Building

Giorgio de Chirico, ‘The Seer’ (1915)

The building effects a brutal condensation of social relationships, as I shall show later in more (economic and political) detail. It embraces, and in so doing reduces, the whole paradigm of space: space as domi­nation/appropriation (where it emphasizes technological domination); space as work and product (where it emphasizes the product); and space as immediacy and mediation (where it emphasizes mediations and mediators, from technical matériel to the financial ‘promoters’ of construction projects). It reduces significant oppositions and values, among them pleasure and suffering, use, and labour. Such condensation of society’s attributes is easily discernible in the style of administrative buildings from the nineteenth century on, in schools, railway stations, town halls, police stations or ministries. But displacement is every bit as important here as condensation; witness the predominance of ‘amenities’, which are a mechanism for the localization and ‘punctualization’ of activities, including leisure pursuits, sports and games. These are thus concentrated in specially equipped ‘spaces’ which are as clearly demarcated as factories in the world of work. They supply ‘syntagmatic’ links between activities within social spaces as such – that is, within a space which is determined economically by capital, dominated socially by the bourgeoisie, and ruled politically by the state. – Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Production of Space’, p227.