The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Adrian Forty
families is to miss the point; classical music concerts appealed to the bourgeoisie
and professional classes, and it was these for whom the Festival Hall
was built, and it was they who went to it. 11 Yet insofar as the building caused
people to see others, and through others themselves, as of “equal social
worth” it can be said to have been “democratic.” It offered—to the class who
had least to gain from the welfare state, and were most likely to be opposed
to it—the opportunity to experience the altered perception of social relations
that life in a social democracy promised. As a theater of the welfare
state (with an uncannily close resemblance to a Moscow Soviet workers’
club), 12 it did not touch “reality”—“reality,” as Levin noticed, lay outside.
Like a theater, it dealt with perception and illusion, and its business was not
to change the world but only to show how it might feel different.