ABSTRACT
As registered at the outset of this work, and illustrated throughout by the assortment of arguments braided through it, examinations of architecture in the political realm are as multifarious as they are intricate. It includes research into what we defined in the introduction as the architecture of the State – conceptualised and funded directly or indirectly by Government organisations, but also includes a plethora of work analysing architecture through more intricate politico-economic frames of reference. The more nuanced readings facilitated via such schemata have resulted in sophisticated considerations of architecture as a cultural-economic phenomenon of which the building as object can be seen as little more than a residual trace. However, as also hinted at in the introduction, these readings still commonly direct attention onto built form as the most visible and possibly most ‘important’ manifestations of the cultural-economic forces operative ‘below the surface’ of the built environment and, in that regard, are categorisable in a strict interpretation of this work's basic duality between ‘reified and represented’ considerations of architecture in the political domain, as primarily aligned with the former.
