A geography of big things

TLDR

The paper proposes conceptual tools for cultural geographers to study architecture, centering on the modernist residential highrise and offering a template for scholarship that engages the technical work of such structures. It applies material semiotics to interrogate the highrise’s global reach, uniformity, and scale, rethinks diffusionist explanations toward translation, and illustrates the approach with case studies of highrise suicides in Singapore and the Ronan Point collapse inquiry. The study concludes that the scale of a modernist highrise is produced relationally and in specific contexts, reshaping how geographers understand “big” and “global” built forms.

Abstract

This paper sketches some conceptual tools by which cultural geographers might advance geographies of architecture. It does so by thinking specifically about one architectural form: the modernist residential highrise, which is the ‘big thing’ of this paper. The paper draws on recent developments in material semiotics in order to interrogate features often uniquely associated with the highrise, such as its global reach, uniformity, and scale. The paper first rethinks how cultural geography has traditionally explained the movement of built forms, explicitly turning from diffusionist accounts to the notion of translation. It then offers a reconsideration of the way geographers might think about scale in relation to a ‘big’ and ‘global’ thing like the modernist highrise, arguing that scale is produced relationally and in specific contexts. Finally, it offers a template for cultural geographical scholarship which takes seriously the technical work entailed in things, like a highrise, materialising or de-materializing. It does so by way of two illustrative stories: one about the productive social science of highrise suicides in Singapore; the other about the destructive role of the inquiry into collapse of Ronan point in the UK.