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16ARCHITECTURE AND MODERNISM

Victor Buchli

Of all the areas encompassed by MaterialCulture Studies, the area of architecturalModernism is peculiarly underdeveloped. Thatthis should be so is remarkable considering theimportance of anthropological and archaeologi-cal studies for the development of Modernismin general. From the very beginnings of thesedisciplines Ethnography and Archaeology’spre-occupation with built forms went hand inhand with the development of modern architec-tural principles and the eventual developmentof Modernism in the twentieth century. If wethink of the origins of modernity within archi-tecture as the historical move away from vernac-ular traditions and the emergence of architectureas seen in the Renaissance then it becomesevident how both the ethnographic ‘other’ andthe archaeological ‘past’ served as a means ofrenewal, critique and development of modernnon-traditional forms. The Renaissance develop-ment of classical studies with its concern for thearchitectural forms of classical antiquity usedearly archaeological works as a means for creat-ing and grasping eternal architectural principles.As late as the eighteenth century archaeologistsand architects were almost indistinguishablefrom one another because of their preoccupationwith the discovery of classical forms to inspiremodern architectural work. Archaeologists wereyet to be properly distinguished from architectsin terms of their classical studies as they were inthe nineteenth century. Archaeology basicallyserved as the means to understand architectureand develop it as part of the modernizing enter-prises of Enlightenment era thought, the spec-tacular example of Pompeii on the developmentof both architecture and neo-classicism is an

excellent instance as to how the two fields – laterdistinguished from one another – worked intandem – flip sides of the same endeavour, themodernization of architectural forms throughthe study of classical antiquity.

Ethnography as well served the eighteenth-century imagination also as a source of inspi-ration and reform for the creation of newarchitectural forms with which to realize thesocial goals of European Enlightenment erathought. The works of Abbé Laugier, and hisinvestigations of the primitive hut, saw in thearchaeological ‘past’ of classical antiquity, aswell as in the ethnographic ‘other’, the originsof pure elemental universal forms with which toinvigorate the development of Enlightenmentera architecture. The sources of modernity wereseen in the distant archaeological ‘past’ and theethnographic ‘other’. The hut of the ‘noblesavage’ was instructive for these Enlightenmentera endeavours, as was the burgeoning body ofremains with the development of classicalantiquity. These investigations had a socialreformist impulse as a means with which toquestion the present by positing alternative‘pasts’ whereby one could then imagine alterna-tive ‘futures’.

The first proper systematic study of architec-tural forms from within an anthropologicalcontext was arguably Morgan’s magisterialAncient Society (1877). However, a happenstanceof publication prevented Morgan’s AncientSociety to be published with its architecturalstudy, thereby prefiguring the separation ofstudies of architecture from other human activ-ities in the study of human societies that wasthe focus of Ancient Society. The unilineal

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evolutionary framework of the work evincedthe nineteenth-century preoccupation with the‘philosophy of progress’ fuelled by a historicallydetermined impetus for inexorable progress. AsMorgan stated: ‘Every institution of mankindwhich attained permanence will be foundlinked with a perpetual want’ (quoted in PaulBohannan 1965: xvi). This preoccupation withsocial change or rather social evolution in nine-teenth-century terms highlighted the emergingModernist impulse that had preoccupiedarchaeological and anthropological studies ofarchitecture. The enterprise was truly at its roota Modernist one, and as such it is all the morepeculiar that the study of Modernism and archi-tectural form has barely held the interest ofanthropologists.

The negation of this connection is even moreevident in the tradition of architecturalModernism itself and the modern movementin the architecture of the twentieth century.This movement had an even more emphatic ifnot suppressed preoccupation with prehistoryand ethnography as a means of further mod-ernizing classical forms as represented bythe Vitruvian orders. Vogt’s work on the pre-eminent Modernist architect of the twentiethcentury, Le Corbusier, demonstrates this linkbetween prehistory and Modernism with hisanalysis of the discovery of the early LakeDwelling cultures found in the late nineteenthcentury on the shores of Lake Zurich inSwitzerland (Vogt 1998) and its influence on LeCorbusier’s Modernism. Prehistory, whilesimultaneously fuelling the nationalist imagi-nary with a history and material cultureof autochthonous forms, similarly offeredan opportunity for the discovery of ‘pure’ anduniversal forms in the tradition of the AbbéLaugier. As the archaeological discoveries ofthe Lake Dwellers emerged and were incorpo-rated into the Swiss national curriculum toforge a common sense of Swiss origins for anotherwise ethnically and linguistically divideddemocracy, it also served as inspiration for theconsideration of alternative architectural formsand later as alternative social forms that would‘correct’ the classical inheritance. The casein point is Le Corbusier’s own innovation ofthe pilotis, which, while harkening back to theclassical Vitruvian orders, surpassed them,going further back into prehistory with theirassociation with the pile dwellings found onthe periphery of Lake Zurich. Le Corbusier’sexercise of the archaeological imagination,though restricted to the development oftypologies, was not restricted to such formal

exercises by others. Architects of the Sovietavant-garde – the acknowledged architects ofthe first utterly Modern and progressive,utopian and socialist state – pursued theseexplorations of the archaeological past andethnographic ‘other’ but in particular those soci-eties believed to be characterized by a lack ofclass exploitation and possessing egalitariansocial principles (Figures 16.1–3). The standardwork on Soviet town planning from as late asthe 1960s shows how the architectural foot-prints of egalitarian societies (Figure 16.4)relate to the Modernist reinterpretation ofthese egalitarian principles in the new indus-trialized Modernist forms being built by thepost-war post-Stalinist state (Gradov 1968).These ethnographic and archaeological modelsserved, as Rykwert has noted, as ‘a guaranteeof renewal: not only as a token from the pastbut as a guide to the future’ (1989: l91). Herewe see how the tradition of Morgan and theModernist planning tradition of the SovietUnion were imaginatively linked in the SovietMarxist Modernist imagination.

Within anthropology between Morgan andthen the birth of the New Archaeology, and therise of structuralism in anthropology, little hadhappened in general in terms of the develop-ment of anthropological thought on architec-ture, not to mention Modernism. One istempted to speculate the happenstance of pub-lication that divorced architecture from thestudy of human evolution and hence ‘moder-nity’ and the decline of material culture in theface of British social anthropology conspired tominimize the significance of this area of work.Morgan’s work on architecture fell out of thedeveloping canon of anthropological thoughtin the late nineteenth century. However, theimplications for built forms were not lost onnineteenth-century social reformers such asMarx and Engels,who were keen readers of hiswork. Engel’s seminal work on the family(Origin of the Family, Private Property and theState, 1972) was to remain the classic work incommunist traditions on prehistory. This wasessentially an application of Morgan’s princi-ples on the bourgeois family and the devel-opment of a unilineal framework of socialevolution for the understanding of futuresocial formations that were central to thedevelopment of leftist thought in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries. However,in the wake of such figures as Henry Maine(Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995) and the rise ofBritish social anthropology in the first half ofthe twentieth century, the anthropological

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SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS256

Figure 16.2 Green citySource: Ladovski (1929)

Figure 16.1 An African dwelling, ZhilishcheSource: Ginzburg (1934)



Figure 16.3 The Narkomfin communal houseSource: Soveremennaia Arkhitektura, 5 (1929): 158–61

Figure 16.4 An Iroquois dwelling, redrawn from Morgan (1881)Source: Gradov (1968: 30)


study of architecture remained marginal, onlyto re-emerge in the post-war period in theworks of Edward Hall on proxemics (Hall1959) and the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss(1973, 1983). However, in the intervening timearchitectural theorists within the developingcanon of Modernism were actively pursuingtheir own empirical research into house forms,studying classical and especially ethnographicexamples for the development of new forms of‘dwelling’ as well as conducting their ownsociologically inspired studies of use mostlyderiving from the emerging managementsciences of Taylorism which studied humanbehaviour in order to better design architec-tural forms. Later in the post-war period theseconcerns would be paralleled in the develop-ment of ethno-archaeology from within theNew Archaeology, by studying the systematicsof human movement and behaviour, particu-larly in relation to architecture and spatialuse, to create analogues of material cultureuse in the present and past. Both functionalistand structuralist approaches held swayfor their inherent systemness (Hodder 1986:134–5) despite their otherwise divergentepistemologies.

Within this structuralist tradition, however,deriving from the work of Lévi-Strauss, archi-tecture modestly reassumed a significance lostsince Morgan’s day. Architecture emergesas the social ‘blueprint’ according to whichsocieties organize themselves and resolve theirtensions and contradictions. It becomes ameans of thinking through social life and assuch becomes an important metaphor withwhich to conceive of oneself in the world andthrough which to behave, embodying ‘deepstructures’ organizing human societies (Lévi-Strauss 1983). However, the materiality of builtforms, unlike later studies (Humphrey 1974,1988; Blier 1987; Bloch 1995), did not figure asprominently. What was significant was howthese ‘plans’ structured how people thoughtand behaved.

Later figures, such as the American folkloristHenry Glassie, in the wake of Hall’s proxemicsand Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, further devel-oped these ideas in relation to recent linguistictheories (especially those of Noam Chomsky1968) to understand architecture as language-like, following similar forms of grammaticaldevelopment and reflecting deeper cognitiveprocesses that structure both language andmaterial culture, especially architectural forms.What was to emerge within this understand-ing was an ‘architectural competence’ akin

to linguistic competence. The materiality ofform was reduced to its schematic outline as itpertained to the understanding of an abstractgenerative scheme (see Glassie 1975). In Britain,the impact of structuralism figured promi-nently in Caroline Humphrey’s seminal workon the anthropological study of architecture inher structuralist account of the Mongolian yurt(Humphrey 1988). But it is probably PierreBourdieu’s work on the Kabyle house of NorthAfrica (1973, 1977) and his later work on tastein contemporary French society, Distinction(1979) that served more than anything to refo-cus attention on architecture – particularly atthe analytical unit of the domestic sphere: thehome – and more explicitly on the condition ofWestern ‘modern’ societies themselves, servingas one of the first and probably most sophisti-cated and thorough mediations on the experi-ence of modernity, with an overt emphasis onmaterial culture.

Later, in the wake of the feminist movement,the traditional association of the home with thefeminine invigorated anthropology’s tradi-tional interest in dwelling, family structureand the home. Engels was reclaimed as a keyintellectual forefather for thinking about socialform, gender and by extension the home(see Engels 1972: preface). Thus domestic archi-tecture increasingly became the site wherethe inequalities of gender could be addressedand studied. If subaltern groups and sexuali-ties could not be studied directly, they couldbe approached in the almost forensic fashionof archaeology, ethno-archaeology and there-emerging tradition of material culture studies(see Moore 1986 and outside of anthropologyDuncan 1996; Sanders 1996).

The post-war response to Cold War antag-onisms and radical social movements withinWestern democracies spurned a renewedMarxian-inspired critique of consumerism andits practices (de Certeau 1998; Barthes 1973;Baudrillard 1996). With the Western modernhome as the key if not most important site ofconsumerist practices the dwelling in whichthese practices take place increases in signifi-cance (see Gullestad 1984; Csikszentmihalyiand Rochberg-Halton 1981; Miller 1987, 1988).Indeed, it is with Miller that the problem ofmodernity and consumption, particularlywithin the home, emerges as a centralproblem within anthropological thought andthe re-emerging interest in material culturestudies and the central role of consumption inthe reproduction of social relations (see Miller1987).



Alongside this trajectory of interest inconsumption, the home and the perennialModernist dilemma over ‘dwelling’, a broaderfocus on institutional and bureaucratic struc-tures and cities emerges, owing a great debt tothe philosopher and critical historian of intel-lectual thought Michel Foucault (1973). Withinanthropology Paul Rabinow, Foucault’s majoranglophone translator and editor, worked onNorth African cities, particularly the impact ofModernist architects such as Le Corbusier andhis role in town planning and bureaucraticcolonial administration (Rabinow 1995). Whilein the wake of post-war critical interest in con-sumerism in the home, especially the suburbanhome, figures such as Setha Low refocused onthe contradictions of modern urban life in theanalysis of suburban communities (l999; seealso Silverstone 1997).

The underlying modern preoccupation witharchitecture and the home has been of courseits inherent ‘unhomeliness’. This is the unheim-lich derived from Freud and developed by thearchitectural theoretician Anthony Vidler – thisis the flip side of the preoccupation with‘dwelling’ by Modernist theoreticians and crit-ics. The postmodern turn can be said to reflectthis disillusionment and melancholy inherentwithin Modernist thought and its preoccupa-tion with the terms of alienation withindwelling and the home. Marc Augé (1995) hasrefocused attention on new modern architec-tural forms within which this unhomelinessand alienation occur, focusing on those placessuch as airports, rest stops and spaces of tran-sit that increasingly impinge on our troubledunderstanding of dwelling. Similarly, anthro-pological work has focused on the terms bywhich households are dissolved or divested(Miller 2001; Marcoux 2001). The implication ofthese works is that the almost melancholicobsession with the built forms of the home hassuggested that the problem of ‘dwelling’ mustbe understood elsewhere and in differentterms: in the ways we inhabit fragmented geo-graphies and spaces, and the means by whichnew technologies such as the Internet, mobilephone use and SMS messaging create newdimensions of time and space which weinhabit.

Without doubt it was Modernism’s myth ofprogress that required the suppression of thisprimitivist imaginary created within anthropo-logical work (see Vogt 1998). Divergentmethodologies and their attendant scales ofanalysis have been largely responsible for therelative dearth of ethnographic inquiries into

architecture and Modernism. Anthropologicalinquiries regarding architecture have mainlyfocused on the dwelling, the architectural formmost intimately associated with kin groupsand households. This scale of inquiry has gen-erally narrowed anthropological inquiry (eth-nological, ethnographic and archaeological) tothese architectural forms and scales. This is thescale anthropologists and archaeologists tendto work at by virtue of methodological con-straints and their disciplinary focus and train-ing. More complex structures and larger-scaledarchitectural assemblages tend to fall withinthe purview of archaeologists, with scales ofanalysis beyond the village level or face-to-facecommunities rarely taken up by ethnogra-phers. At these greater scales, anthropologistshave tended to give way to geographers, andstudents of urbanism.

This tendency to focus on dwellings,as opposed to other architectural forms, isalso reinforced in the study of Modernismand its own preoccupation with dwelling.As Heynen notes, for Modernist theorists,philosophers, architectural theorists (and ofcourse anthropologists) the home is the centralproblem of the experience of modernity(Heynen 2001). The two are inextricable whenwe think of Modernism and architecture. TheModernist break from tradition is a rupturewith rootedness. At stake of course is thenature of dwelling and the home and modernanxieties over the inevitability of ‘homeless-ness’ (Heynen 2001). This is the problem thatHeidegger identifies: ‘The proper dwellingplight lies in this, that mortals ever searchanew for the essence of dwelling, that theymust ever learn to dwell’ (1993: 363). Thisproblem is what Morgan refers to in his prefaceto House and House-life of American Aboriginals(1881): ‘Every institution of mankind whichattained permanence will be found linked witha perpetual want’ (quoted in Bohannan 1965:xvi). This restlessness is what characterizesthe Modernist preoccupation with the architec-ture of dwelling. Transfixed as we are by thisproblem, as Heynen observes, we have tendedto focus on the melancholic object of our rest-lessness and loss: dwelling – despairing tofix and grasp it (as with Heidegger) or morenihilistically despairing at our own despair(see Heynen on Adorno, Eisenman andCacciari). It is worthwhile to reconsiderHeidegger’s suggestion that ‘[mortals] mustever learn to dwell’. How people cope withthis problem is probably what students ofmaterial culture can address best and better



enable but to do this also suggests a shift in thescale of analysis, a move away from the elusiveartefact, the dwelling per se, to the process ofdwelling itself: the physical house, dwellingand architecture of whatever form is a mereeffect.

In light of these circumstances and theirattendant splits in terms of method and disci-plinary purview it is worthwhile consideringhow these historical breaks in analysis andmethod might be reconsidered. One problemthat stands out is the question of materiality.The social terms and effects whereby the mate-riality of built architectural forms exist andare experienced in time and space are oftenoverlooked – a consequence, I would argue, ofthis historical methodological and disciplinarydivision of labour and the driving myths ofModernism that this split has historicallymaintained. Materiality and its developmentover time are a crucial dimension towardsresolving some of these issues that have beenoverlooked. These are the issues of housekeep-ing, within the critical feminist tradition, build-ing maintenance, its organization and its socialeffects in terms of how such activities organizepeople’s relationships to one another via themateriality of built forms. If buildings areabout the construction of social forms, much ofwhat has been written is about the exteriorform, skeleton, or shell but not about howthese relations are maintained. This is intendedto mean everything from the maintenance ofsurfaces through the quotidian chores ofhousework to building maintenance overtime,to the issues of authenticity of form and sur-face relevant to cultural heritage. Social struc-ture and architectural structure are presentedas one-off givens. Such a static view of socialstructure is an effect of the anthropological pre-occupation with the ethnographic moment:snapshots are by nature static, while similarlythe architectural structure is subject to a similarstasis resulting from a preoccupation withform and the static nature of representation.Time depth and process are under-examinedand architectural form and social life, thoughanalysed in tandem, are rarely understoodtogether in modern contexts. The two are pre-sented as analytically separate and the embod-ied dimension of their interdependence (as canbe seen in phenomenologically inspired stud-ies of traditional forms) between the material-ity of built forms, lived experience andmaintenance and duration over time are over-looked. (See, however, Melhuish 2005.) Yet it is

precisely here where the politics and conflictsof preservation and cultural heritage manage-ment take place.

The materiality of built forms is oftenassumed, like the ‘velvet folds’ of Benjamin’sdescription, unproblematically passively con-taining, circumscribing, enfolding and unam-biguously signifying the social relationswithin. Similarly the act of building up theseforms rarely moves beyond the one-off momentof construction when the analysis often staysfocused on the means by which buildings cre-ate social relations among builders. Not oftenis the continuously lived interaction with builtforms and their changing materiality engaged.(See the works of Bloch and Blier for especiallygood discussions of this ongoing process innon-Euro-American and non-Modernist con-texts.) This interface is rarely engaged, whilemore consumption-based studies tend toignore it altogether. Architectural form con-tains, maybe moulds, but it is presented as staticby the constraints of the ethnographic moment.Work in the sociology of technology (Law 2002;Latour 1999; Yaneva 2003) suggests anenmeshed and deeply involved relationshipbetween built forms in their changing dimen-sions and the various actors, both human, andnon-human, that shape this continuous dynamic(see Yaneva 2003; Jenkins 2002). The physicalqualities of buildings and their surfaces andmaterials and the social relations that themaintenance and presentation of these formsrequire and forge are often not glimpsed untilcritical moments, such as those that arise withconflicts over Heritage management (Rowlands2002) and the negotiation of built forms.Otherwise this ongoing process betweenhuman agents both individual and institu-tional and material go unnoticed along withthe critical dynamics of power forged withinthese processes and the social relationshipsthereby enabled.

For the most part this issue of materiality hasbeen predominantly understood within domi-nation and resistance models where homedwellers would ‘appropriate’ (the methodolog-ical domain of the ethnographer, see forinstance Boudon 1979; Buchli 1999; Miller 1988)the dominant architectural forms created byarchitects and institutions (the methodologi-cal domain of the architectural historian andtheorist). Materiality is seen as either/or: theproduct of two opposing social forces, method-ologically segregated by the respective realmsof surface and form and rarely seen as part of an



integrative process that involves a constellationof actors, human and non-human, agents andtime frames. There have been a few suggestionsas to where such an approach might lead usand the nuances it might uncover (see Yaneva2003 and Jenkins 2002). The significance ofthese approaches is evident in the way in whichthey are able to document the subtle play ofmicro-powers that forge the materiality of builtforms we encounter and the social nature oftheir effects, which are generally lost or emergeas the intractable conflicts highlighted withinpreservation and cultural heritage disputes(Rowlands 2002).

Within material culture studies, visualityhad been historically sidelined but morerecently reincorporated (Thomas 1997, Pinney2002), however textuality, since earlier under-standing of material culture as text, has beensimilarly forgotten (see Tilley 1999; Buchli1995) and not reconsidered. Recent work in lit-erary studies has focused on the narrativetropes that shape perceptions of built formsand spaces. This narrative dimension has beengenerally overlooked in material culture stud-ies. However, recent work has suggested howsuch narratives forms have very specific socialeffects. Ironic or satirical prose produces a sen-sibility towards materiality that can provokea certain sensibility in the reader throughthe articulation of certain material qualities.Neutral empirical descriptions suggest a uni-versality and interchangeablity (Guillory 2004)with their own effects and relationships, whilesatire produces others. These various dimen-sions along which materiality is producedhave been demonstrated by Richardson in howsatirical language used to describe the domes-tic spaces of Elizabethan drama serves to medi-ate a specific public and critical response to thesignificance of the home that only the satiricalnarrative style with its embellished materialitycould render (Richardson 2004). This, likecolour (Young 2004; Wigley 200l; also Dyer1997) in more ephemeral but in very real waysproduces certain materialities and sensibilitieswith direct significance for the ways in whichpeople inhabit the built environment, createmeaning and effect social relationships. This isnot simply in terms of the sociological dimen-sion of signification implied within narratives.Along this line of dimension, as within others,a material effect is produced that facilitatesparticular social relations: such as the work ofsatire through its highly particular and vividprose which articulates a materiality that

invites a certain relationship in a reading orlistening audience, creating varying degrees ofsocial engagement, in the way in which textand narrative style produce a particular way ofdwelling and interaction within the narrative.

These different articulations of dimensionare particularly significant in light of the factthat dwelling is understood increasingly in‘virtual’ terms because of the impact of newtechnologies such as the Internet which spa-tially and temporally fragment the experienceof contemporary dwelling (diasporic ‘homes’maintained over diverse physical sites andtimes, Internet-based work/home relationsmediated by time rather than space, remotedwelling via webcam video monitoring viacomputer or mobile video-phone, etc.). It is thecase that dwelling is experienced ‘virtually’,that is, along different dimensions of material-ity (such as visually mediated in two dimen-sions by digital technologies) such as thedifferent dimensions in which materiality isexperienced as in the engraving/print (Thomas1997) dispersed over a wide essentially limit-less area geographically in two dimensions asopposed to the three dimensions of the model,actual site or reconstruction experienced withinin a very limited geographical area and by alimited audience. Similarly the social effect ofarchitectural spaces and dwellings renderedlinguistically within different rhetorical tropes(empirical descriptive, lyrically satirical) allfunction to render a certain materiality withspecific social effects.

Within this set of issues arises the questionof the ethnographic site. The legacy of the fossilhas persisted with the site, be it the home orthe building; the obviousness of the site is notquestioned. The ‘fact’ of the ‘interior’ as anahistorical and universal category still predom-inates. At a conference the suggestion by onespeaker that the ‘interior’ as a self-evident ana-lytical category was only a nineteenth-centuryinvention was met with guffaws. The multifar-iousness of dwelling – the diasporic home, thespace of the Internet, the simultaneity of differ-ent spatialities in architectural space and else-where – is under-analysed. There is a neededemphasis on material effects and the produc-tion of sites and multiple, fragmented sites.The prevailing fossil metaphor is no longeruseful – a lingering effect of the work done toproduce the myths of Modernism. Traditionalethnographic approaches have much to offer interms of understanding how the multiplicity ofdwelling occurs. If architecture is about



dwelling as traditionally described then themulti-sitedness and increasing immaterial andvirtual means of dwelling in the world requirea reconsideration of this Heideggerian under-standing. Buck-Morss (2002) observed how theprogressive socialist Soviet state shifted theterms of Modernism from the conquering ofspace as part of the nation-building enterpriseto the domination of time as part of the con-quest of history and progress. This resulted ina very different materiality in terms of dura-tion and presence that privileged the anticipa-tion and control of socially progressive timeover the domination of space, what Ssorin-Chaikov (2003) refers to as the ‘poetics ofunfinished construction’ or alternatively (seeBuchli forthcoming) as the indexes of continu-ity of varying materiality and dimensionality,depending on whether these index futurity orcontinuity with the past: two different meansof reckoning continuity requiring differentmaterialities and dimensions.

Similarly the Benjamin model of the étui con-taining the self within its ‘velvet folds’ presup-poses the classical Cartesian individuatedskin-enclosed self. But as such notions of indi-viduation have been challenged not only innon-Western (Strathern 1998; Broch-Due et al.1993) contexts as well as Euro-American, thisdistinction and division which have character-ized much Modernist thought have little pur-chase. The relationship between architecturalform, its materiality and the fragmented‘dividual’ of late capitalism is obscured withinthis methodological division of labour and site.Within these late Modern settings the questionof where the body and the building begin isfragmented and contested. How then is themateriality of built forms implicated in forgingemerging notions of self and individuation?We have lost sight of the terms of dwellingidentified by Heidegger, seeing them withinthe velvet folds of the discrete étui-like spacesthat have held our attention. This boundednessis assumed (as those conference guffawsaffirmed), but that is not merely an affirma-tion but a melancholic attachment that hasfuelled the Modernist enterprise and its strug-gle with the unhomely terms of modern exis-tence. As Internet studies (Miller and Slater2001) and studies of diasporic communitiessuggest, all moderns are diasporic in relativeterms of scale.

Within the question of the site is also theissue of homelessness, which has received littleattention in relation to the study of Modernismand architecture within material culture

studies. This is due in part I would suggest toan outmoded preoccupation with the ‘fossil’and its ossified built forms partly derivingfrom anxiety over the fact that Modernism isby definition a condition of homelessness. Wehave abandoned the universality of theWestern indigenous and Modernist Cartesianskin-enclosed unified self, but we have notadequately reconsidered the ‘velvet-linedcases’ in which it has been enfolded (Benjamin1999): the dwelling; this has remained with us,much like the fossilized mould of long-deadlife forms. As noted by Csikszentmilhalyi andRochbert-Halton: ‘Like some strange race ofcultural gastropods, people build homes out oftheir own essence, shells to shelter their per-sonality. But, then, these symbolic projectionsreact on their creators, in turn shaping theselves they are. The envelope thus created isnot just a metaphor’ (1981: 138). In this sensethe study of Modernism and architecture isa mournful preoccupation, the étui is reallya death mask (as in Rachel Whiteread’s House,Lingwood 1995) while at the same time it is aneffort to, pace (but against) Heidegger, to learnhow to dwell and thereby discern new forms ofsocial life and individuation that are emerging.

The built and lived forms of Modernismare rarely studied together as part of an ongo-ing process. As dwellers are rarely everbuilders this interrelatedness which character-izes ethnographic work on the dwelling ofnon-Modernist societies rarely looks at theimbrication of individuals, communities andinstitutions and their material practices whichconverge at the site of the ‘home’. Thesespheres are segregated by the traditionalmethodological boundaries of disciplines andan imputed division of labour. The architec-tural ‘shell’, the building or dwelling, often-times is the subject of the architecturalhistorian, theoretician or vernacular specialist.Little interest is expressed in activities inside,behind closed doors, and the lived forms thatemerge. At best there is a strict division from themoment of construction to its appropriation –following rather rigidly a domination/resistancemodel. A dominant original form, the productof institutional works, is then appropriated(a good example is the work of Boudon (1979)in his ethnographic study of the inhabitants ofPressac designed by Le Corbusier). This is thetraditional domain of the anthropologist andsociologist, who are often uninterested in themoment of construction when the structureemerges (see however Marchand 2001) andthen exists indefinitely and unproblematically



as an ideal type or background in which theethnographic drama unfolds. In many respectsLévi-Straus’s old observation that the house isthe site where social tensions are negotiated,obscured and obviated needs further radicalcommitment.

There are two split moments, the dwelling/building at the moment of construction and theindwelt experience captured by the ethno-graphic moment. In between there is a wholeprocess of change, modification and develop-ment, that is, a shifting nexus of interests thatsignificantly shapes the materiality and socialeffects of built forms. The material and socialeffects of this shifting nexus are for the most partunder-determined and fall out of analyses whichprivilege either built form or dwelt form and thesnapshots that arise from the methodologicalrestrictions of these forms of analysis and theirdisciplinary restrictions. Methodologically thetwo spheres have not been successfullyapproached as they have been in other non-Western and non-modern contexts (see Carstenand Hugh-Jones 1995; Bloch 1995; Riviere 1995;Blier 1987).

The Utopian ideal of dwelling whichModernism has longed for in its incessant andobsessive melancholic strivings should be setaside, to see what in fact homes ‘do’ as Lévi-Strauss long ago intimated. In my own workon Soviet Modernism I have attempted to tryand discover how the materiality of built formscan be creatively and radically manipulated inorder to overcome conflicting social tensions(Buchli 1999). Work by Young on housing andthe London property market (2003) has gone along way towards redressing this issue byfocusing on the materiality of built forms inthis case, namely colour, and the social effectsit produces. In Young’s work we see how theideologies of transparency and neutrality thatcharacterize the modern movement and itsattempts to overcome the effects of industrial-ized capitalism in fact work in the oppositefashion by realizing the perfect, interchange-able universal commodity: one’s real estateinvestment and home that enables the produc-tion of ‘fluid’ subjects (Bauman 2000) to existwithin a highly fluid property market andthereby ensure the terms of constantly shiftingsubjectivity required by late capitalist moder-nity (Bauman 2000). Similarly Froud (2004)examines the materiality of neo-traditionalbuilt forms in English suburban communitiesand their simulacra of textures and architec-tural references. This work looks at the com-plex interaction of surfaces, environments

and individuals and sees how the work of‘home’, its agent-like qualities that generatehomeyness and space, are the function notof any a priori understanding of materialauthenticity but of the complex interaction ofthese elements in the negotiation of social con-tradictions to create a contingent ‘authentic’moment where it is possible to dwell in theHeideggerian sense. The preservation of theModernist heritage of the recent past becomesequally problematic. Entirely new kinds ofrelationships are created between inhabitants,communities and local and national authoritiesthrough the creation and enactment of preser-vation guidelines. At times the preservationistimpulse, focused on particular notions ofmaterial authenticity, flies in the face of thevery well known architectural concepts sup-porting the structure – a building designed tobe continuously added on to and expandedis suddenly threatened from being so bypreservation guidelines which enforce anentirely new and different materiality andprogramme that were never intended by theoriginal builders – two competing modernimperatives come into conflict with oneanother. These instances demonstrate theimportance of both sides of the surface (insideand outside) as problematic and part of acomplex nexus of shifting interests, institu-tions, agents and resistances that our melan-cholic Modernist preoccupation with homeand dwelling has left us unable to describeadequately.

Similarly UNESCO’s concern with the authen-ticity of built forms in its preservation guide-lines creates a materiality that privileges acertain nexus of interests (globalized tourism,nation-building enterprises and various localelite interests) at the expense of other nexusesof interest groups, individuals and institutionsthat facilitate the contingent terms of dwellingby recourse to other materialities and orders ofauthenticity (see Rowlands 2002). As Rowlandsnotes, this is a means of asserting an objecti-fied and mutually recognized form of authen-ticity with which to counter the variousalienating historical processes of industrial-ization, de-industrialization, colonialism andpost-socialist transition. The relationshipbetween these nexuses and their competingconstellations of social interests is only nowbeginning to be addressed. How this isachieved might be better addressed in terms ofthe nuances of power distribution and theirmaterial effects. The evident need of a twentieth-century Heritage (see Bradley et al. 2004) and



its preservation presents many complexproblems. The need to obsessively documentand fix within the archive the disappearingworlds encountered in the nineteenth centurywith the birth of anthropology and archaeol-ogy was daunting but self-evidently urgent. Ifthe pace of time and change dictated necessityin these nineteenth-century endeavours, thenthe experience of modernity in the twentiethcentury which is underfoot and amidst us dic-tates different terms of necessity. The roleModernism plays in the lived lives of commu-nities needs to be more directly engaged andunderstood in terms of the material effects ofModernism and the social consequences of itspreservation – not everything can or should bepreserved. However, if the materialities of‘house’ serve to negotiate social tensions, asLévi-Strauss once observed, then it might bemore profitable to identify those tensions,those areas of social conflict that require mate-rial intervention within the material legacy ofModernism to help negotiate these contingentissues. This requires a focused and nuancedapproach that identifies micro-powers andtheir imbrication with macro-powers to helpaid the new materialities constituted by ourresearch into the experience of Modernism todo the relevant cultural work required of localinterests as those needs arise (Bradley et al.2004). A renewed attention to materiality andthe imbrication of scales (micro-ethnographic,macro-architectural historical) might help tobreak this segregation which privileges one setof interests over another and thereby facili-tates materialities that allow for a more inclu-sive and just intervention within theseconditions.

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