Unifying and Decomposing Building Types: How to Analyze the Change of Use of Sacred Buildings
- PDF / 472,716 Bytes
- 20 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 51 Downloads / 204 Views
Unifying and Decomposing Building Types: How to Analyze the Change of Use of Sacred Buildings Michael Guggenheim
Published online: 20 October 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract What do churches do? What do mosques do? Constructivist sociology has usually argued that buildings do not do anything, but are enacted by users. Conversely, actor-network theory has interpreted buildings as actants that are stabilized by architect-controlled networks. In this article, I argue for a differential theory of objects, which conceives of the specific agency of different kinds of objects. Buildings can be understood as mutable immobiles, objects that are immovable and thus likely to be changed on the level of their social classification, or in architectural terms, their building type. Drawing on fieldwork in and around Berlin, Germany, I use two different kinds of change of use to show the agency of buildings as mutable immobiles. First, I show that in the case of churches that are changed to other uses, the church attempts to discursively associate the buildings to religion primarily and then uses large scale interventions to preserve the unity of the church if change of use cannot be avoided. Second, I show that in the case of factories that are turned into mosques, very small material interventions with furniture change the buildings. Keywords Actor-network theory . Buildings . Architecture . Churches . Mosques . Sacred buildings . Technology . Change of use . Building conversion Let us start with two ethnographic vignettes, set in two different buildings in and around Berlin, Germany: First, a large unadorned, but majestic room, with very high ceilings and a strange, curved structure in the centre that looks like a ship cut in half lengthwise. A group of tourists enters, quietly. They sit down on a row of benches. Suddenly, what appears to be the tour guide gives a sign, and they all start to sing a religious song that fills the room. Later, I go up some stairs into the ship to speak with a librarian who works there. She complains about the difficult working conditions and the noise that too often disturbs her work. The library is mostly empty since it moved into the church, she complains, because the library is now hidden away from the community. Second, we are in a much smaller square utilitarian room with bare walls and a kind of podium in it. Groups of people mingle and chat, children run around. Some walk over M. Guggenheim (*) Department of Sociology Goldsmiths, University of London New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK e-mail: [email protected] URL: http://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/guggenheim URL: http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/MichaelGuggenheim
446
Qual Sociol (2013) 36:445–464
to a stall with nuts, sweets and other foods. With a squeaking noise from loudspeakers, the group separates and the men disappear through one door, while the women disappear through another door in an adjacent room, where they kneel down and pray together. The first of these buildings is a church, or rather a f
Data Loading...
