Architecture and the Housing Question

Can Bilsel, Juliana Maxim, Can Bilsel, Juliana Maxim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781351182942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Architecture and the Housing Question examines how the design and provision of housing around the world have become central both to competing political projects and to the architecture profession.

How have architects acting as housing experts helped alleviate or enforce class, race, and gender inequality? What are the disciplinary implications of taking on shelter for the multitude as an architectural assignment and responsibility? The book features essays in the historiography of architecture and the housing question, and a collection of historical case studies from Belgium, China, France, Ghana, the Netherlands, Kenya, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and the United States. The thematic organization of the collection, interrogating housing expertise, the state apparatus, segregation and colonialism, highlights the methodological questions that underpin its international outlook.

The book will appeal to students and scholars in architecture, architectural history, theory, and urban studies.

Part I Whose History? Rethinking the Expert

1 Housing and History The Case of the Specific Intellectual

Reinhold Martin

DOI: 10.4324/9781351182966-3

Honored as I am by the invitation to address the crucial question posed by this collection of chapters,¹ I join some likely readers in saying: I am not a housing expert. This is not to justify the lacunae in my account, or to pre-empt inevitable objections, but rather to qualify certain fragments of intellectual history in hopes of forcing together two great lineages of critical thought as they pertain to our subject. I say this also to point out the preponderance of duly certified expertise that has attached itself over the years to what this book calls, after Friedrich Engels, the “housing question.” Housing, as a subset of architecture and urbanism, a social policy, an economic nexus, a tangle of infrastructure, a commodity, a locus of desire and power, a home, a space, a luxury, a site of exploitation, a prison, or a utilitarian response to utilitarian concerns, tends to call forth expertise, and to demand a scientist’s—or a social scientist’s—trained eye and cautious hand whenever its vagaries, dilemmas, or histories are discussed. Expertise of this sort populates today’s joint centers, institutes, think tanks, advocacy organizations, NGOs, foundations, and—yes—academic departments and academic publications. Historically, the deployment of such expertise in the great metropolises of Europe, and eventually throughout the world, bears some relation to what has been called the “rule of experts” in Europe’s colonies and, especially, in its later articulation among the community of nation-states.² Just as with today’s globalized histories, we cannot simply add new contexts or cases to the current hegemony; instead, we must examine that hegemony’s organizing principles, and gather counterhegemonic forces from within it, as well as from without.

Sometime during the middle of the twentieth century, a different kind of expert also emerged. It may seem a monumental non sequitur to name the dissident nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in this regard. But perhaps you recognize the reference: Oppenheimer is the rather surprising example given by Michel Foucault in response to a question posed to him in 1977 regarding the role of the intellectual in everyday political struggles. In a written response to his Italian interviewers, Foucault proposes replacing the intellectual as the custodian of universal reason (he likely had in mind his compatriot, Jean-Paul Sartre) with the “specific” intellectual, a strategist who deploys expert technical knowledge in an oppositional fashion at carefully chosen points within the dominant system. As Foucault says of the transition:

Intellectuals have got used to working, not in the modality of the ‘universal,’… but within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and sexual relations).³

To illustrate he cites Oppenheimer, a leader in the wartime Manhattan Project who later vocally advocated arms control and opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and suffered personally and professionally as a result. Foucault argues that expert dissidence within a specific sector of knowledge, and particularly techno-scientific knowledge, can reach well beyond that sector, provided that it connects its specific concerns to a society’s “regime” or “apparatus” of truth, including the power relations thus entailed. Hence, for Foucault, “it is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of ‘science’ and ‘ideology,’ [he is referring to Louis Althusser, and to Marxism in general] but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power.’”⁴

And so we have our conundrum: as posed by Marx’s colleague Engels in 1872, the “housing question” comes down, as we shall see, to a critique of housing as ideology. This critique pertains equally to utopian socialists and to the bourgeoisie, against whose daydreams Engels asserts the universality of the class struggle and of scientific Marxism. About a hundred years later, rejecting that very same universality, Foucault insinuates housing among the local, strategic sites in which, as he says, specific intellectuals gain “a much more immediate and concrete awareness of struggles.”⁵ We will deal with this concrete awareness in due course. For now, I want to ask: in what ways and at what levels might these two quite distinct and possibly antagonistic positions, one occupied here by Engels (and by extension, by Marx) and the other by Foucault, be reconciled, if at all?

If at all, the “housing question” may be as good a place as any to start. But first, we must establish what that question is. Even before which, we must ask: what, after all, is housing? Surely among other things, housing is an architectural type, a species of building that branches into a variety of subspecies and groupings: perimeter blocks, high-rises, low-rises, Siedlungen, planned-unit developments, single-family houses, projects, gated enclaves, slums, favelas, barrios, squats, condominiums, cooperatives, and so on. Nonetheless, housing seems to be a very special building type that bears the burdens of society as a whole; in it appear all the antagonisms, the hopes, the failures, and the contradictions of modernity. It is exactly this burden, this apparent proximity to history that confers upon housing its aura of specialization. Since the European nineteenth century, a seemingly direct connection to a society’s aspirations, to its contradictions as well as to its productive forces, has qualified housing as a distinct object of expert study and administration, alongside (not coincidentally) those other building types studied by Foucault: prisons, asylums, and hospitals. What is more, and closer to the frame around our book, in the realm of architectural historiography, where meaning is generally taken to be multivalent, the cultural meaning of any given housing project is quite readily treated as functionally and symbolically transparent to its social world.

I have in mind first of all the tendency, visible in architectural scholarship since the 1970s, to treat the history of housing as principally a form of social history, as in the ground-breaking work of Gwendolyn Wright, Dolores Hayden, Dianne Harris, and numerous others;⁶ or, barring that, to treat the architecture of housing as ideological projection, rather than as a productive intervention in its own right. In contrast, there does exist a different, minor historiography from within which, I believe, the housing question may also be posed. This, more properly architectural approach treats buildings and their discursive surround less as documents of social processes or as ideological datum lines or archetypes than as technical infrastructures whose workings have been buried under layers of over-interpretation. Provisionally, we can call such an approach archaeological. With respect to housing, among its most able practitioners, and one whose work has sometimes been identified with Foucault’s, has been the historian Robin Evans.

Mainly, I have in mind a short, influential article published by Evans in Architectural Design in 1978 titled “Figures, Doors and Passages.”⁷ There, Evans locates a shift in European domestic life that corresponds to the gradual disappearance of rooms arranged en suite or enfilade, with multiple doors making multiple connections, and the emergence of the corridor as a planimetric and spatial device, with one door per room. Evans explores his floor plans with customary finesse. His conclusion, however, is disarmingly simple: that the isolation of rooms or apartments along a corridor has, during the course of four or five centuries, led to an impoverishment of the sensual, convivial sociability, or “carnality,” that he finds built into plans like that of Raphael’s Villa Madama with its interlocking rooms, begun in 1518, and in paintings of human figures—they tend to be holy families or fragments thereof—like Raphael’s Madonna dell’ Impannata (1514), with bodies intertwined, almost skin to skin.

Unfortunately, this thinly disguised postmodernist critique of functionalism undermines the originality of Evans’s approach. Strip it away and you get what matters most: a pre-typological encounter with the architectural thing—let’s call it here a house—that takes a given pile of documents (floor plans, paintings, texts, as well as the thing itself) as literally as possible, and attempts to make sense of them in the manner of a detective who assumes that something has happened but is not sure what. Although his architectural examples are mainly aristocratic or bourgeois, Evans makes clear that he is really writing a history of modernist mass housing. He trains us to see changes in an actual rather than a projected social world, arranged enfilade or lined up along a corridor, uncovered by painstaking analysis. Without Evans actually saying it, we recognize that the most basic unit of that social world is the family, holy or otherwise. The family is the figure—the social body—that is transformed by the rearrangement of doors and passages that “Figures, Doors and Passages” discovers. Which is not to say that Evans has discovered social reality inside the house. It is to say that he has discovered the entrails of the housing apparatus.

Foucault used the term dispositif, which is usually (if controversially) translated as “apparatus,” throughout his career. But by his own admission he only began to favor it rather late, during the 1970s, in the midst of a slow but decisive shift away from the early emphasis on language in works like Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things) and The Archaeology of Knowledge. The book that has exercised the most influence on architectural discourse, Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et Punir), from 1975, is the one that marks this turn most clearly. There Foucault shows Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon to be an apparatus of sorts, but only insofar as it is linked, through a series of relays, to a wider and more diffuse set of disciplinary practices and procedures that encompass education, medicine, and other realms of social reproduction. These all amount to what Foucault calls “the carceral,” or “carcerality,” in which a dispersion of texts mixes with physical cellularity, panoptic perspective, light and shadow, and spatial confinement. The carceral, then, consists in an irreducible materiality that, although present, was less active in Foucault’s earlier works.

In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, published one year later (1976) and titled La Volonté de Savoir, or The Will to Know, Foucault refers to sexuality, too, as an “apparatus” that, beginning in the eighteenth century, Western societies deployed, or rather “superimposed” on the networks of familial alliance—kinship, names, possessions, and the like—that defined the older, classical order. Foucault’s purpose is to challenge what he calls the “repressive hypothesis,” which holds that bourgeois modernity placed human sexuality under a series of prohibitions or prudish silences associated with juridical power. Architecturally, we can recognize a version of this “repressive hypothesis” in Evans’s claim that the modern house calcified or repressed planimetric “carnality.” Foucault argues the contrary: that the new power nexus was productive rather than repressive, and that, rather than censorship, “when one looks back over these last three centuries… around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable discursive explosion.”⁸ This explosion comes to light when we understand sexuality as something that has been deployed in a strategic fashion, as “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population.”⁹ What Foucault calls the “family cell” is its main site, which suggests that the housing question may not be far behind.

In an interview with a group of psychoanalysts published in 1977, Foucault is more precise about what he means by the dispositif (or apparatus) of sexuality, and by a dispositif in general. He says:

What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.

Foucault explains further that he aims to specify particular relations among particular, heterogeneous elements that form a strategic response to an “urgent need,” as in the assimilation of an uprooted “floating population” under a mercantile economy and then under industrial capitalism, into regimes of “madness, mental illness, and neurosis.”¹⁰

Although Foucault generally said little about housing, a bit further on in the same interview, in response to a challenge that his approach downplays the agency of human subjects in favor of anonymous strategies, he responds with the example, during the late 1820s, of “definite strategies for fixing the workers in the first heavy industries at their work-places.” Factory towns like Mulhouse, in northeastern France, saw the deployment of various tactics: “pressuring people to marry, providing housing, building cités ouvrières, practicing that sly system of credit slavery that Marx talks about, consisting in enforcing advance payment in rents while wages are paid only at the end of the month.”¹¹ Out of this complex of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Architecture and the Housing Question: Specific Histories
• Part I Whose History? Rethinking the Expert
• Part II Housing and the State
• Part III (De)Segregation and the Housing Enclave
• Part IV Land, Property, Colonization
• Index