Buildings and their genotypes

Abstract

SUMMARY This chapter adapts the analytic method to building interiors, arguing that these are different in kind to settlement structure, and not simply the same type of structure at a smaller scale. The method shows how buildings can be analysed and compared in terms of how categories are arranged and related to each other, and also how a building works to interface the relation between the occupants and those who enter as visitors. Small and large examples of domestic space are examined to show in principle that spatial organisation is a function of the form of social solidarity – or the organising principles of social reproduction – in that society. Insides and outsides: the reversal effect A settlement, as we have seen, is at least an assemblage of primary cells, such that the exterior relations of those cells, by virtue of their spatial arrangement, generate and modulate a system of encounters. But this only accounts for a proportion of the total spatial order in the system, namely the proportion that lies between the boundary of the primary cell and the global structure of the settlement. No reference has yet been made to the internal structure of the primary cells, nor to how such structures would relate to the rest of the system. This section concerns the internal structures of cells: it introduces a method of syntactic analysis of interior structures, which we will call gamma-analysis; it develops a number of hypotheses about the relation between the principal syntactic parameters and social variables; and it offers a theory of the relations between the internal and external relations of the cell as part of a general theory of the social logic of space.