otherness is problematic, but introduces a useful critical distance to the discussion. As such, anthropologists often work away from their homes.¹

Architecture deals with people and their lifeworlds in a different way, seeing the facts of our everyday lives as the raw material from which new possibilities can be wrought. A more detailed and fine-grained understanding of the facts of these lifeworlds, in all of their diversity, offers the potential for accommodating (in both senses of the word) the lives of people in a more nuanced and intelligent fashion. The potential is for a more socially informed and engaged architecture to emerge from a deeper understanding of what it means to dwell in space. Anthropologist Michael Jackson (2013) considers his preference for the term lifeworld:

If I prefer the term ‘lifeworld’ to ‘culture’ or ‘society’, it is because I want to capture this sense of a social field as a force field (kraftfeld), a constellation of both ideas and passions, moral norms and ethical dilemmas, the tried and true as well as the unprecedented, a field charged with vitality and animated by struggle. (Jackson, 2013:7)

By eschewing categories such as ‘culture’, the lifeworld avoids some of the assumptions of a bounded social group sedimented within the term. Whist not perfect in itself, it does assist us in thinking of how concepts of the world are bound up in individuals and how they live their lives within it. One of the things anthropology excels at as a discipline is the discussion of knowledge and its production. Anthropology challenges structures of knowledge based on conventional power relations, such as patriarchal, imperialist, academic or capitalist constructs, and gives equal weight to knowledge possessed by other groups and won through other ways of knowing and understanding the world. These challenges to the conventional structures allow for a more holistic understanding of the many ways in which it is possible to be human, to dwell within the world and to construct a coherent lifeworld. In order to do this, anthropological approaches ask us to understand where we ourselves come from and to make fewer assumptions about the world around us. Living is, therefore, to produce working knowledge of the world.

It is this principle of observing, asking, participating and questioning the world rather than walking into a context, situation or place knowing everything about it that is most valuable to the process of architectural design: how can we mobilize the methodologies and practices of anthropology in order to situate our design practices more carefully, responding more fully to the needs of people and the wider environment.

The importance of the lifeworld concept is that it suggests we cannot understand elements of social life in isolation, but must have a holistic approach which considers the following at a range of scales from micro- to macro-scale: environmental conditions, historical legacy, politics, ecology, economics and many more aspects. Even if the eventual account focuses on a small set of examples, these are chosen as representative of the entire context, highlighting its most significant features which demonstrate an alternative way of living.

This introductory chapter discusses some key methodologies in anthropology, suggesting where these cross over with architectural concerns and practices. This allows the body of the book to focus on specific examples and theories developed by way of anthropology. By engaging with participant participant-observation, auto-ethnography, and methodological atheism/philistinism visual anthropology and design anthropology amongst other methods, one can begin to draw parallels with not only architectural theory, but also aspects of the design process itself from specification of a programme, context analysis, spatial and formal design, materiality, construction process and post-occupancy analysis.

A range of practices already exist in architecture in order to integrate elements of the social more fully into architectural design processes. The results of these as practices have specific aims, often aimed at particular types of community, such as vulnerable or disenfranchized groups. User-centred design, co-design, people–environment studies, environmental psychology, space syntax, and other systems and processes have sought to reduce the distance between architects and the people they are working for, but are designed to address particular aspects of socially responsible design. My intention is not to be dismissive of these important and evolving practices, but rather to add further nuance to conventional design practice rather than suggest additional work packages of activity and enquiry.

Anthropology for Architects offers a substantially different approach, one which places the architect as someone who draws, models, designs and hopefully builds culture; intervenes upon and provides context, where anthropologists classically write it.²

The introduction concludes by summarizing the approach taken by subsequent chapters, which are arranged according to site typologies and their associated anthropological interpretations.

The anthropology of architecture

In situating the intentions of this book, it is helpful to consider some of the possibilities in sketching a relationship between architecture and anthropology. This is often discussed in terms of the distinction between anthropologies ‘of’ architecture and anthropological architecture or architectural anthropology. The anthropology of architecture often takes architecture and its practices as the unit of analysis, studying the agency of designers, clients or users and their buildings through participant-observation with the aim of understanding the complex network of social interactions which contributes towards the construction of our built environment. Similar approaches exist within the study of vernacular architecture, where building conventions alternative to the dominant paradigm are charted.³ The potential of an anthropology with architecture suggests that the disciplines work closely with one another in order to produce a new manner of understanding, exploring a wider range of methodologies and approaches in order to produce a new social and spatial context.

This book presents a survey of the theory that underpins the strong correspondence between contemporary social anthropology and architecture with the aim of moving towards an anthropological architecture or architectural anthropology. As the study of people and their lifeworlds, anthropology has a great deal to contribute to architecture, with implications for long-held assumptions, reinforcing and elaborating as much as it contradicts and complicates. The central contention is that this is good for both disciplines and lies at the root of any cross-disciplinarity. Anthropologists often seek to engage with architects and academics in architecture, a shared interest in dwelling and how we make places in the world makes for fruitful discussion.

Above all, the book is to be read from the point of view of what assists us with the practice of architectural design. This idea of practice is broadly sketched to include more than the professional and commercial office familiar to bodies such as the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) or American Institute of Architects (AIA), but rather to consider the practices which constitute the built environment at the scale of the building. The more explicitly urban scale presents another set of problems of course and lies outside the scope of this study.

The initial research question is: what can architects learn from anthropologists?⁴ This swiftly developed to ask how architects can integrate anthropological thinking and processes into their work.

As architects, reading ethnographic accounts written by anthropologists gives us a window into other peoples’ worlds: precisely the aim of anthropology. This is, of course, highly specific and problematic when we attempt to mobilize this directly into designing. Where anthropology can contribute, however, is at the level of theoretical structures: the scaffolding for thinking about complex, messy, real-world situations – more appropriate than the fashion for philosophy with its essentially reductive approach and abstraction of problems. Anthropology can also offer methodological approaches: not only the fully engaged ethnography, which takes a great deal of time, but other ways of knowing are certainly possible.

The book seeks to demonstrate the applicability of anthropological thought and ethnographic practices to both the understanding and the design of the built environment. This is fraught with as many difficulties as correspondences, of course, and the fundamental nature of architecture and design as broadly interventionist is the most problematic of all. Anthropology is conventionally understood as an observational practice – one which stresses engagement and participation, but methodologically atheist, apolitical and philistine: taking a position apart from our own desire to interpret through our existing belief and value systems. The notion of taking these observations and making fundamental changes to the environment in question is often anathema to anthropologists, where it is second nature to designers such as architects and other designers.

Our definitions of architecture must change to encapsulate the social sphere in a more holistic manner. In order to do this, the lessons of disciplines such as anthropology must be attended to, their practices understood and adopted as appropriate, allowing architecture to enter into informed collaboration with its practitioners. Exploiting existing disciplinary intersections relies upon collaboration with contemporary practitioners rather than solely upon our reflections on the writings of anthropologists. Our alternative reading of these theories as designers informs this collaboration significantly: we approach the material differently as architects. One way to discuss this is to consider what a parallel discipline of Architectural Anthropology might look like, borrowing from the recent and continuing development of Design Anthropology with its focus on industrial and product design but with the aims and needs of architecture kept in mind. Design anthropology’s methods use provocation and prototypes in a way that architecture cannot: different concepts of scale are a significant issue in this, where the size of a building often precludes building a prototype leading to adaptation and conversion after construction to resolve issues, whereas the scale of industrialized production requires product design to have a high degree of refinement before committing to a run of thousands of units. Despite a clear kinship between architecture and the other design disciplines, the terms of engagement between architecture and anthropology are distinct from those found in design anthropology, so it is mainly the process of forming this sub-discipline and how it established its methodologies that is of interest to us here.

The potential is a more socially informed, engaged and sensitive architecture which responds more directly to people’s needs. It is crucial for architecture to move away from the technocratic models developed during Modernism, but which remain persistent today – and perhaps more efficiently enacted with automation in the design and construction processes. The profession can adopt alternative models of practice which surpass the demands and economics of professional and commercial practices in order to produce a more holistic built environment.

The enormous potential for anthropologically informed architecture lies in a reassertion of what architecture is as a discipline. It is more than merely economic activity, building what is determined by market forces in a manner determined by vested interests. Instead, we must build resilient and sustainable architecture fit for people to truly dwell in. This indicates that an approach towards anthropology needs to be embedded within architecture rather than as an add-on or sub-discipline. Care needs to be taken in the manner of architecture’s adoption of anthropological thinking, particularly around the idea of making use of traditional or vernacular knowledge. Whilst such recoveries of historical precedent can be appropriate, they are only ever one option for architectural design: it is not the role of a recast architecture to police what is acceptable and what is not, whether that is as a form of cultural appropriation by learning from other cultures or the denial of modernity and its technologies. These options must remain on the table, articulated in new ways by an architectural anthropology.

There are opportunities for close collaboration between architecture and anthropology, and, it can be argued, a need for it. Buildings fail or succeed based on social conditions as often as material failures: yet the questions are rarely framed around the social status of the building, such a massive investment of time, materials and other resources. More than a curiosity or study in the collaboration possible between two cognate disciplines, this book suggests that the social aspect of architecture is crucial rather than luxurious, pragmatic rather than philosophical.

A brief history of anthropology

It’s helpful to have a little context to the discipline of anthropolog...