The Laws of Foreign Buildings: Flat Roofs and Minarets - Michael ...

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2 Social & Legal Studies 000(00) import of flat roofs is an illuminating comparison, because of some similarities but also differences. In both cases, a building part was resented by the local population and fought with building codes. In both cases, the building part was taken to embody a foreign lifestyle. But whereas in the case of flat roofs, it is a modern lifestyle that attempts to destroy the traditional order of Switzerland, in the case of the minaret it is a traditional order that probes the modern order of Switzerland. In both cases, the crucial legal problem is how the building parts relate to the social order. The two respective questions for the law are as follows. Is a minaret necessary for Muslims to perform their religion in a mosque or are they just religiously meaningless towers on buildings? Are flat roofs signs of modernity or of dangerous immigrants? The goal of my analysis is not so much to answer these questions from the viewpoint of minority rights, but to analyse the legal theories of architecture behind these issues. I use the two cases to elucidate how building codes struggle with what I call the quasitechnicality of buildings. Recent scholarship in socio-legal studies has increasingly focused on the relationship of space and the law and specifically on the city (Ben-Joseph, 2005; Blomley et al., 2001; Butler, 2009; Manderson, 2005; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2007). This research showed that the law also regulates the spatial distribution of social practices. An important part of this research looks at the use of building codes and zoning laws to negotiate space use by different groups (Frug, 2001: 153–64; Oh, 2005; Perin, 1977; Ranasinghe and Valverde, 2006; Ritzdorf, 1994; Valverde, 2005; VanderVelde, 1989). These studies focus on the effects of zoning on specific – usually disadvantaged – groups such as migrants, women, the elderly, or unwanted activities such as abortion clinics or porn movie theatres (Papayanis, 2000). They look at zoning as having indirect effects on those groups and activities by its use to achieve what cannot be regulated with more direct laws directed at humans, such as vagrancy laws. 1 Zoning is directed at regulating human groups by imposing a normative view of how to spatially order society. By doing so, zones and the buildings therein become replacements for human groups and lifestyles. In this article, I build on these studies and expand the argument by taking the underlying architectural problems more seriously. My argument is based on an understanding of buildings in the context of actor-network theory: buildings are not technologies that merely enforce certain uses; rather they are quasi-technologies, whose relationship to use is vague. As I show, legal regulations of buildings mediate the relationship between the law itself, the building form and their users. Thus the effects of regulating buildings are vague and do not directly translate into the intended effects on the implicated lifestyles and groups. To elucidate this problem I focus on the architectural theories implied in legal arguments. How are buildings as building types classified and given names and qualities? How are these qualities linked to groups of people and defined as foreign? I want to show that because building types are quasi-technologies, they result in difficult legal conflicts where buildings and uses are sometimes identified with each other and sometimes kept apart. Furthermore, I wish to show that those processes of identification or keeping apart are not stable across cases because the law lacks a consistent theory of buildings. The article starts by elucidating the relationship between foreign building types and the law. I then move on to the two case studies and finally, to a comparison between them. 2
Guggenheim 3 Building types as quasi-technologies: Legal Theories of Architecture and Zoning How to find out whether a building type is ‘new’ or ‘foreign’ or rather ‘vernacular’, ‘native’ and ‘local’? 2 How to determine whether such a foreign building type is necessary for a given practice or not? Is a minaret necessary for Muslims to perform their religion in a mosque or are they just religiously meaningless towers on buildings? Any legal discussion of such a question requires a theory of architecture. The difficulty of identifying ‘foreign’ building types hinges on the fact that buildings themselves usually do not travel. What travels are ideas and representations of buildings according to which buildings are designed. From this follows that, other than for humans or goods, there is no migration law and no customs to separate legal from illegal imports. A legal dispute about ‘foreign’ buildings has to resort to other kinds of laws. These are building codes and specifically zoning laws. Such a theory of architecture has to define how the qualification of foreignness relates to a building type and to a particular meaning or to the interactions of users. To do so, three categories have to be defined with regard to each other: meaning, use and materiality. Are buildings mere objects that can have any meaning and any use observers attribute? Or are buildings technologies that enforce certain uses and any change of a building results in different uses? A building type refers to a concept and a term that classifies a group of buildings according to their material form, its meaning and use. 3 For example, the building type bank identifies the word ‘bank’ with the material form of a building comprised of tellers’ windows, reflecting glass facades, offices and the use, mainly, of lending and borrowing money. The classification of a building as a bank performs the two operations of identifying the building with the use and with the appropriate material form at the same time. We assume that the material form, the tellers’ windows, the offices and the glass facades are needed to make the lending and borrowing possible. Users then have to interpret these forms correctly to be usable. If there were no glass facades, tellers’ windows and offices, users would not understand that the building is a bank and there would be no lending and borrowing. Following Francescato we can differentiate between form-type and use-type (Francescato, 1994). I use the term form-type to designate typified building forms and usetype to designate typified uses. As I have illustrated above, in most of the cases these two coincide, because forms are identified with uses. Indeed, our perception of buildings and our orientation in a city routinely depends on this identification. But there are also instances where they do not coincide. This happens most notably in building conversion. Thus there are buildings whose form-type we might classify as a bank but which are used as a court of law. Depending on whether we call such a building a bank or a court, it either shows that a form-type bank does not enforce its use as a bank or that the usetype court does not depend on a typological material structure identified with a court. How do material, meaning and use work together in buildings? There are three positions on this issue: A first position understands buildings as technologies. Following Niklas Luhmann and Bruno Latour, I define technology as an assemblage of things and practices that produces with the same input the same output and thus makes processes 3
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The Laws of Foreign Buildings: Flat Roofs and Minarets - Michael ...

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