Lipstdat - The Case of The Architecture Competition

Cultural Studies
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Can ‘art Professions’ Be Bourdieuean Fields Of

Cultural Production? The Case Of The Architecture
Competition
Hélène Lipstadt
To cite this article: Hélène Lipstadt (2003) Can ‘art Professions’ Be Bourdieuean Fields Of Cultural
Production? The Case Of The Architecture Competition, Cultural Studies, 17:3-4, 390-419, DOI:
10.1080/0950238032000083872
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238032000083872
Published online: 22 Oct 2010.
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05 rCUS 17-3&4 Lipstadt (JB/D) Page 390 Thursday, July 3, 2003 1:48 PM
CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S 1 7 ( 3 / 4 ) 2 0 0 3 , 3 9 0 – 4 1 8
Hélène Lipstadt
CAN ‘ART PROFESSIONS’

BE BOURDIEUEAN FIELDS
OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION?
THE CASE OF THE ARCHITECTURE
COMPETITION
Abstract
The difference between ‘artistic and literary fields’ and universes such as
architecture usually recognized as ‘art professions’ but which enjoy a far
lesser ‘degree of autonomy’ than such fields seemingly constitutes an
obstacle to the broader application of the notion of a ‘field of cultural
production’ sought by Bourdieu in his Rules of Art. The author of this paper
overcomes this obstacle by employing his notion of the ‘field effect’, with
the architecture competition serving as the test case. Following Bourdieu,
the author replaces the notion of profession with that of the field, for the
former is a representation fostered by professional groups themselves.
Architecture is a field, but, because architects require clients to construct
and realize their works, one unlike the artistic and literary fields, which
are markets of symbolic goods where ‘distinterest’ reigns and an autonomy
unthinkable elsewhere is enjoyed. However, much like artists and unlike
any other ‘professionals’, architects enter competitions, suggesting that
this practice is an analytically relevant indicator of the field effect. After
defining several of the elements of Bourdieu’s relational conceptual matrix
(field, illusio, collusion, doxa and space of possibles) and demonstrating
that the Baptistery competition in Florence (1401) conforms to Bourdieu’s
historical beginning point for the process of ‘autonomization’ of artistic
production, I examine a number of competitions from 1401 to 1989
(Berlin Jewish Museum) along with the general properties of competitions
(structure and organization, publication and exhibition of results, com-
petitors’ economically irrational behaviour, practices of designers and
Cultural Studies ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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DOI: 10.1080/0950238032000083872
AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 391
jurors and the associated universe of beliefs), analysing them as those of an

artistic field. It is concluded that when architects enter competitions,
architecture, at least provisionally resembles an artistic field, for there is a
field effect shown by a high degree autonomy, disinterest and the creation
of an upside-down world.
Keywords
Bourdieu; field of cultural production; architecture; competition; pro-
fessions; [Daniel] Libeskind
I want to analyse briefly the case of artistic practice, especially painting or

poetry (leaving aside architecture which is in some respects a very intel-
lectual or intellectualist art but which can anyway be understood according
to the schema I propose to describe literature).
(Bourdieu, 2002a:32)
The literary and artistic field, . . . this profession which is not really one.
(Bourdieu, 1996: 227)
B EGINNING WITH Les Heritiers of 1964 and until his death in January 2002,
the arts of photography, painting, drama and literature and the practices of
their producers were central to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. Not so
the art of architecture and architects, as distinguished from the habitat; his
interest in the latter never flagged. Although in 1980, he (1990: 9) partially
repudiated his now classic essay on the Berber house (1970) as ‘perhaps the last
work I wrote as a blissful structuralist’, Bourdieu did maintain the strong interest
in the habitat that he had manifested in his work on Algeria (see Figure 1)
(Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964), returning to the subject in 1990 in Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences Sociales (Bourdieu and Christin, 1990) and finally, in one of
his last books, Les Structures sociales de l’économie (2000b). But in this full-length
study of the dialectical relationship between the habitus and one’s place in
physical (and through the single-family dwelling, in social) space, architects
received only an occasional mention, and these were architects in their function
as state civil servants or as architect-builders. It was, in fact, in Perth, Western
Australia in 2000, on the occasion of the Habitus 2000 conference organized by
the Curtin University School of Architecture, Construction and Planning, that,
to my knowledge, Bourdieu (2002: 32) first explicitly invited us to consider
architecture as an artistic practice in the light of his sociology of culture.
‘The schema [he] propose[d] to describe literature’ is of course that of the
literary field, and more generally, the field of cultural production, the subject of the
392 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S
Figure 1 Pierre Bourdieu, photographer, c. 1959. Regroupment center under construction.

Cheraïa Algeria, cover of Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad Le déracinement. La crise
de l’agriculture traditonelle en Algérie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964. Courtesy Camera
Austria.
essay collection of the same name (Bourdieu, 1993) and of The Rules of Art
(1996).1 But an obstacle seemingly arises from within his own sociology that
impedes the direct extension of the notion of a field of cultural production to
architecture that has heretofore gone unremarked in the English language liter-
ature about architecture as a field, although not in the French literature (Mont-
libert, 1995; Biau, 1996; Violeau, 1999: 7–10), and that carries over to its
extension to other kinds of cultural production as well. It is the distinct, and
more, the diametric opposition, that he has repeatedly drawn between the
literary and art fields, described as ‘this profession which is not really one’, and
the professions, with their codified conditions of entry and state-regulated
licenses, something which architecture is commonly thought to be. These apparent
obstacles are overcome by employing his notion of the ‘field effect’, with the
architecture competition serving as the test case.
The distinction between the ‘pure’ fields of cultural production, namely

literature and painting, and the professions (in which Bourdieu sometimes
includes journalism) is fundamental, for it reflects the nature of power accumu-
lated by the agents in those respective universes and thus their relation to what
others might call the dominant class but that Bourdieu famously, and in contra-
distinction, calls the ‘field of power’.2 Thus he (1996: 221, 222) said: ‘all holders
of cultural capital – experts, administrators, engineers, journalists – may find
themselves granted . . . all forms of heteronomous power . . . as a counterpart
to the technical and symbolic services they render to the dominants (notably in
the reproduction of the established symbolic order)’, but they never acquire the
‘symbolic power’ that comes with the ‘collective’ and ‘symbolic’ capital attached
to say the word ‘writer’ or ‘philosopher’, notably ‘the right and the duty to ignore
the demands or requirements of temporal powers’ and to enjoy as ‘normal, if
not everyday . . . liberties and daring gestures . . . which would be unreasonable
or quite simply unthinkable . . . in another field’. The distinction comes down
to the ‘degree of autonomy’ possessed by the universe in question.
The problem is complicated by the fact that Bourdieu (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1992: 242–3) finds the whole notion of the profession to be a
specious one.3 It is, he holds, a self-characterization that masks the fact that it
was ‘socially produced only by superseding or obliterating all kinds of economic,
social and ethnic differences and contradictions’. The profession is ‘a folk concept
which has been uncritically smuggled into scientific language’, a ‘social product of
a historical work of construction of a group’, and a ‘representation’ produced by
that group’s ‘work of aggregation and symbolic imposition’ and then ‘surrepti-
tiously slipped into the science of this very group’. These efforts at representa-
tion are to be ‘take[n] seriously’ as evidence of what the notion of profession has
obliterated. Rejecting the term symbolically imposed, or ‘profession’, one can
bring to light the conflict and contradictions that mark the existence of a field
and call the profession what it is, namely a field.
Given the fact that architecture is commonly considered by historians and
sociologists (Larson, 1983; Dovey, 2002; Lipstadt, 2000) to be a profession and,
especially, a profession that is also or believes itself to be an art, students of
architecture who wish to take up Bourdieu’s invitation to understand architec-
ture as a field of cultural production might thus wonder just how and where to
begin. Since the degree of autonomy architecture possesses is commonly consid-
ered by those same historians and sociologists to be quite limited relative to art
and literature, the matter is further complicated. The answer is that one begins
with the notion of a field. This is true if Bourdieu’s concepts and his entire
approach are to be used in conformity with their creator’s intentions, for without
that notion, his other more familiar concepts like ‘cultural capital’ have no
purchase. Thus he (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 101, 228) wrote: ‘a capital
does not exist and function except in relation to a field’ and even more fundamentally,
the concept of the field must be used because it works as a ‘memory-jogger’,
much like a Post-it note, to remind us of the ‘first precept of method’, which is
not to take the world as it is found, in a ‘substantialist manner’, but to ‘think
relationally’. Finally, he tells us (2002: 31) that the habitus ‘must be used in
relation to the notion of a field’.
The problem we face is not unique to architecture and, indeed, may be
especially pertinent to students of cultural studies who stake out topics at the
margins of traditional disciplines and identify new modalities of intervention in
culture. How are we all to understand Bourdieu’s invitation (1996: 214) to use
his work on the literary field as a model, ‘to replace writer with painter, philoso-
pher, scholar, etc.’? We can rightly wonder who constitutes this ‘etc.’; what is the
nature of the field composed of those creators of culture who are not among
the above named; and whether these fields are fields of cultural production
(emphasis added).
The notion of a field is in fact made for this kind of innovative use, for it
‘promotes a mode of construction that has to be rethought anew every time . . .
[and that] forces us to raise questions . . . about the limit of the universe under
investigation’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 110). The benefits for the
researcher of constructing a field are not to be underestimated, for, as noted, it
obliges relational thinking. That thinking produces the kind of epistemological
rupture from preconstructions that disguise themselves as ‘common sense’ and
even ‘good scientific sense’, creating a ‘new gaze’ that Bourdieu (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1992: 251), not without generating some criticism, equates with ‘a
sociological eye’.4 Rupture frees up intellectuals for the reflexivity on which
Bourdieu insisted in a ‘quasi-monomaniacal’ fashion’, to quote his close collabo-
rator, Loïc J. D. Wacquant (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 42). Reflexivity is
the key to the maintenance of the autonomy that intellectuals, like artists, enjoy
and which Bourdieu in his last years made the basis of the development of a
programme for collective action by intellectuals who wish (and should) battle
the neo-liberal commodification of culture. He did this through many activities,
including the publication of his own journal, Liber, a journal intended to ‘bind
intellectuals together as a militant force’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 57, n.
104, Bourdieu’s unpublished introductory editorial, quoted by Wacquant).
But most importantly for our present concern, namely, with the extension
of the notion of a field of cultural production to fields less ‘pure’ than painting
and literature, relational thinking generates a rupture with the ‘intellectualist
bias’, which Bourdieu in his other works calls the ‘theoreticist bias’, ‘intellectu-
alism’ or the ‘scholastic fallacy’. As the names suggest, these biases are commonly
found in the realm of the scholar. Those who are in the grip of the scholastic
fallacy inject ‘a scholar’s mind into everyone’s head’, seeing everyone – artist or
ordinary person – as ‘homo calculans’, calculating man, of which ‘economic man’
is the most familiar, and most extreme, example. The fallacy inhibits analysis,
indeed, the very comprehension of practice, its logic and its mastery, obscuring
any understanding that what makes an ‘artist’ is a ‘manner of doing, . . . modus
operandi . . . style . . . mastery . . . habitus . . . “métier” . . . craftsmanship, . . .

practical mastery without theory’ (2002: 32–3).
Returning to the topic of architecture as a field of cultural production, the
exemplary application of a schema originally designed for the literary field to
architecture would consist of a field construction for a precise historical and
national case, for fields are by definition specific to times and places. It would
be, however, folly to undertake this extremely laborious empirical work without
some preliminary reconnaissance that would identify the salient characteristics
of that field in comparison with the Bourdouean locus classicus of the art and
literary field. Fortunately, here and there he indicated how this might be done.
One might begin by using the notion of a ‘field effect’ to anticipate where the
boundaries of a field might lie. A field effect is, in a certain sense, an instrument
born of his (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 100) fundamental definition of a field
as a ‘space within which an effect of the field is exercised, so that what happens
to an object that traverses that space cannot be explained solely by the intrinsic
properties of the object in question’. Although establishing the limits of a field
is among the most difficult of tasks, for it is, as we shall see, in the nature of fields
to have their boundaries constantly in play, he acknowledged that the evidence
of the diminishing of the effect can serve as a preliminary indicator that the limits
of a field have been reached. While there is no single measure of a field effect,
an old-fashioned tabulation technique that he (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:
230–1) recommended to his students serves as a good starting point. This ‘very
simple and convenient instrument of the construction of the object’ consists of
a comparative ‘square-table of the pertinent properties of a set of agents or institutions’
that reveals the properties that are unique to any one agent or institution when
compared to others. Employing it establishes the ‘analytically relevant . . . traits’
in their relational difference to other comparable institutions or individuals, and
the analytically relevant traits, when taken together, allow one to construct the
abstract microcosms, the spaces, or fields, that are the matter of which the social
world is made, avoiding the all preconstructed categories that Bourdieu often
described as ‘all too real’.
For architecture, one such analytically relevant trait is the architecture
competition. Competitions are those events in which entire buildings are
designed in a general manner, stopping short of construction drawings, by ‘two
or more architects for the same project, on the same site, at the same time’
(according to the American Institute of Architects), at great cost of labour,
presentation materials and opportunity costs, for clients who select – at rela-
tively little cost and risk to themselves – the best design for their purpose, most
often through the intermediary of designated independent experts constituted
as a jury (Lipstadt, 1989b: 9). Competitions occurred in antiquity and were
revived in the Italian Renaissance, after which they continued to be used on
occasion, always for building projects of exceptional prominence: the nine-
teenth-century Opéra in Paris (and its recent replacement at La Bastille); the
White House and the Capitol; and the Houses of Parliament in London and
Canberra, to mention just a very few. Today, in many European nations, they are
the required or preferred mode of selecting an architect for major public
buildings.
The competition is useful for our discussion. It is an institution unique to
architecture among state-regulated professions, but one shared with fine artists.5
First, while all other professionals compete, only architects enter formal compe-
titions. As was noted in the nineteenth century by E. M. Barry (Bergdoll, 1989:
43), the son of the winner of the competition for the British Houses of Parlia-
ment, ‘no one would think of inviting the Attorney General with eleven other
leaders of the bar, to work out a case . . . nor would anyone expect to obtain
the opinions and advice of twelve eminent physicians, in order that he might
choose one . . . Architects are expected to do what no other profession would
tolerate’. Second, fine artists since the Renaissance in Italy have entered compe-
titions and do so today, especially for public art projects.
As already noted, the artistic and literary fields enjoy a degree of autonomy
unequalled by any other. What precisely does Bourdieu mean by that? He (1993:
163–4, 182) holds that the artistic or literary field are ‘neither a vague social
background nor even a milieu artistique like a universe of personal relations
between artists and writers . . . [but] a veritable social universe where, in
accordance with its particular laws, there accumulates a particular form of capital
and where relations of force of a particular type are exerted’. The particular laws
operating in this field enables it to ‘function like a prism which refracts every
external determination’, including demographic, economic or political events.
It follows that without a grasp of that ‘ “refraction coefficient”, i.e. its degree of
autonomy’, it is impossible to understand works, relations in the field between
individuals, ideologies, and genres, or the field’s own historical evolution.
This brings us to the competition. Arguably, when architects enter compe-
titions, their practice does not conform to that of other ‘professions’, but does
resemble that of artists. We have to consider, therefore, that when architects
compete, architecture at least provisionally resembles an artistic field. However
paradoxical it might seem, the activity of competing, which on the face of it
would appear to be so disadvantageous to architects, constitutes a space where
they can operate as if they enjoy ‘a degree of autonomy’.
Autonomy is not, however, the only element of the artistic field present
when architects compete. As I will demonstrate, the ‘modern’ competition that
took form in the Early Renaissance shares its point of origin with that of the
artistic field. The competition obeys a particular law that is unique to the artistic
field, that of disinterest. Finally, works in competitions gain their public meaning
in the same manner, and through the same mechanisms, as do works in the
artistic field.
All architecture cannot, however, be reduced to the competition, so that the
question of architecture’s nature as a field of cultural production is only resolved
insofar as the practice of competing is concerned. But competitions offer us a

window on a type of cultural production that can display varying degrees of
autonomy. The value of the competition is that it makes this one state visible in
an exaggerated way and thus provides a model for the identification of similar
states in other fields of production that are similarly ‘impure’.
However, architects do more than ‘tolerate’ competitions; they seek them
out, even as they recognize and bemoan their lottery-like quality. The naturaliz-
ation of the economic irrationality of the disproportionate ratio of the compet-
itor’s effort to likely gain requires explanation, an explanation that can be found
in their commitment to architecture as a field, or to what Bourdieu terms their
‘belief in the game’, or illusio.We emphasize the illusio because it is the ‘bedrock’
(1996: 274) of a field of cultural production, and therefore vital to our concerns.
Moreover, it is unaccountably omitted from most exegeses of Bourdieu’s soci-
ology and, indeed, rarely mentioned in the ever-increasing commentary on his
notion of fields of cultural production. But, as we have heard him argue for the
habitus and capitals, the illusio acquires its meaning only in relation to these more
familiar terms and to the field. Accordingly, these concepts must be briefly
reviewed here, and there is no better starting point than Bourdieu’s favourite
metaphor of the board game.
Bourdieu’s game
According to Bourdieu, social space is made up of many fields, which he
frequently compares to games. There are players (agents) who have not created
the game (field), although they enter into it voluntarily, committing themselves
to it (interests, investments, illusio, libido) and to the foundational value of the stakes
without ever questioning them (doxa). As a result of this unquestioned collective
commitment (collusion), the stakes are produced by the very competition in
which they are participating (the production and reproduction of the field). Players
possess chips valid only in a specific game (specific capitals) and trump cards that
are valid in every game (fundamental capitals), but these cards can change in value
from game to game (a stock of economic capital is especially useful to the
aspiring professional athlete in an individual competitive sport, say in tennis, but
of much less use to the aspiring team player, say, a football player). The player’s
stock of cards and chips establishes her place in the game ( position in the field).
The stock works together with the experience of the game underway and other
games played by the player that have conditioned her and that have provided her
with the schema through which she perceives the world (the habitus, or disposition,
operating as the social, embodied and as a cognitive construction). The conditioning
and those schema orient – but do not determine or predestine – her strategies and
the style of play, as well as her actual moves (position-takings, stances).
Let us examine some of the most important aspects involved in this game
analogy that will be used in our subsequent analysis: field, illusio, collusion and
doxa, and the manner in which they manifest themselves in fields of cultural
production.
Fields
Fields are an abstraction used to apprehend and describe the relatively autono-
mous social microcosms that in relationship to each other make up social space,
the relational notion that replaces the reified one of society in Bourdieu’s soci-
ology. Fields are structured configurations or spaces of objective relations
between both positions and position-takings and each other. Positions, both formal
jobs and tasks and roles, are objective, being characterized by the capital or the
amount and species of real and symbolic resources needed to achieve and
maintain positions and which endow a given position with the weight needed to
dominate other positions, or lacking that weight, to be dominated by them.
Position-takings are the stances, practices and expressions of agents, including
artistic expressions. The field is in itself dynamic, because any change in the
location of or weight within a field of any one position and its holder, be it agent
or institution, or a change in any of the stances/position-takings shifts the
positions of all the others and the extent and shape of the boundaries of the field.
Each field obeys a specific logic and recognizes specific stakes as valid (and these
are valuable in no other). To think a field, think of the changes that occur within
an entire discipline when an ‘academic star’ decamps for another university; the
perceived rankings of all the self-styled comparable departments – professors
and graduate students alike – as well as of the abandoned and accepted one are
all objectively transformed. What is at stake exists objectively for all concerned;
and, yet, with the exception of the improved salary of the star in question, they
are incomprehensible or even inexistent to anyone outside of the discipline (the
academic field).
The most general thing that can be said about a field is that it is a contest for
authority over the field itself; without this struggle, there can be no field.
Structured by contests for domination or power, both symbolic and real, fields
are arenas in which everything is always at play and up for grabs, including the
shared principles that define the identity of the field and that are used to establish
the boundaries that distinguish it from others, which are themselves matters of
perpetual dispute and rarely fixed by law.
Illusio, collusion and doxa

The illusio, derived from the word ludes (meaning game), is also called libido.
The illusio, most frequently defined as a ‘belief in the game’, is possessed by the
player who is invested – in both the economic and psychoanalytic sense – in and
committed to the game, even ready to die for its stakes, as, say, a geometrician
might be ready to die for a theorem. The illusio goes hand-in-hand with an
unconscious, invisible, collective collusion, a readiness to be ‘taken in by the
game’ that comes as the result of the very adhering to the belief in the game and
valuing its stakes. The doxa is ‘a set of cognitive and evaluative presuppositions
whose acceptance is implied in membership itself’ (2000a: 100). Indeed, the
illusio is necessary for the functioning of the game or field that produces it, for
this collusion, an ‘interested participation in the game’, of the agents is ‘the root
of the competition which pits them against each other and which makes the game
itself’ (1996: 228).
The field of cultural production

As the locus of struggle for authority gained through the monopoly of the
cultural capitals specific to it, the field of cultural production has all the charac-
teristics of other fields and some that no others possess. It possesses as we have
seen more autonomy (but still only relatively) than other fields, especially in its
position relative to the economic field and the field of power, and a logic that
inverts that of the economic field. The logic of this anti-economic economy, also
called the ‘market of symbolic goods’, is founded on those goods’ special dual
nature, ‘their two-faced reality, commodity and . . . symbolic object’, with these
values being relatively independent of each other.The field of cultural production
is ‘so ordered that those who enter into it have an interest in disinterest’
(Bourdieu, 1993: 113, 140). In this upside-down economic world (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992: 98), the ‘law of material profit’ that prevails in the economic
field, that ‘universe within which, as we commonly say, “business is business”’,
is denied but not disowned and disinterestedness prevails and is rewarded.
Disinterestedness exists whenever an action is taken in accordance with the
field’s definition of its highest purpose, and despite the sacrifice incurred in doing
so.
The object of competing in this field – the stakes in this particular and
peculiar game – is control over the categories of evaluation that determine the
legitimacy of works within that field, establish criteria of membership, define
boundaries and set the rules whereby, in modes acceptable to the field’s notion
of disinterestedness, the cultural capital gained can be converted to other forms
of capital in use outside of it and valued by the field of power (as when achieve-
ment in the academic field is converted to expertise and, even more profitably,
to punditry, which is one of the many reasons why Bourdieu in On Television and
Journalism (1998) and elsewhere (2002b: 265) is particularly apprehensive about,
if not downright dismissive of, ‘television dons’ and other ‘heteronomous
producers’).
A special characteristic of the structure of this field is its subdivision into

two poles. One is situated at the most relatively autonomous part of the field,
and one at the more heteronomous, or the least relatively autonomous extreme,
closest to the economic and power fields and therefore sharing some of their
beliefs. The more autonomous one is the subfield of restricted production, or of
‘producers for producers’, in which ‘pure’ art works are produced relatively
independently of demand and are most easily understood by those steeped in the
history of the field and especially of this subfield. In this subfield success is
expected to be deferred or to be gained indirectly by making a public for the
work without any concessions to that public. The less autonomous one is the
subfield of large-scale production, or of production for pre-established markets in
which commercial art works are produced for the public and in response to
demand; the emphasis is on the distribution of those works; and where success
is expected to be immediate and in a quantifiable form.
Another important element in the field of cultural production is the ‘space
of possibles’, also frequently described as ‘the problematic’.6 It is Bourdieu’s (1993:
176) replacement term for the far-too-vague notion of artistic or literary tradi-
tion, and is ‘in short, all that one has to have in the back of one’s mind in order
to be in the game’. This space (1996: 235) is constituted by the system of already
realized position-takings, a shared heritage that has been collectively constituted,
but which transcends the individual agents who share it. It offers the ‘possible uses’
of ‘things “to be done”, “movements” to launch . . . established position-takings
to be “overtaken” and so forth’ as well as ‘bold strokes of innovation or of
revolutionary research’ that have as their ‘counterparts’ limitations or
‘constraints’ within which and against which these objective opportunities will be
perceived and transformed into works. In other, more philosophical, words, the
space allows for both freedom and necessity. The fact that the space of possibles
is pregnant with a finite but universe-size range of possibilities and constraints is
one reason that artistic position takings are not predetermined: entering into the
literary or artistic field, every agent receives in exchange for accepting the codes
of conduct and expression, that is, the habitus of that field gained through long
apprenticeship, access to the same universe of possibilities that provides both the
definitional grammar of everything that can be possibly conceived and the ability
to invent endlessly within the limits established by grammar, all of which is
internalized, rather than consciously known.
Bourdieu’s notion of artistic change, indeed, of the agent’s ability to
conceive of change, almost reverses conventional ideas of the romantic genius,
who innately possesses a gifted eye, shared by no one else, for the impossible or
for that which lies outside convention and will shatter all past ways of perceiving
the world. Instead, Bourdieu argues that the possibility of radical innovation
exists in the form of potentialities within the space of already accomplished
possibles. The more an agent has taken the field’s space of possibles as his or her
mode of conception and evaluation to heart and the more it is incorporated into
the agent’s perceptual schema, the more likely that agent is to perceive those
gaps within the structure that offer the greatest potential for innovation. They
are apprehended not so much as gaps to be filled and opportunities to be seized,
e.g. as rational, calculated, action or, to the contrary, as a unique creative vision,
but rather as commands meant for that agent and for that agent alone.7
Extremely important as well for field of cultural production is the illusio. It
is thanks to the illusio of agents in the artistic and literary fields, namely their
belief in the existence and value of an autonomous aesthetic, or, in other words,
of a purposeless work of art, that such a field exists; and it is thanks to that illusio
(which we remember is also an investment in the psychoanalytic sense) that the
field, by its very functioning, creates the aesthetic disposition required for its
continued functioning. For Bourdieu, the illusio produces the charismatic ideology
of creation that endows a single creator with the quasi-magical power capable of
transubstantiating objects and actions into symbolic goods. By thereby fixing
attention on the ‘apparent producer’, the illusio prevents the asking of the
‘forbidden question’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 166–7): who creates the creators? The
illusio thus blocks any understanding by agents in the field that it is the field –
the fullest complement of publishers, curators, critics, dealers and preface-
writers as well as the artists – which creates the creator and the creator’s power
to transubstantiate material objects into art.
Having examined those elements of the conceptual matrix most relevant to
the architecture competition, we can now look at its history, operations and the
beliefs architects share about both. In common with most historians of art,
Bourdieu (1993: 112–13) sees Florence of the fourteenth century, or the early
Renaissance, as the place and time when the process of ‘autonomization’ of
artistic production began in the West. Then, members of craft guilds began to
form a category that was recognized by patrons and themselves as socially
distinctive, a social change that went hand in hand with the ‘affirmation of a truly
artistic legitimacy, i.e. the right of artists to legislate within their own sphere –
that of form and style – free from subordination to religious or political inter-
ests’. Unlike many art historians, however, he (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:
94) believes that the Quattrocento was only the beginning point and not a once-
and-for-all ‘emancipation’ of the artist. It was only after several centuries and in
the context of radical social and political change that a field was constituted and
that there was the ‘genesis . . . of the space in which this character [the artist] can
exist as such’. By that point, a ‘universe of belief’ constituted around the law of
disinterestedness, or the now familiar inverted economic world, had formed. In
his chosen example of France, this process did not culminate until the second
half of the nineteenth century.
Joseph Jurt (2001: 91), who has written extensively on Bourdieu and the
literary field, has recently pointed out that the relationship between autonomy
and its opposite, heteronomy, is dynamic and that ‘it is . . . not exclusively total
autonomy which constitutes the field. There is an effect of the field as soon as
the process of autonomy begins’. Pertinently, Jurt cites Christian Jouhaud’s

evidence that field effects existed in the seventeenth-century French literary field
in the absence of full, or even substantial autonomy; for French writers enjoyed
a degree of autonomy when compared to other cultural producers and yet an
ambiguous social status, being both men of letters and of men of the court,
dependent on the ruler. Jurt’s historical example is consistent with Bourdieu’s
description of the ‘refraction coefficient’ as an indication of a ‘degree of
autonomy’, suggesting that autonomy does admit to variations in intensity.
To what degree, then, can architecture be said to be autonomous? The fact
that a different degree of autonomy differentiates architects from painters has
been repeatedly noted in historical (Van Rensselaer, 1890; Janson, 1995) and
sociologically-informed studies of the profession (Lipstadt and Mendelsohn,
1979; Larson, 1983). The view goes as follows: while architects can conceptu-
alize or design a building without clients, they cannot realize, unlike painters,
those designs without them. It is for that reason that the eighteenth-century
architect and artist, J. B. Piranesi, spoke of ‘sculpture and painting’s advantage
vis-à-vis architecture’ and the nineteenth-century architect, theorist and archi-
tectural publisher E. E. Viollet-le-Duc wrote that ‘when an architect builds a
monumental building, he is not considered the owner of his work as the artist is
of his painting, he does not possess it . . . and cannot remove it from circulation
as if it were a book or a statue’ (Lipstadt, 1989a:130, 109). It should be said that
this view is apparently not shared by contemporary twentieth-century architects;
the Italian Marxist Aldo Rossi, the neo-liberal Rem Koolhaas and the more
pragmatic Herzog & De Meuron, among others, have all maintained that archi-
tecture (or at least their architecture) is autonomous. It is to that watershed
moment of the Early Renaissance in Central Italy when artistic autonomy first
appeared that, following Bourdieu himself, we must return for a closer look.
Unbeknownst to Bourdieu, what might be called the ‘ur-competition’ was part
of that initial movement toward autonomization.
The architecture competition, or 1401 and all that

It was in Italy in the Trecento, as we have argued elsewhere (Lipstadt, 1989a),
following the demonstration of A. M. Kosegarten (1980), that the individuals
who were called architects began to benefit from the same affirmation of artistic
legitimacy that Bourdieu noted for painters and did so in large part due to
architectural competitions. It was then that Italian competitions of the Middle
Ages – which had really been wars between bidders decided solely on the basis
of cost – turned into a struggle for artistic pre-eminence modelled on the
literary agons of antiquity, and, she argues, introduced those artists to the
attitudes and practices that would secure their ‘emancipation’ from the craft
guilds. Competitions began to be employed by the independent communes of
central Italy for buildings that would assert their superiority over rival
communes. The self-aggrandizement and display of wealth previously pro-

hibited by Church strictures at the civic level was now legitimated at a slight
remove: the merchants who were the patrons of these buildings were also the
judges of the competitions in which civic superiority was asserted. At the
moment of this social transformation, as new procedures for judging future
projects were introduced, buildings were selected based on drawings, and
designers had to adjust their practices to create new modes of representing
future work that enabled them to compete for distinction (in the sense used by
Bourdieu) through distinctive graphic styles.
Soon after, in Florence in 1401, the humanist scholar who had been chosen
to judge the competition for the sculpted bronze doors of the cathedral baptis-
tery explicitly evoked the ancient literary agon. Henceforth in Florence,
according to Kosegarten (Lipstadt, 1989a: 121), ‘an intellectual conception
tinged deeply with a humanist sobriety and aspiration . . . [allowed] the artist
. . . [to] aspire to, and win, fame as an individual in his own right and his own
dignity’. Because the two leading contenders offered radically opposing solutions
to the problem of both pictorial space and narration that were, in turn, radically
different from the medieval solutions to both, the contest acquired an excep-
tional significance for contemporaries, and the submissions of Lorenzo Ghiberti
and Fillipo Brunelleschi were not only exhibited as works of art in public, but
preserved, something unheard of heretofore.
This first ‘modern’ competition introduced many of the elements that
became constituent parts of the process: the allocation of the power of selection
from patron to outside advisers chosen for their aesthetic expertise and thus for
their discernment in matters of artistic competence; the side-by-side compar-
ison of near-identical representations, in this case, models; and the use of those
representations not only to preview the larger scale work to come, but as the
basis for assessment of competence. As Barry Bergdoll (1989:23) has brilliantly
argued, this new type of competition was grounded in the idea that ‘scale models
or graphic representations can be discussed, revised, compared and ultimately
put into competition with any number of other proposals . . . abstractly and
separately from the building process’. This supposition is itself grounded in the
Renaissance notion that design, ‘disegno’, is a form of cognition, of mental work,
the form that is common to all the arts and absent in the crafts (Wilkinson,
1977). Historians of architecture agree that arguments based on disegno and on
the model of the Roman architect drawn from rediscovered ancient texts
provided a conceptual justification for differentiating architecture from the craft
of building masons, which it resembled the most. But the role of the competition
process in helping to initiate a dialectic of distinction between communes and
patrons as well as the model that it provided for artists and architects, as
described by Kosegarten, cannot be discounted.
Competitions again contributed to autonomization when they came to be
employed during the French Revolution as a substitute for the patronage power
of the dissolved royal academies and as a manifestation of the philosophy of

democracy, natural law and genius that had helped lead to the academies’
dissolution, as Bergdoll has shown. The contemporaneous use of competitions
by the fledgling American democracy for its primary representational buildings
was, however, a mainly utilitarian solution in a country with a miniscule number
of ‘architects’ and no royal academy to overthrow (Lipstadt, 1991). It was,
however, the nineteenth century that was the great age of competitions,
especially in Victorian England. As Bergdoll (1989) has shown for the UK,
France, Germany and Austria, and Sarah Landau (1989) for the USA, their use
and their reform served as a platform for the emergence and imposition of a self-
styled ‘profession’. In France, a country governed by an academic competition-
based system that controlled access to national government careers and thus to
all commissions for national public buildings, the architectural press functioned
as a legitimate alternative professional space and it militated for the use and
reform of architecture competitions. The reforms sought included: a neutral
referee, usually a professional architect; binding deadlines; and anonymous
submissions. The very style of architectural representation also changed;
perspective views, whose illusionistic effects were especially appealing to
amateurs unable to decode conventional architectural drawings were eliminated
in favour of the standard plans, elevations and sections of architectural design.
Reformers ultimately instituted professional control over the contest from
beginning to end, establishing procedures that were meant to ensure that the
projects could be compared equitably and judged on intrinsic architectural
qualities, qualities best discerned by professionals. Since World War II, numerous
European countries have come to require competitions for their major public
buildings. In the USA, where they remain rare, arguments are continually made
for their greater use, especially when a ‘polling’ of architectural opinion is
considered necessary. At this writing, a competition is underway for the
memorial to those who died at the Pentagon on September 11th, and discussions
with family members of the World Trade Center victims about the use of a
competition for the monument at ‘Ground Zero’ are on-going.
The history of the competition is also the history of beliefs peculiar to it,
with four predominating and forming a ‘universe of belief’. Beginning with the
first work of art history, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors
and Architects of 1550, competitions acquired a quasi-mythic association with
opportunities for advancement and for design innovation, and as the birthplace
of new standard-bearers and catalyst for new models that were supposed to be
impossible without them. The myth of the power to unveil unsuspected talent
was initiated by the very same Baptistry doors competition, since both the
selected winner, Ghiberti, and the runner up, Brunelleschi, were unknowns.
Fabled ‘dark horse’ victors subsequently entered the annals of competition
history, as in the following five examples all drawn from large competitions with
anonymous entries:
• In Napoleon III’s France in 1860, Charles Garnier won the Paris Opera
competition at age 36, a youthful age in a profession in which what Bourdieu
would call the social ageing was slow.8 Moreover, Garnier trounced the
favourite of the imperial household, E. E. Viollet-le-Duc, who was the one
who had convinced his patrons of the necessity of the competition.
• In England, the 1839 triumphal design of a concert hall (St George’s Hall)
by the 24-year old Harvey Elmes in his hometown of Liverpool not only
confirmed the myth of youth and opportunity, but also added that of the ‘local
boy-makes good’ at the expense of the older and better connected London
architects.
• In the USA, the young Eero Saarinen secured the design for what is now
known as the Arch in St Louis in 1947–48 in one of the first efforts he made
independently of his renowned father, Eliel Saarinen.
• Maya Lin was declared victor of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Wash-
ington, DC) competition in 1980–81 while still an undergraduate in an
admittedly highly unusual competition open to professionals and non-profes-
sionals alike.
• In 1989, the commission for the politically and programmatically difficult
‘Extension to the Berlin Museum to include the Jewish Museum’ (see Figure
2) was won by the 43-year-old Daniel Libeskind, an artist-architect whose
lack of a built oeuvre gave him the social age of a beginner.
Figure 2 Hélène Lipstadt, photographer, 1998. The Garden of Exile, Berlin Jewish Museum,
Daniel Libeskind, architect. Courtesy, author.
Each competition was won with a design that was widely acclaimed for its
innovative quality, and, with the exception of Saarinen’s Arch (Lipstadt, 2001),
the winning entries are now considered canonic or, in the case of Libeskind’s
museum, critically successful, works of architecture.
This belief associating the competition with both opportunity and design
innovation, initiated in 1401 and recorded by Vasari in 1550, remains potent into
the twenty-first century, finding supporters both among the architects who
represented the business orientation of architecture and among teaching archi-
tects, who are perceived or perceive themselves as designers first and foremost,
as well as across stylistic divides. Thus, the traditionalist architect, H. R.
Goodhart-Rendel (Bergdoll, 1989: 45), president of the Royal Institute of
British Architects, proclaimed in 1938 that ‘now the competition, as things are,
is the only door that can always be kept open to the unknown man who has
something to give that the world of architecture needs’. In the same year, in the
USA, Talbot Hamlin (Lipstadt, 1989c: 79), an architect-historian favourable to
modernism voiced the same idea when he said that ‘competitions lead inevitably
to experimentation in design’ (meaning: modernism). The most revered of
American modernist architects of the second half of the twentieth century, Louis
I. Kahn (Lipstadt 1989b: 10), who was famously given to Delphic pronounce-
ments, exalted the competition in such a manner: it is an ‘offering to architec-
ture’.
A second, if somewhat discordant, belief holds that ‘losers’ often actually
win, something that occurs when a design pregnant with stylistic change often
proves too innovative for first place but too good to be ignored and is designated
as a runner-up. From there, it goes on to earn critical laurels from contem-
poraries and historians, becoming the ‘true winner’ in the eyes of history. This
conviction, too, has its foundation in the Baptistery door competition, where the
far more radical design by Brunelleschi, rejected by the judges, was later deemed
the ‘beginning’ of Renaissance sculpture and pictorial space. Another fabled
rejection is that of Eliel Saarinen’s proposal for the Chicago Tribune Tower
(1923), placed second by the judges but immediately hailed in print by Louis
Sullivan, the aged designer of Chicago’s most famous early tall buildings, as the
‘pearl’ that the jury had thrown away.
Counterbalancing, but not contradicting, these two beliefs are two aspects
from the dark side of competition history: that of their onerous cost, dispropor-
tionate to the chance of success, and their well-deserved association with proce-
dural irregularities. Perhaps no one was more acerbic on the subject than the
experienced competition referee, William Robert Ware (Lipstadt, 1989b: 15),
who, in 1899, described competitions in this way:
if extensive, . . . [they] cost the profession hundreds of dollars, most of

which falls upon men who can ill afford the loss . . . Fifty or a hundred
sets of drawings are submitted for judgment, . . . [but] all but one [will]
have labored in vain . . . Thus the profession grows and travails . . . under
the strain of sacrifices . . . No wonder the system . . . has come to be
regarded as a sort of nightmare, as an incubus or vampire . . . Only the
winner is satisfied with the way the system works, and even he is not eager
to risk it again.
When Ware concluded that there were, in the end, only two customary opinions
among architects about competitions, that they were either necessary evils or
unnecessary ones, he was alluding to the fourth prevailing belief, their associa-
tion with inequitable treatment of the competitors and even the designated
winner by jurors and clients, or both. Historians of nineteenth-century compe-
titions, especially those in Great Britain, have amply documented how frequently
this belief was substantiated by events.
Ware (Lipstadt, 1989b: 15) allows us to return to our initial proposal of the
correlation of the beginning of the process of artistic autonomization and the
1401 competition. Even this unbridled critic of competitions saw them as the
perpetuation of that moment when architects ceased, in his words, to be ‘stone
masons’ and became ‘sculptors’ and when architecture became an art. It is
because their work is art and should be judged by the criteria of quality and not
cost, that he asserted that architects have been and are still ‘asked to show who
could do the best work before they were allowed to begin’. In short, for Ware,
the competition reaffirms the historic connection between architects and the
newly ‘emancipated’ Renaissance artists, and that association explains and justi-
fies the existence of the necessarily or unnecessarily evil competition.
We can now complete our preliminary reconnaissance work and bring to
bear Bourdieu’s relational matrix of concepts on the historical material
reviewed. (The question of the specific roles of habituses and capitals must be
bracketed, since they exist and function only in relation to a specific field in a
specific historical moment, for which that field must already be constructed.)
Before taking up our analytical task, however, there is one more historic and
ongoing connection between competitions and the artistic field to be noted. It
is their intertwined history with published books and exhibitions. Here
Bourdieu’s (1993: 113–14) observations about the nineteenth-century French
artistic and literary field can be extended to architecture. He is among the many
students of that period who view the multiplication of books and newspapers in
France as the ‘development of a veritable culture industry’, which he claims
conditioned the ‘development of an impersonal market’ for art. As this market
grew, and as other related developments in the habituses and capitals of writers
and artists occurred within these markets, ‘writers and artists found themselves
able to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art to the status of a simple article
of merchandise and, at the same time, the singularity of the intellectual and
artistic condition’.
But it is especially in the field of restricted production, characterized by a
closed circuit of production and consumption, that Bourdieu (1993: 119) places
the making of the public meaning of artistic and literary works in a process that
he has called ‘‘‘publication” of the work, that is, its becoming a public object’. In
somewhat less abstract terms, he means that the meaning of the work originates
in the objective relations surrounding the publication of the work, and that all
parties to the making of public meaning – publisher and author, dealer and artist
– introduce into the work their own relations in that process of production and
consumption, themselves determined by the agents’ relative position in the
field.9
Again, the history of the connection of competitions with exhibitions and
books begins with the Baptistery Doors competition. Since 1401, when the
models of the two sculpted doors entered into competition were put on exhibit
and, since 1550, when Vasari recounted the story of that competition in his Lives
of the Artists, competitions have gone hand in hand with the display of the
competitors’ drawings in gallery-like settings and with the publication of the
results. Glossing a demonstration that I have made elsewhere (Lipstadt and
Mendelsohn, 1979, Lipstadt, 1989a), it can be argued that since the Renaissance,
publication, and especially illustrated publication, worked to lessen the differ-
ence between architecture and painting, ‘rob[bing] the latter of [its] advantages’,
as Piranesi claimed for his illustrated books. Publishing, and especially publica-
tions with illustrations, give architects the ability to build unrealized designs, to
rectify and ameliorate built ones, and to frame and move them as if they were
paintings and not someone else’s real estate. Most essentially, it allows them to
repossess the creation they had sold to their clients, asserting both ownership
and authorship of the designs and thereby gaining for their authors a semblance
of aesthetic autonomy. In short, they put the signature on the building. The
invention of the illustrated press for architects in France in 1840, and its
reinvention elsewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century, coincided
with this development. Where before the ‘advantage’ of which Piranesi wrote
was reserved to architects-authors, now a far, far larger number of architects
than heretofore had access to literal publication, and it became possible for any
and every building to be ‘signed’ as if it were a painting.
As for publication in the special sense it takes on in a field of restricted
production, we are reminded that all competition entries are designed as much
for the jurors as for the site and the programme, and thus in anticipation of their
consumption by specific judges. Moreover, entries aside from the winning one
have no other possible public existence except as illustrations in a book or
drawings in an exhibition. In competitions since the nineteenth century, it is not
uncommon for competitors to discount the possibility of winning and submit
the drawings that will draw attention qua drawings in the final publication or
exhibition. The competitors’ objective position as losers is thus inscribed in the
project itself.
The competition and the operations of the field

The competition neither makes architecture into a field of cultural production,
nor does it do away with the need to construct a field in its historical specificity.
But it does demonstrate that architecture possesses a fairly significant degree of
autonomy and that when a competition is taking place, it closely resembles a field
of cultural production. Let us look at this in detail.
Competitions are constituted as a structured relational configuration of
objective relations between and among positions and position-takings. The objec-
tive positions are the basic jobs of client, competitor, juror, professional advisor,
technical juror, etc. The position-takings or stances are made up of the compe-
tition programme, designs, jury report and the content of the subsequent critical
and polemical pronouncements. There will be a play of forces between these
positions, concomitantly with the play of forces between the individual position-
takings of their holders as they vie to win, choose the winner, or consecrate him
or her or, as occurred in Chicago in 1923, consecrate the runner-up. For
example, where the programme is highly technical, the technical jurors or a
juror with technical rather than architectural expertise will struggle with the
other jurors and can gain the upper hand. When, to the contrary, the chosen
project is deemed to be especially innovative formally and symbolically, as was
the Libeskind project for the Berlin Museum, enthusiastic aesthetic critical
commentary will carry the day and jurors with a special interest in the resolution
of practical problems, such as the adequacy of the building to the programme,
will ultimately acknowledge the existence of such problems only by denying that
they exist. The struggle for the authority to produce and reproduce the compe-
tition as a field is played out in inter-competition relations. It is present in the
long history of competition reform, which is filled with struggles to establish the
rules of admission and of judgment and to create and enforce negative sanctions
for infractions of those rules. As in any field, these struggles have been the basis
of its transformation. Thus, Bergdoll (1989: 40–4) describes how the fledgling
professional organization of British architects, whose members disdained even
the prestigious competition for the Houses of Parliament because competitions
smacked of the market and interfered with the autonomy they believed architects
should enjoy, were obliged, over the course of the nineteenth century, to take
up the cause of regulation, regulation that pushed the organization toward
advocating the professional rather than the more autonomous artistic model for
the architect.
Because of the competition’s historical and functional association with publi-
cation and exhibitions, there are positions in the field of the competition that are
the same as those of other sub-fields in the field of cultural production, including
both actual jobs (the editors of the book, the curators of the exhibition) and roles
(critics and dealers in architects’ drawings). Analogously to the literary field, in
which established genres are also position-takings, there are genres of responses
to programmes, although these are far less formalized than are literary genres.
They are nonetheless discernable to the experienced juror, astute critic and
historian, who often divide entries into such genres in their analyses, as was done
for the competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Reviewing the 1421
entries for that competition, Mary McLeod (1989: 119–20) was able not only
to distinguish amateur from professional entries, but to identify among the latter
those modelled on the approaches then most popular in schools of architecture.
She concludes, as I dare say might a Bourdouean sociologist, that ‘what appeared
to be expressed first was . . . architectural allegiance, rather than any interpre-
tation of the memorial programme itself’.
When architects compete, they enjoy a relative autonomy from the
economic and power fields. Any competition that is judged by a jury that is
(relatively) independent of the client, even one in which the largest international
corporate firms participate, creates a moment in which architects temporarily
operate as far from external determination as architecture can allow. Anonymity,
the regulation of the number and types of drawing, and the presence of referees
are also structural elements that distinguish the competition from the normal
free market conditions of competing, for these rules that actually restrain inter-
ested behaviour were imposed, after much struggle, by architects, by the very
agents whose interests were thereby regulated.
The temporary creation of a complex of players who name the winner and
decide what winning itself consists in creates a struggle in which – much like a
struggle in the field of cultural production – the stakes are cultural authority.
Within any given competition, the struggle to select a winning project is also a
struggle to find one of such exceptional quality that it legitimates at one and the
same time the decision, the necessity of this particular competition, and of
competitions in general. As in Bourdieu’s game, ‘by definition, to be in the game,
everyone is playing to win’ (Patton, 2002) and ‘everyone’ includes not only the
entrants, but also all the participants. Although it is desirable to win outright,
this is of course rare. However, a winning project has the potential to benefit all
the others if it is also acclaimed as an exceptional work. The celebration of the
project as uniquely exceptional is a consecration of it as art. Its selection redounds
on all the participants; that is to say, even those who do not win experience an
increase in cultural capital because the cultural authority of architecture has been
affirmed even for its lesser members.
Economic interest, while not disowned, is constantly denied, if not verbally
then behaviorally (and Bourdieu (1993: 74) uses the term denial in the psycho-
analytic sense ofVerneinung) as any competitor, whether a large firm participating
in an invited competition where the honorarium barely covers the cost of the
elaborate model or the student paying for supplies with a credit card, would tell
you. When, as Louis Kahn did, architects invoke sacrifice as the reason for not
only enduring but embracing competitions, these rationalizations of economi-
cally irrational behaviour are classic statements of artistic disinterest.
World turned upside down
The architecture competition reverses not only the economic mandates of a

successful business, but also, as I (Lipstadt, 1989b) have argued elsewhere,
parallels carnivals in undifferentiated societies. In the latter, rituals and masquer-
ades invert the habitual real and symbolic orders, offering opportunities for the
young, weak and dominated, apprentices among them, to taunt, humiliate and
even mildly punish the old and the powerful. Carnivals are the original ‘worlds
turned upside down’, or what anthropologists call ‘reversible worlds’. The fabled
events that, in the words of Goodhart-Rendel, opened the ‘door [to] the
unknown who has something the world of architecture needs’, and to the already
mentioned Elmes, Garnier, Saarinen, Lin and Libeskind, are extremely rare, but
do occur sufficiently frequently for each (social) generation to possess its
example, its ‘proof’ that the competition can serve as a reversible world in which
the young, the inexperienced or the unrecognized triumph.
The competition is also, then, a mode of inculcating new members with the
doxa, unquestioned by all, that the competition reaffirms the artistic element of
this profession, forging and reforging the connection between the professional
and the artist, separating the architect from the stone mason. The illusio restates
the doxa as the belief that a particular game – a particular competition and
competitions in general – is worthy of everything that need be invested in it, and
that there is always the possibility of gaining symbolic profits of an unknown
being consecrated as an individual creator whose genius is all the more dramat-
ically affirmed by the agonistic circumstances of the selection.
The collective labour of collusion that is the illusio’s counterpart is also
manifested in the competition. Nowhere is the social reality that designs require
the collective labour of architects and clients to become realized buildings more
evident than in the competition, and nowhere does the illusio function more
evidently to deny that reality. The competition makes a public performance of
the designer selection process that usually goes on unseen by the public; and the
very structure of the process, with its multiple actors and experts, shows that it
is the field that is literally creating the creator. We need go no further than a
competition report in which the jurors’ choice is justified to find a clear demon-
stration of the collective labour of disavowing the collectivity of their labour.
Even when dissension is acknowledged, its existence is perceived not as evidence
of the give-and-take of compromise between jurors, but rather of the power of
the winning design to overcome objections and doubts, and thus of the incom-
parable qualities of creator and creation.
Such was the case for the Libeskind entry in the competition for the Exten-
sion to the Berlin Museum to include the Jewish Museum Department (Heise
and Holstein, 1990). Jurors and invited observers described how the brilliance
of the design’s translation of the broken, disrupted and irreparable history of the
destruction of the Jews to whom Berlin owed so much into a museum of jagged
Figure 3 Hélène Lipstadt, photographer, 1998. The main stair with structural beams. Berlin
Jewish Museum, Daniel Libeskind, architect. Courtesy, author.
parts (Figure 3) and inaccessible voids overcame the misgivings that stemmed
from their particular area of expertise or institutional authority. In doing so, they
unintentionally revealed not only how each of their positions contributed to the
consecration of the winner, but also how those positions had been shifted by
the new objective relations established by that very consecration. For example,
the director of the Museum and one of the authors of the competition
programme proclaimed himself confident that the museum’s memorial spaces
would not render it more monument than museum; that there was no risk that
the building would become a work of art in its own right, overriding the needs
of the museum and subordinating contents to container; and that collaboration
between architect and museum staff would assure that this was the case (Heise
and Holstein, 1990: 55). The consensual view in Germany today is that the
outcome he so confidently discounted is exactly what occurred, albeit long after
that director (and several others) had departed in a series of dramatic overhauls
of the museum’s program. Over the close to ten years between the competition
and construction, serious proposals were made to leave the building an empty
shell so that it might serve as the German national Holocaust monument to the
‘Murdered Jews of Europe’. And now that it has been fitted out with a collection
that had to be adjusted to its very special, discontinuous exhibition spaces,
museum specialists in Germany and abroad agree that the needs of the collections
and the visitors are subordinated to Libeskind’s ‘concern with the overall archi-
tectural scheme’ (Reid, 2001).
Critics and historians who describe a winning project as the product of a
single, charismatic author also collude, and their action is all the more question-
able because their accounts will transubstantiate that collusion into history.What
is left out and denied is that it is they, along with others, who have created the
creator; for the winner is only one of the co-makers of the work, the others being
the jury, the programme, the promise of publication and exhibition and the
history of the competition itself, functioning as a space of possibles. However,
the most telling evidence of the collusion that makes the game possible is the
very fact of the competition’s existence. Without a collective willingness to
compete, especially in building economies based on competitions (as was, to all
intents and purposes, a good part of Victorian England’s), there could be no
competitions.
Space of possibles
Although the necessary analysis cannot be undertaken here, the mediation of the
space of possibles is evident in the emergence of the innovative designs that have
won, or have been lauded as the second place but real winners. The process of
selection against the backdrop of a space of possibles allows for transformation of
styles, if only, sometimes, in retrospect. Indeed, winners often declare allegiance
to the very tradition – if not the specific style – that they are overthrowing. Thus,
the story is often told that when the Empress Eugénie complained that Garnier’s
design was not in one of the ‘Louis’ styles, he responded, ‘it is style Napoleon
III, Madame, and you are complaining!’ He at once legitimated his design as their
equivalent, while offering the Empress a far more potent form of legitimation
than her pretension to have inherited the mantle of her (dynastically and politi-
cally unrelated) eighteenth century ‘predecessors’. Far more modestly, Daniel
Libeskind (Heise and Holstein, 1990: 166) spoke of the extension to the Berlin
Museum as a ‘project on which he had worked all his life’. It is certainly past
experience, and thus the habitus, supported by capitals, that orients the choice
of strategy, a pragmatic playing to the jury or a flagrantly rule-bending solution,
like Libeskind’s initial proposal of a building that was intentionally out of kilter
in every respect. Not only was the plan that of a jagged ‘lightening strike’; not
only does a series of inaccessible basement-to-roof voided spaces make contin-
uous movement impossible; but even the walls and elevator shafts were initially
intended to slope away from plumb.
But a space of possibles like the one constituted by the collective experience
of previous competitions is there to provide the ‘summons’ when the ‘thing to
be done’ is the thing that has never been done, come what may, i.e., in defiance
of the identifiable interests of the jurors, which would caution a far, far more
conservative approach. Such was the case in Berlin, where the chair of the jury
was Josef-Paul Kleihues, the architect often associated with the move in urban
design in Berlin called Critical Reconstruction that began around 1980. Critical
Reconstruction not only promoted the preservation of the city’s late nineteenth-
century ‘street’ or ordinary architecture, but also the elaboration from it of all
the new architecture and city planning needed to ‘repair’, as it was often said,
the gaps in the urban tissue left by the World War, by the Wall’s sedimenting of
derelict sites on its Western side, and by the modernist urban designers who,
during the 1960s, were said to have destroyed more old buildings after the war
than were destroyed during it. Since the jury took the exact opposite approach,
and in an area that had been partially ‘critically reconstructed’ under Kleihues’s
direction, they clearly believed that a backwards-looking ‘repair’ was not exactly
what Berlin needed and that Libeskind provided what was needed, specifically a
dramatic rupture that represents the ‘voids’ of Berlin (Huyssen, 1997).
Conclusion
A competition is thus a space that allows architects to be as relatively autonomous
creators as architects can ever be and in which the field effect is that of a field of
cultural production. The charismatic ideology of the architect as a lone creator
is not a delusio, but a historically generated illusio of the artistic field, supported
collusively by all concerned. We are reminded of the field effect in seventeenth-
century France, in which, in the absence of a fully constituted literary field,
authors ambiguously fluctuated between the status of men of letters and of men
of the court, always enjoying an autonomy accorded to no similar group. The
case of the architectural competition suggests not only that architects can enjoy
a considerable degree of autonomy when they compete, but also just how great
the cost of that autonomy is. Whether this is the case for other practices and
institutions within architecture, and whether something similar can occur in
other ‘art professions’, remains to be determined. And to make this determina-
tion, it is the schema of the field that we must employ, remembering Bourdieu’s
words with which we began our investigation, that this schema ‘promotes a mode
of construction that has to be rethought anew every time . . . [and that] forces
us to raise questions . . . about the limit of the universe under investigation’
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 110).
Notes
1 Unless explicitly stated, the italics are Bourdieu’s. The essays in The Field of
Cultural Production (1993) will be identified by the date of the appearance of
this American collection of previously published and unpublished writings
of 1971–1988.
2 Unlike the former, a precise set of agents possessing the power to coerce, the
field of power is an abstract space of the relationships between agents in their
respective field with the amount and species of capital that allow them to
dominate their field and who are automatically engaged in struggles with
implications for the reproduction of their or competing fields.
3 Unless attributed to Wacquant, all quotations from Invitation to Reflexive Soci-
ology are Bourdieu’s.
4 The notion is one of the points that he shares with Michel Foucault, but he
does not owe it to him, for both found it in the teaching of Gaston Bachelard
when students of his.
5 We are aware, of course, that the competition can take varied forms and that
there are particular national histories of its use. Notwithstanding, we believe
that the analysis proposed here enables and facilitates the use of Bourdieu’s
relational matrix for the investigation of all competitions.
6 The space of possibles is an aspect of Bourdieu’s sociology that has also been
neglected by the English language exegetes. We are addressing only its role in
artistic change, omitting its connection to the agent’s trajectory and primary
socialization, to the way it situates and dates cultural producers, renders them
autonomous from external social and economic determinations, and the way
it relates producers to other producers, even when they do not specifically
reference them, all discussed in Rules of Art.
7 Space does not allow a discussion of the conditions that produce the rare
‘successful revolution’, for which see Bourdieu (1996: 252–3).
8 Social age, roughly being classified as having the right age for success in a social
group, having acquired the signs of consecration valued in it. It is an age that
is independent of real, biological age and which classifies one as belonging to
a generation (which is also social).
9 Bourdieu would later insist on the need to situate the field in the field of power
and correct his earlier tendency to equate relations between positions to the
interaction of agents (see 1996: 376, n. 17).
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Cultural Studies

ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

Can ‘art Professions’ Be Bourdieuean Fields Of

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CAN ‘ART PROFESSIONS’

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 391

jurors and the associated universe of beliefs), analysing them as those of an

I want to analyse briefly the case of artistic practice, especially painting or

392 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

Figure 1 Pierre Bourdieu, photographer, c. 1959. Regroupment center under construction.

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 393

The distinction between the ‘pure’ fields of cultural production, namely

394 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 395

operandi . . . style . . . mastery . . . habitus . . . “métier” . . . craftsmanship, . . .

396 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 397

insofar as the practice of competing is concerned. But competitions offer us a

398 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

Illusio, collusion and doxa

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 399

The field of cultural production

400 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

A special characteristic of the structure of this field is its subdivision into

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 401

402 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

the process of autonomy begins’. Pertinently, Jurt cites Christian Jouhaud’s

The architecture competition, or 1401 and all that

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 403

communes. The self-aggrandizement and display of wealth previously pro-

404 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

of the dissolved royal academies and as a manifestation of the philosophy of

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 405

406 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

if extensive, . . . [they] cost the profession hundreds of dollars, most of

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 407

408 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 409

The competition and the operations of the field

410 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 411

World turned upside down

The architecture competition reverses not only the economic mandates of a

412 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 413

414 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 415

416 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

AR T PR O F E S S IONS AND CUL T UR A L PR ODUC T ION 417

administrative et la production de la “politique du logement”’. Actes de la

418 CUL T UR A L S T UDIE S

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