Framing Places Framing Places investigates how the built forms of architecture and urban design act as mediators of social practices of power. It is an account of how our lives are ‘framed’ within the clusters of rooms, buildings, streets and cities that we inhabit. Kim Dovey contends that the nature of architecture and urban design, their silent framings of everyday life, lend them to practices of coercion and seduction, thus legitimizing authority and control over civilian populations. The book draws from a broad range of social theories and deploys three primary analyses of built form, namely the analysis of spatial structure, the interpretation of constructed meanings and the interpretation of lived experience. These approaches, to program, text and place, are woven together through a series of narratives on specific places and types of built environment, such as Berlin, Beijing and Canberra. Kim Dovey is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne. He has published and broadcast widely on issues of meaning, place and ideology in architecture and urban design. THE ARCHITEXT SERIES Edited by Thomas A.Markus and Anthony D.King Architectural discourse has traditionally represented buildings as art objects or technical objects. Yet buildings are also social objects in that they are invested with social meaning and shape social relations. Recognising these assumptions, the Architext series aims to bring together recent debates in social and cultural theory and the study and practice of architecture and urban design. Critical, comparative and interdisciplinary, the books in the series will, by theorising architecture, bring the space of the built environment centrally into the social sciences and humanities, as well as bringing the theoretical insights of the latter into the discourses of architecture and urban design. Particular attention will be paid to issues of gender, race, sexuality and the body, to questions of identity and place, to the cultural politics of representation and language, and to the global and postcolonial contexts in which these are addressed. Forthcoming titles: Gender Space Architecture An interdisciplinary reader edited by Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden Moderns Abroad Italian colonialism and construction Mia Fuller Architectural Production and Policy of the SS, 1936–1945 Paul Jaskot Architecture and Language Thomas A.Markus and Deborah Cameron Spaces of Global Cultures Anthony D.King Kim Dovey Framing Places Mediating power in built form London and New York First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1999 Kim Dovey All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Dovey, Kim. Framing places: mediating power in built form/Kim Dovey. p. cm. —(Architext series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Architecture and society. 2. Space (Architecture) I. Title. II. Series. NA2543.S6D69 1999 98–35335 720´.1´03–dc21 CIP ISBN 0-415-17367-1 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-17368-X (pbk) ISBN 0-203-01757-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20652-5 (Glassbook Format) FOR SANDY Contents List of figures x Preface xii Acknowledgements xiv INTRODUCTION 1 PART I: FRAMES OF THEORIZATION 7 1 POWER 9 Defining power 9 Forms of power ‘over’ 10 Mediating ‘power over’ 15 2 PROGRAM 17 Structuration, habitus and gaze 17 Spatial analysis 20 3 TEXT 29 Myth 29 Deconstruction 30 The meaning market 34 Taste and symbolic capital 35 4 PLACE 39 Phenomenology 39 Dwelling 41 Ideology 45 Local/global 47 Action and representation 50 vii Contents PART II: CENTRES OF POWER 53 5 TAKE YOUR BREATH AWAY 55 Community architecture 57 Blood and soil 58 Slippery surfaces 59 Germania 61 Bunker and wall 64 Styles of tyranny 67 6 HIDDEN POWER 71 Forbidden space 72 Liberated space 79 Forbidden space II 82 7 TRACES OF DEMOCRACY 87 Choir boys 87 Lobbying 89 A house divided 93 House as hill 97 Coda: choir boys II 102 PART III: GLOBAL TYPES 105 8 TALL STOREYS 107 Distinction 108 Place 112 Promenade 114 Prospect/refuge 115 Creative destruction 118 9 INVERTED CITY 123 Arcade and mall 123 Syntactic inversion 125 Semantic inversion 130 Pseudo-community 133 Resistance 135 10 DOMESTIC DREAMING 139 Model and home 139 Genotype 141 Status and authenticity 147 Sanctuary 150 PART IV: LOCALITIES 155 11 ON THE MOVE 157 Melbourne 157 viii Contents Global/local 158 Crown and state 161 On the move 164 Saluting the new order 166 12 RUST AND IRONY 171 Rottnest Island 171 AFTERWORD 181 13 LIBERTY AND COMPLICITY 183 Authorizing madness 184 Deconstructing law 187 Incising memories 188 Constructing law 190 Notes 195 References 200 Index 213 ix Figures 2.1 Primary syntactic relations 21 2.2 Versailles Palace c. 1701 23 2.3 Versailles Palace c. 1701: spatial analysis 23 5.1 Reichstag district: Speer Plan and east-west border superimposed 56 5.2 Berlin Chancellery and Bunker 60 5.3 Berlin Chancellery: spatial analysis 60 5.4 Hall of Marble: slippery surfaces for diplomats 62 5.5 Proposed north-south axis: ‘things to take your breath away’ 63 5.6 Proposed hall from Brandenberg Gate: belittling the past 65 5.7 Chancellery Bunker: spatial analysis 66 6.1 Ceremonial axis and Forbidden City, Beijing (Qing Period) 73 6.2 The Forbidden City: spatial analysis (Qing Period) 74 6.3 Hall of Mental Cultivation: screening power 77 6.4 Central Beijing and Tiananmen Square 78 6.5 Goddess of Democracy and Tiananmen Gate, June 1989 84 7.1 Houses of Parliament, Westminster 88 7.2 Houses of Parliament, Westminster: spatial analysis 89 7.3 Commons Chamber, Westminster, 1858 90 7.4 Provisional Parliament House, Canberra 91 7.5 Provisional Parliament House, Canberra: spatial analysis 91 7.6 New Parliament House, Canberra 95 7.7 Ministerial offices: required spatial program 96 7.8 Parliament House, Canberra 97 7.9 Parliament House, Canberra: spatial analysis of public areas 98 7.10 Forecourt and entrance: Aboriginality and civilization 99 7.11 Members’ Hall: the archetypal centre 100 8.1 Bourke Place: genius and distinction 109 8.2 101 Collins Street: standing alone 110 8.3 Capita development: prominence/dominance 111 x Figures 8.4 333 Collins Street: harmony and history 113 8.5 Whitehall building: slippery surfaces 114 8.6 Four scenes from the corporate tower 116 9.1 Beverly Centre, Los Angeles 124 9.2 Blok M Plaza, Jakarta 124 9.3 The mall genotype 126 9.4 Three typical malls: spatial structure 127 9.5 ‘Rome’, Metro Centre, Newcastle 131 9.6 Doncaster Shopping Town, Melbourne: decentring the centre 131 9.7 Metro Centre, Newcastle: community of consumption 134 10.1 Laguna Niguel, southern California: detached dreaming 140 10.2 The ‘Da Vinci’: northern California 142 10.3 The ‘Da Vinci’: spatial analysis 142 10.4 ‘The Chenin’: Western Australia 144 10.5 ‘The Chenin’: spatial analysis 145 10.6 Provinces of meaning 149 10.7 ‘Clos Du Lac’: northern California 151 10.8 ‘Siena’: southern California 151 11.1 First Crown Casino, Melbourne: crown and state 162 11.2 Melbourne street signs: government says gamble 162 11.3 Crown Casino, Melbourne: explosions of joy 165 11.4 Melbourne Exhibition Centre: saluting the new order 165 11.5 City Link entry icon: ‘triumph’ of a new order 168 11.6 Melbourne Docklands: bridge icon and proposed tower 168 11.7 Iconography and ideology 169 11.8 Forbidden art 169 12.1 Rottnest Island settlement plan 173 12.2 Aboriginal prisoners in the Quod, c. 1883 173 12.3 Thomson’s Bay and sea-wall 174 12.4 Interior of Quod 178 12.5 Quod entrance: the inverted prison 178 13.1 Parc de la Villette: authorizing madness 185 13.2 Loyola Law School: deconstructing law 187 13.3 Vietnam Veterans Memorial: incising memory 191 13.4 Uluru/Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre: constructing law 191 xi Preface I have long been fascinated by the meanings and mysteries of places—rooms, buildings, streets and cities; typical and exceptional; wonderful and awful. This book is driven by a belief in the potency of places to touch our lives—in the best and the worst of ways. Such an interest does not fit neatly into the discipline of architecture, which is my background, nor of urban design, urban planning or landscape architecture. Instead it entails a slippage between categories, a crossing of boundaries as regularly as we do in everyday life. I write from a context of teaching architecture and urban design in a university and therefore with a view to the task of designing places. It has always seemed to me that this task is, in a small way, to literally ‘change the world’. But whose interests prevail in this practice of ‘changing the world’? What do justice, democracy or liberation mean with regard to built form? What does ‘change’ mean in a world that is transforming in a bewildering range of ways which often seem both destructive and inevitable. The task of changing the world requires more than a capacity to climb on, or under, the Juggernaut. Architecture and urban design are the most contradictory of practices— torn between a radically optimistic belief in the creation of the new, and a conservative acceptance of the prevailing order.