History of Art and Architecture: Class Matters - in Architecture, Art and Design

Abstract

Class matters – in Architecture, Art and DesignThe subject of this seminar is the relationship between architecture and social class.

Objective

The participants gain familiarity with the analysis terms of historical cultural sociology and can apply them to questions of architecture and urban research.

Content

Class matters – in architecture, art and design The subject of this seminar is the relationship between architecture and social class. Our inherited class reference determines our social architecture: how we relate to each other in a historically grown, hierarchically structured space, how we perceive the built world, how we intervene in it in a creative way and how we judge sensuality and beauty, all of this is strongly pre-structured and yet leaves nothing to be desired leeway open. We can't help what class we're born into, but we can understand, mediate—and maybe even change—the social reflexes and unconscious beliefs that arise out of this coincidence. This seminar offers a sociological, historical and aesthetic basis for this. • On the basis of theoretical texts, a number of questions are discussed: How is the racialization of the working class manifested in the history of cultural production? How are economic discrimination and privilege in the field of the arts related to normative gender categories? How do we make the big analytic terms our own when we write about class and architecture to connect with others? • Exercises on graphical representations of social strata. What is a spatial perspective considering the creativity of class habitus? How can we present the fragments of our perception, determined by class origin, as a whole without leveling or even condemning individual positions? How do we deal with the naturalized power of imagery's common sense when representing class issues in architecture? • Personal engagement with autobiographical photo material regarding the manifestation of the habitual, inherited lifestyle of a certain milieu or a certain class faction - or regarding the manifestation of the break with this heritage. Approaching the answer to the question: What makes the difference - or, how do I make the difference - between a narcissistic and an objectified architectural view of social space?

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