Taking Berger and Luckmann to the Realm of Materiality: Architecture as a Social Construction

Buildings as Materialized Structures of the Social

Sociology has long understood buildings and objects as materialized structures of the social, even if various theoretical currents conceptualize these structures very differently. Émile Durkheim and his disciples, for instance, regard any man-made material structure as part of a socially produced ‘morphology’ (Halbwachs, 1960), whereas Karl Marx (1977: 49–98) considers objects, as soon as they are produced as commodities, as ideological duplications of the social, thus mystifying it.

Durkheim argues that the social world consists not only of communication and interaction, but also of socially produced artifacts that confront the individual just as externally, independently, compellingly and with equally universal validity as do institutionalized modes of thought and action or moral notions (Durkeim, 1982: 50–59). In other words, he understands material objects and buildings as ‘social facts’, and, as such, they are assumed to have an objective meaning structure:

The social fact is sometimes so far materialized as to become an element of the external world. For instance, a definite type of architecture is a social phenomenon; but it is partially embodied in houses and buildings of all sorts which, once constructed, become autonomous realities, independent of individuals. (Durkheim, 1951: 313–314)

The underlying assumption is that architecture is a congealed or sedimented form of the social. Therefore, the starting point for such analyses is always the building itself. Maurice Halbwachs, who is particularly interested in the connection between built space and memory (Halbwachs, 1980), investigates the function of architecture in social cohesion, further developing one of the central notions of Durkheimian sociology: ‘For societies exist in the material world, and, in the concepts that derive from these spatial conditions, the thought of the group finds a principle of regularity and stability’ (Halbwachs, 1960: 41). Even in times of crisis, the impression of a stable order is lost only up to a certain point, which Halbwachs (1960: 130) attributes to ‘the inert character of physical objects’. This derives, above all, from the cohesive forces of collective memory, which become stronger as soon as memories can be tied to concrete physical objects. For Halbwachs, the material world is thus an anchor that helps society give itself a physical form and – in the collective contemplation of this physical form or in the recollection of it – find both stability and solidarity.

Karl Marx also thought of the man-made material world as a congealed and sedimented form of the social, but – and this differentiates him decisively from the position of the Durkheim school – he saw in it a materialized ideology. He comes to this conclusion because the material world of his time is a world of commodities, i.e. a world based on capitalist means of production. In the first volume of Das Kapital (1977) he shows in a detailed ‘Wertformanalyse’ how the value of a product is formed and expressed under capitalism. He argues that a commodity seems to be ‘a very trivial thing’ only at first glance, but that it is in fact rather ‘queer’ and ‘mysterious’ (Marx, 1977: 85). By its ‘object-ivity’, it veils its value-forming core, which actually lies within the average amount of work a society needs to produce it. Every critical sociological analysis must thus systematically lay bare the actual value-relation behind commodities. The neo-Marxist new urban sociology in particular has applied this theoretical position to the analysis of architecture aiming to determine ‘the place of the built environment in the overall process of accumulation’ (Ball, 1986: 451). In a similar way, the more recent work of Leslie Sklair (2006) explores the ‘iconicity’ of contemporary architecture as an expression of the culture-idology of consumerism in globalized capitalism.

The foremost figure in the current Marxist debate concerning urban spaces and architecture is the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Extending Marx’s ideas, Lefebvre (1991: 229–291) views the built spaces of a capitalist society as ‘abstract space, the core characteristic of which is the simultaneous occurrence of homogenization and fragmentation. However, according to Lefebvre, this conflicting unity also offers chances for the emergence of contradictions, collective appropriations and the imagination of alternative spaces, which can lead to real-world confrontations and social change. Thus in his view the material world is more than an alienated social world fetishized in the form of material goods. The way it is collectively appropriated also indicates a way out of the structural conditions of capitalism.

Ascribing Meaning to the Built Environment

The second main current of looking at architecture from a sociological perspective focuses explicitly on meanings, which are attributed when individuals or social groups handle objects or buildings. That is, social meaning is presumed to lie not in the building itself but in how it is used. This perspective ultimately goes back to Max Weber’s thesis that:

… every artifact, such as, for example, a machine, can be understood only in terms of the meaning which its production and use have had or were intended to have; a meaning which may derive from a relation to exceedingly various purposes. Without reference to this meaning, such an object remains wholly unintelligible. (Weber, 1968: 7)

Depending on theoretical preference, the conceptualization of how buildings and objects are dealt with varies considerably. Whereas studies in the American tradition of symbolic interactionism focus on the interpretation of artifacts in human–thing interactions, European sociology has been more interested in the links among built structures, symbols, discourses and practices.

The most important influences for interaction-based approaches come from George Herbert Mead. Mead (1962 [1934]: 152–164) emphasizes that the interactive forming of the ‘self’ is connected with the constitution of ‘physical things’. A prerequisite for this is the ability for ‘taking the role of the other’ (Mead, 1962 [1934]: 142) that children develop in interactions – first in ‘play’, then in the ‘game’. In addition to the social world, which consists of ‘significant’ and ‘generalized others’, the human being is also confronted with an opposing material world, which Mead (1932: 169) defines in the following way: ‘Physical things are perceptual things. They also arise within the act’. This applies first of all to our own body, our organism, as Mead explains (1932: 119): ‘It is evident that a definition of the physical thing in terms of manipulatory and distance experience must apply also to the organism as a physical thing. The organism is seen and felt’. A material thing, he continues to argue, is only perceived by us as a thing when we assume it has an interior which exerts pressure on us as soon as we touch it. The basis of this assumption is the experience of self-perception through the contact, for example, when we press one hand with the other. Pressure and counter-pressure are represented simultaneously in our consciousness and we can transfer this experience to dealing with things. We assume an object has an interior when we regard its counter-pressure as originating from this object. In other words, we become able to take on the role of the thing. Mead argues that through a coordination of hand and eye, we can transfer the experiences of our directly lived ‘manipulatory area’ (Mead, 1932: 109) to domains lying beyond this – an idea that is also of interest to architectural sociology. Once we have experienced a building bodily (by walking through it, touching and smelling its materials, and sensing its atmosphere and spatiality), we can see its weight, hardness, warmth or coldness without having to enter it again. Through this process, we start to anticipate the material world, which makes it possible for us to read it, i.e. to perceive it as a ‘sign system’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967 [1966]: 51).

Whereas George Herbert Mead has scarcely been discussed in architectural sociology up to now, more recent works often adopt the position of Pierre Bourdieu (Jones, 2006, 2009, 2011; Lipstadt, 2003). In his sociology, Bourdieu is concerned with negotiating structuralist and constructivist perspectives. To him, artifacts and buildings are, first of all, materialized structures of the social, and thus ‘social facts’ in a Durkheimian sense. Ultimately, however, they owe their collective significance to ‘the fact that in diverse fields, discussions are held about them to the extent that they indicate or guarantee more or less decisive advantages in these discussions’ (Bourdieu, 1991b: 29). What seems to occur without conflict in Halbwachs’s theory – the development of a collective understanding of the material basis of the social world – is an arena of symbolic struggles for Bourdieu. According to him, social reality is a collection of invisible relationships, a ‘social space’ organized in terms of relationships in which individuals and groups are reciprocally positioned. These positions are based on the distribution of social wealth, i.e. on the possession of position-related economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984). This in turn not only evokes a typical view of the world, but also implies greater or lesser power to establish this worldview as the legitimate way of seeing things in society (Bourdieu, 1991a). Thus the social space is simultaneously objectively structured through unequal distribution of capital and subjectively structured because the established perceptual, interpretational and evaluative schemata express the state of the symbolic power struggles. According to Bourdieu, architecture plays a key role in this because it is oriented to the body in both its material form and its symbolism, and thus exercises ‘silent’ (and therefore all the more effective) power. For Bourdieu, the world of objects is the materialized result of symbolic negotiation processes and an element of strategic moves in ‘social fields’ (Bourdieu, 1993).

In his works based on Bourdieu, Paul Jones (2006, 2009, 2011) shows that discourses play a special role in these symbolic negotiation processes. Jones focuses on the controversial issue of the meaning of buildings, which he investigates on the basis of collective identity formation (Jones, 2006). In his view, ‘collective identity discourses’ (Jones, 2006: 550) – such as the question of ‘the nation’ or ‘Europe’ – find concise and concentrated expression in landmark buildings such as the Berlin Reichstag (see Delanty and Jones, 2002). For Jones, landmark buildings symbolize the social, lend it form and thus contribute to its constitution. Like flags, national anthems or national commemoration speeches, architecture plays an important role in constituting the national, which can prove conflictual: ‘As landmark architectural projects act as a “space” in which identities are discursively formulated and expressed, sociology should consider architecture as a field of cultural contestation’ (Jones, 2006: 550). He thus suggests examining the practice of ascribing meaning through ‘collective identity discourses’ while buildings are being designed, planned and constructed.

The Materiality and Affectivity of Built Space

The most important impulses for the third line of thought in relating the social and material worlds have again come from France. Actor–Network Theory (ANT), primarily represented by Bruno Latour, asserts that not only human beings but also things have the capacity to act (Latour, 2005). Actor–Network Theory abandons the traditional concept of the social as social ties – however established – among human beings, and replaces it with the notion of associations between human and non-human actants. This renders obsolete the distinction propounded by modern science between the subject (which thinks and acts) and the object (which can be manipulated and acted upon). Latour advocates a flat ontology in which things, humans, symbols, rites and forms of sociation exist on the same level of being, influence one another and form actant networks and associations. Applied to architecture, this means that buildings have inherent action programs, which – beyond symbolic communication – can bring human actors to do something or refrain from doing something. From this point of view, in other words, buildings are neither social structures objectivized in material form (as Durkheim or Marx would put it), nor are they objects that take on meaning post factum through being used or discursively charged (as Jones argues). Latour stresses that buildings ‘act’: by separating an interior from an exterior, by guiding the flow of human beings and lines of vision, by permitting or preventing access by means of doors, and by arousing a sense of wellbeing or an impulse to flee. In recent years, this analytical approach has inspired a number of empirical studies and increasing interest in urban studies (Farias and Bender, 2010) and the sociology of design (Moebius and Prinz, 2012). One example is Albena Yaneva’s (2009) study of the design processes and working practices in Rem Koolhaas’s OMA architectural firm in Rotterdam. Yaneva describes OMA as a creative laboratory, throwing light in particular on how architects handle (and are handled by) models and various modeling materials. She argues that architects ‘learn’ from their models and – step by step in ever-new human–thing associations – produce designs for buildings.

The question that arises at the end of this (in complete) tour de force of the history of objects and buildings in social theory is: Why should we now attempt to apply Berger and Luckmann to architecture? In what follows, I will argue that there are two good reasons which make it worthwhile to think about material objects with the help of the ‘new sociology of knowledge’. Because of the broad theoretical foundation on which The Social Construction of Reality is based (combining the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz with the sociological arguments of Durkheim, Weber and Mead), first, it makes both a comprehensive and detailed sociological approach to objects and buildings possible, which, second, leads to a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches described above.

Consciousness and the Body

Inspired by Schutz’s reflections upon the ‘Leib’ (2003 [1937]: 111–114), I regard the human body as a duality (Steets, 2015: 77–92). As a physical and sensing body, a human being is simultaneously an experiencing subject, i.e. the center of his or her durée, from which he or she perceives the world sensually, and also an object within an external world bounded by space and time. A permanent problem for human beings is bringing the two facets of this dual body existence into a state of balance, something which, according to Schutz (1945: 540), is achieved by means of bodily movements. For instance, as I draw, I experience the movements of my hand as a bodily feeling, which I – at the same time – can observe visually as ‘movements of my hand’. As soon as forms of movement gain relevancy for our everyday life, they are subject to ‘habitalization’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967 [1966]: 70–71), which again results in relatively fixed ‘body techniques’ (Mauss, 1979 [1950]). Riding a bike is a good example of this - it is a body technique which implies using an artifact – a bicycle. It is learned by imitation and repetition and, when successful, results in skilled handling of the bicycle and a feel for the delicate balance required when riding on two wheels under varying circumstances. Thus it is not primarily the individual hand and foot movements carried out in a routine sequence on every bike ride which have to be updated again and again in order to ride skillfully, but rather the feel for this form of movement as a whole. The physical technique of bike riding thus simultaneously records itself in the body’s movement memory and is assigned a correlate in our consciousness, which leads to the fact that we not only do ride bikes but that we are also able to label this pattern of movement ‘bike riding’. The fact that people in different eras and different cultures have ridden bicycles in widely different ways demonstrates the fundamental cultural variability of body techniques (Mauss, 1979 [1950]). In summary, we can conclude that human beings do not interpret their environment solely in terms of cognitive processes (as Schutz showed in great detail), but also by interacting with their environment through both a physical and a sensing body. When fundamentally similar ways of thinking and views of the world are formed and – as I stress – are linked to similar bodily techniques and forms of movement, we can speak of a shared objective reality.

Drawing on Schutz in their work, Berger and Luckmann are interested in showing that this shared objective reality is socially constructed. According to them, this process arises out of a dialectic and ongoing interaction among the aspects of ‘externalization’, ‘objectivation’ and ‘internalization’ of meaning. Through acts of externalization, human beings establish a relationship with their bodies and their physical and social environments. They develop languages and concepts, as well as tools, things and buildings to make themselves ‘at home’ in the world. This does not happen in a ‘black box’ (as the Durkheimian position suggests), but always in concrete and predominantly contested contexts (as, for instance, Bourdieu emphasizes). ‘Objectivation’ is then the transfer of material and immaterial human products into a ‘reality that confronts its original producers as a facticity external to and other than themselves’ (Berger, 1990 [1967]: 4). That is to say, the built world, once erected, is a ‘social fact’, and as such it is indeed socially effective in the sense offered by Latour. Through ‘internalization’, human beings finally reappropriate this objective material and immaterial reality, ‘transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness’ (Berger, 1990 [1967]: 4), and – I would add – into bodily practices and modes of movement. But how does it all work in detail?

Externalization

According to Berger and Luckmann, externalization is an anthropological necessity: Human beings, in contrast to non-human animals, are born as an unfinished bundle of life, unsure in their instincts but open-minded as a result. They only become human by developing a relationship to their own body and to their physical and social environments which, however, are never finished but must be constantly reproduced. This means that humans must make a world for themselves, and during the course of the construction of this world, they ensure stability mainly by forming and controlling nature. As Berger puts it: ‘Biologically deprived of a man-world, [man] constructs a human world. This world, of course, is culture. Its fundamental purpose is to provide the firm structures for human life that are lacking biologically’ (Berger, 1990 [1967]: 6). For Berger, culture encompasses everything produced by humans, both material and immaterial, i.e. tools, artifacts and buildings, as well as language, ways of thinking and institutions. Berger defines society as an aspect of immaterial culture. It is the structuring order which comes into existence among human beings in the process of establishing a world, because humans jointly (i.e. in a certain relationship to other humans) invent tools, languages and ways of thinking. According to Berger, society and culture form an interactive dialectic relationship. This means that society is simultaneously the result of, and a precondition for, human production of culture. It is a result insofar as it comes into existence through the process of collective world-building activity, and is simultaneously a precondition for human production of culture in that it ‘structures, distributes and co-ordinates’ (Berger, 1990 [1967]: 7) all forms of human externalization, i.e. people’s material and immaterial behaviors.

Starting from the idea of a dialectic interaction between culture and society, I propose considering the making of architecture as a process that is both essentially creative on the one hand and framed by society on the other hand. When architects design buildings, they like to say they ‘solve problems’. As a rule, they do this in design studios in which solving a construction problem is seen as a creative challenge. There, shapes, colors and materials are combined, spaces and pathways laid out, models built, plans drawn up and experiments carried out with optical and acoustic effects. To secure this creative space upon which every form of design is based, architects temporarily abstract from the primary needs of the users of architecture and of underlying social conditions. They operate – using the words of Alfred Schutz – in a ‘finite province of meaning’ (1945: 551–555), a world of play and experimentation. On the other hand, they always operate in specific social contexts. The world of architecture can also be understood as a ‘sub-universe’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967 [1966]: 103), i.e. as a specific branch of knowledge within the reality of the everyday world, which came into existence through the division of labor and – in much the same way as a ‘field’ in the theory of Pierre Bourdieu (1993) – is hierarchically structured and stands in a specific legitimation relationship to society as a whole. Dana Cuff (1991) describes this architectural sub-universe as a ‘culture of architectural practice’, and shows that it is based on the certainty of a clear role structure (experts versus laypersons, teachers versus students, architects versus clients), that it has institutionalized rituals, which have a socializing function (above all, during university studies), and that it is based on highly specific knowledge, a knowledge not only about how architects solve problems architecturally, but also about the social frameworks determining design practice. In this way, the externalization of the built world can be very fruitfully understood and investigated as a dialectic interaction between creative design processes (culture) and its respective social framework (society).

Objectivation

With regard to the process of objectivation, the willful peculiarity of architecture can be illuminated especially well as phenomena of material culture. Objectivation is the ‘transformation of man’s products into a world that not only derives from man, but that comes to confront him as a facticity outside of himself’ (Berger, 1990 [1967]: 8). This means that the world, as soon as it has been built, is something that presents itself as universal and compulsive; it is – as Émile Durkheim put it – a ‘social fact’ capable of resisting the desire of its creator. Berger illustrates this using a tool as an example:

Man manufactures a tool and by that action enriches the totality of physical objects present in the world. Once produced, the tool has a being of its own that cannot be readily changed by those who employ it. Indeed, the tool (say, an agricultural implement) may even enforce the logic of its being upon its users, sometimes in a way that may not be particularly agreeable to them. For instance, a plow, though obviously a human product, is an external object not only in the sense that its users may fall over it and hurt themselves as a result, just as they may by falling over a rock or a stump or any other natural object. More interestingly, the plow may compel its users to arrange their agricultural activity, and perhaps also other aspects of their lives, in a way that conforms to its own logic and that may have been neither intended nor foreseen by those who originally devised it. (Berger, 1990 [1967]: 9)

Whereas Berger and Luckmann are primarily interested in the facticity of non-material objectivations, the quotation above clearly shows how it is possible to think about the social relevance of material objectivations in terms of the sociology of knowledge. Material objectivations achieve their effects in a different way from the immaterial, which derives from the simple fact that we can (and must) handle them physically. Buildings confront us in a way we can experience with our senses, and through their spatial organization, their form and atmosphere, they exercise on us an influence which we are aware of in our minds and have to deal with in a practical bodily way. Thus the knowledge that we acquire through direct contact with buildings is knowledge recorded in the body and simultaneously sedimented in the background of consciousness (Steets, 2015: 69–92).

Berger and Luckmann examine the reality emerging through objectivations in relation to the knowledge linked to this reality. They define knowledge as ‘the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967 [1966]: 13). The point of departure for their analysis is the question of why different societies live in different ‘realities’, so that, for example, one society has a very clear understanding of ‘freedom’ – and considers this to be self-evident – and another does not. From this they conclude ‘that specific agglomerations of “reality” and “knowledge” pertain to specific social contexts’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967 [1966]: 18). Therefore inter-subjective processes form the center of their analysis in which people attain their knowledge of the world, socially solidify it, control it and pass it on. What can we learn from this for architecture?

According to Berger and Luckmann (1967 [1966]: 13), the objective ‘certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics’ emerges in a graduated process of abstraction of concrete everyday situations. One important aspect of this process is ‘typification’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967 [1966]: 45). If interactive situations repeat themselves in everyday life, people begin to typify both these situations and the people involved as well as their actions. We then speak, for example, of a ‘paper presentation’, of a ‘speaker’, or about the fact that someone is acting in a ‘typically European’ manner. This works at the level of the built environment in a very similar fashion, since it cannot otherwise be explained why we distinguish ‘shopping malls’ from ‘cathedrals’ or ‘football stadiums’. Along the same lines as the typification of people and social situations, typical programs of actions are attached to typical buildings: We go to the ‘mall’ in order to shop (not to pray), and we cheer our team on in the ‘stadium’. Typifications of this kind are essential to orientation in everyday life and are maintained as long as they are not problematic. Here it becomes clear that we do not only acquire knowledge of the material world surrounding us by direct physical contact with it, but also through learning a language and thus the typical names for things and their implicit behavioral programs, which help us to orient ourselves in the world. This can be explained with the help of George Herbert Mead’s (1932) idea of the coordination of hand and eye presented above. Mead argues that we are in a position to recall, in our consciousness, the physical experience of interacting with an object (hand) when later we simply look at it (eye). In other words, if we have had physical experience of a building at some time, we can later actually ‘read’ it (and similar buildings). Through the transmission, in communication, of such experiences, buildings become accessible to us in which we have never been but which have a significance that is part of the social body of knowledge made available by communication processes (cf. Keller et al. (2013), which gives particular emphasis to the communicative aspects of world-building, and Christmann (2013) on the communicative construction of spaces).

Internalization

Internalization means more than simply understanding objective reality. As Berger (1990 [1967]: 4) states, internalization means ‘the reappropriation’ by human beings of objectively shared reality, ‘transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness’. Through internalization, the individual takes over society’s interpretation of the world as his or her interpretation of it. ‘Insofar as internalization has taken place’, Berger continues, ‘the individual now apprehends various elements of the objectivated world as phenomena internal to his consciousness at the same time as he apprehends them as phenomena of external reality’ (Berger, 1990 [1967]: 15). He explains this using the example of the course of an individual person’s life, the objective interpretation of which the person places in the context of a collectively acknowledged framework: Name, marital status, nationality, academic title, employment history – these coordinates are some of the official framework details for the life of an individual. In depicting their life in terms of these coordinates, individuals ‘will seek to validate [their] self-interpretations’ (Berger, 1990 [1967]: 13). In short, people are what makes them socially visible. Only when people have found their place in the social world does their own life seem ‘objectively real’. And its objectifying effect is reinforced as they take their socially predestined place in the social world. Berger and Luckmann emphasize that a complete congruence between the objective world of society and the subjective consciousness of the individual is no more than an abstract, empirically unprovable idea (of total conformity). Nonetheless, a society has to introduce its individuals to at least the most important contextual meanings in order to achieve a certain degree of stability (Berger and Luckmann, 1967 [1966]: 183–193).

Considering the internalization of material objectivations leads us to an aspect that only plays a minor role in Berger and Luckmann’s discussion, which, on the basis of the expansion of Schutz’s phenomenology presented above, I characterize as the encoding of the socially manufactured material environment in the body of the individual. Thus internalization, as I understand it, also means the incorporation of the objective world into the individual’s body. If internalization is successful, the social world is experienced as a feeling of consistency. The incorporation of objective reality into the consciousness and the body of a person takes place through socialization processes. Through these, individuals adopt a certain worldview which is assigned to them. At the same time, they learn how to deal with the physical-material objects of objective reality, i.e. they acquire certain body techniques and forms of movement. With successful socialization, the socially interpreted world becomes their own world and they can skillfully and naturally function there.

In the course of the same processes, individuals develop their own socially mediated identity. Berger describes the dual nature of this procedure in the following way: ‘The individual is socialized to be a designated person and to inhabit a designated world’ (Berger, 1990 [1967]: 16, original emphasis). This idea can be clarified by the socialization theory of George Herbert Mead. According to him, human beings are born into a socially interpreted world and encounter significant others who pass on knowledge of this world in the course of their interactions. In addition to the internalization of the social interpretation of the world into their own subjective consciousness and their individual body, people develop an idea of who they themselves are (identity) and where they are positioned in the social space. At the end of a successful process of socialization, human beings will know whether they are ‘male’ or ‘female’, whether they belong to the working class or the elite, and how appropriately to behave and operate. Briefly stated, and following Bourdieu: They develop ‘a sense of one’s place’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 466). This socially acquired ability for self-reflection is also the prerequisite for being able to deal with objects and buildings in a reflective manner. The bodily experience of their existence as an object acquired in the back-and-forth of pressure and counter-pressure has the effect that human beings are also capable of taking over the role of the thing (Mead, 1932: 119–139). The way they do this, i.e. what they see objects as, is, however, extremely variable, and differs not only from society, to society but also according to socio-structural characteristics such as gender, education and social class (Knorr Cetina, 1997).

A wonderful example of a class-specific incorporation of architecture can be found in the documentary film Koolhaas HouseLife (2008), which features Maison à Bordeaux, a luxury villa, designed by Rem Koolhaas for a French publisher. The film does not represent the villa as a series of breathtaking views and footage, a style commonly seen in films about architecture, but instead portrays it via the day-to-day perspective of a cleaning lady who works there. It shows how the cleaner washes, scrubs and vacuums, stops rain water from getting in, dusts the books in the library from a mobile platform in the middle of the house, and moves confidently, but at the same time aloofly, with her cleaning equipment, through the labyrinth of the house. Although, to help her cope with the house, the cleaning lady has developed special body techniques and forms of movement while carrying out her day-to-day cleaning activities, she does not feel at home there in the least. Instead, she is constantly afraid that the house will tip over, she finds the kitchen’s raw, cold concrete surfaces repugnant and unwelcoming, and again and again she finds herself at odds with the sophisticated technology of the house.

When this case study is interpreted against the background of the concept of ‘internalization’ developed here, it becomes apparent that the cleaning lady has incorporated the house as a cleaning woman – not, for example, as a devotee of architecture or somebody who lives in the house. As a cleaning woman, she is interested in a highly specific aspect of the house, to wit, how easily it can be cleaned. Because of her role, other aspects (e.g. modes of dwelling) are irrelevant. In addition, the day-to-day work in the house reminds her again and again of who she is (a cleaning lady) and of what her social standing is (working class). In other words, it is not only interactions with other people which shape our self-identification and ‘sense of place’ (as shown by Mead as well as by Berger and Luckmann), but also interactions with the material world of objects and buildings surrounding us.