ABSTRACT
Introduction Eminently visible, persistent and complex, buildings are artefacts people allow to enclose them rather than to control in their hands. As artefacts, they therefore bring into question control, human ability to create anew and alter the old. Bound up with control is the issue of authority: by whose standards, by what precedents, with whose skills, creation and alteration will occur. Since buildings commonly combine a public façade with a private interior, control and authority are often contested for the physical boundaries between public and private space, and their social borders. After all, buildings rise above human scale, and extend the social interaction that occurs within and around them. Paul Oliver has argued that indeed, they are of a ‘scale and complexity that exceeds all man’s other artefacts, demanding in many cases considerable investments of labour and resources’ (Oliver 1986: 113).
