Constructing “Social Architecture”: The Politics of Representing Practice

Abstract

In the context of ongoing economic and environmental crises, “social architecture” has gained traction as a description of those practices that seek to challenge the dominant professional model of capital-intensive, client-dependent architectural production. Approaching “social architecture” as a representation that contains crucial assumptions both about mainstream architectural practice and disparate strategies for its rejection, this paper draws on recent critical social science literature to analyse fieldwork with the Rural Studio, a design-build program in Alabama, USA. Exploring different understandings of “social architecture”—including as expressed by students, teachers, clients and community members—we suggest that the category is, in practice contexts, replete with tensions, rejections and uncertainties; coherence of intention or outcome can certainly not be assumed when architects attempt to deal with contradictions and crises emerging from other parts of capitalist society.