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

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4 Social & Legal Studies 000(00) predictable (Latour, 1991; Luhmann, 2000). To view buildings as technologies, as is often the case in architectural theory, means to believe that the material form of a building enables and enforces certain uses, more or less without assuming any specific interpretive qualifications of users. In this view, it is the buildings that define and enable both meaning and use. The notion of building types usually assumes such a view and architects often seek to turn buildings into technologies. Architects routinely would explain their design decisions for a bank with their intention to make a building that facilitates the practices that should take place in a bank. They would justify their placing of teller windows with the idea of facilitating the exchange between customers and clerks. Similarly, architectural critics would praise or criticize a building for facilitating such practices or failing to do so. A second, semiotic view would discredit the materiality of the building, but focus on the meaning of forms. But, like a technological view, it would hold that architects can insert meanings into buildings to achieve given effects. Seen from this viewpoint, a bank building does not so much enforce specific uses because of its materiality, but because users understand the meaning of the building as implied by the architect. Such a view largely became prominent in architectural theory in the late 1970s (see e.g. Jencks, 1977; Jencks and Baird,1970). A third, sociological, pragmatic or user-centred view sees buildings merely as objects, not capable to enforce any meaning or use, but rather completely defined by the interpretations and uses of users and onlookers. A sociologist would point out, in the case of a bank, that it is mistaken to assume that the existence of a counter can influence or even be decisive for practices such as making payments taking part in it. They would argue that the building ‘does’ and ‘means’ nothing by itself, but is rather used in one way or another. These three theories of buildings are mutually exclusive. Actor-network theory and Bruno Latour specifically have shown a way out of such unfruitful exclusionary positions (Latour, 1991, 1992, 1993). According to Latour, the world consists of networks, comprised of social, symbolic and material items. Latour initially attempted to show how actors turn such networks into technologies and thereby make them predictable, by linking material, symbolic and social elements and thereby stabilizing and hardening the networks. Latour’s points of departure were scientific objects that originate in laboratories (Latour, 1987). He detailed how scientists turn such objects into what he called immutable mobiles (Latour, 1987: 226ff.). Immutable mobiles are hardened technologies, objects that are stable in varying circumstances and always perform the task assigned to them. For Latour such networks follow an additive logic: the more elements are linked to each other, and the better the elements are connected, the more stable a technology becomes. However, there is a crucial difference between buildings and such immutable mobiles as stabilized networks that emerge from laboratories. The latter can be controlled by scientists and their stability derives from users having only very limited possibilities to interfere with those inbuilt qualities. Buildings, however, are of quite a different quality. They lack defined and controllable interfaces. In fact, architects have, despite their theoretical and practical attempts to steer society with buildings, very limited possibilities to control users with buildings. 4 In most cases, despite the attempts of architects to 4
Guggenheim 5 do so, it is very difficult to say how the material and semiotic aspects of buildings relate to the interactions taking place inside of them. Sometimes buildings are indeed technologies that structure, enable or even enforce practices, and sometimes they are not. Because of this feature I call buildings quasitechnologies, thereby indicating that buildings in some instances work as technologies and in others do not (Guggenheim, 2009, 2010). Different from other technologies, it is very difficult to attribute technological powers or even failings to buildings. For example, it is easy to determine whether a CD-player works or not. However, it is very difficult to say whether a bank works or fails. From this theoretical premise follows an empirical imperative: We should not assume a sociological position and criticize actors for not understanding that buildings are not technologies. Neither should we assume a technological position and criticize actors for assuming that buildings are defined by interactions. Instead, I follow empirically how various actors define buildings as symbolic, technological or defined through interactions and explain why they do so. I use the following terms to describe the respective arguments of actors. When an actors tries to prove the technological properties of a building, I call this technologizing. An instance would be when somebody says, ‘Only with a teller window a bank works as a bank’. When an actor tries to prove the semiotic properties of a building I call this ‘mediatizing’. This would happen when an actor says, ‘Mirror glass windows clearly indicate that this is a bank and this is sufficient to make it work’. When an actor tries to prove the interactional qualities of building I call this ‘socializing’. An example for this would be when somebody says, ‘As long as people exchange money in this building, it is a bank’. Finally, I call ‘materializing’ a procedure that denies that a building is technical, and reduces it to its mere materiality. This is for example the case, when somebody might say: ‘This glass division wall is just a glass wall. It does not facilitate the exchange of money’. Each of these statements may be ‘proven’ with a range of material and interactional elements that are part of the respective processes. As follows from my theoretical position, none of these positions hold up to scrutiny, and none of them can be proven in any scientific or legal sense. The fact that buildings are quasi-technologies is central to understand legal conflicts about building codes and zoning. This is so, because the legal definition of a zone relates areas of land classified as a specific zone to a use taking place on this land and the buildings situated on it. Swiss federal law says: ‘zoning plans regulate the admissible uses of the land’ (Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft, 1979, Art. 14, emphasis added): The regulation is defined as concerning the uses, not the buildings. One could infer that the law does not hold a technological view of buildings! In theory, the definitions of specific zones in zoning law only relate to uses and not to building forms, because it is assumed that the forms do not enforce uses and therefore the latter are decisive for the classification of a building. However, as we will see over and over, this is only partially true. The confusion already starts at the level of written law when it defines specific zones: For example, the building code of the Canton of Zürich, in §60 reserves a zone for ‘public buildings’ – and not public uses (Baudirektion des Kantons Zürich, 2005, §60, p.15, emphasis added). The switch to a technological theory of buildings happens without being noticed, already on the level of the written law, and as I will show, it continues in jurisdiction. 5
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