Using language - speaking and understanding it - is a defining ability of human beings, woven into all human activity. It is therefore inevitable that it should be deeply implicated in the design, production and use of buildings. Building legislation, design guides, competition and other briefs, architectural criticism, teaching and scholarly material, and the media all produce their characteristic texts.
The authors use texts about such projects as Berlin's new Reichstag, Scotland's new Parliament, and the Auschwitz concentration camp museum to clarify the interaction between texts, design, critical debate and response.

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"Buildings and Power" shifts the focus of architectural debate from the dominant themes of art and technology to an analysis of meaning in terms of social relations. Buildings are primarily social objects - their forms provide answers to questions we ask about ourselves, questions of power, order, classification and function. Everything about a building has social meaning - its form, function and spatial structure are each capable of analysis. "Buildings and Power" focuses on the emergence of new building types during the critical period between the Enlightenment and the French and Industrial Revolutions. The range is divided between those which control relations between people directly - schools, institutions of various kinds, buildings for cleaning and hygiene, clubs, assembly rooms and hotels; those which reproduce knowledge - museums, galleries, institutes; and those used for production and exchange - mills, production utopias, markets, shops and exchanges.

Using language - speaking and understanding it - is a defining ability of human beings, woven into all human activity. It is therefore inevitable that it should be deeply implicated in the design, production and use of buildings. Building legislation, design guides, competition and other briefs, architectural criticism, teaching and scholarly material, and the media all produce their characteristic texts.
The authors use texts about such projects as Berlin's new Reichstag, Scotland's new Parliament, and the Auschwitz concentration camp museum to clarify the interaction between texts, design, critical debate and response.

The material and cultural world in which we now live perhaps represents the end of a process created out of the Enlightenment and the Industial Revolution. The battles fought over class, ideology and language are represented most clearly in the explosion of new building types during the Century of Revolutions.
Lavishly illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps and plans, Buildings and Power analyses architectural form, function and space to explore the reproduction and the subversion of power in the modern city.