SOCIAL FACTORS ON THE SHELTERING PHENOMENON

A discussion of social factors that have influenced the evolution and development of primitive shelters will aim at coming towards an understanding of the problems posed by the choice of technology in our modern world. My approach is based on the social factors of the forces creating house forms, which are

- social organization and traditions
- economics
- defence
- religion

First of all, we have to discuss the basic question “Are social and cultural factors, rather than physical forces, more influential in the creation of house form?”

There are some arguments stated at Rapoport’s House, Form, Culture. Some examples are:
- Mumford’s argument: man was a symbol-making animal before he was a tool-making animal, he reached specialisation in myth, religion and ritual before he did in material aspects of culture.[1]
- Redfield points out that early societies are largely ethical, and their moral order is stronger than their technical one.[2]
- Gordon Childe has a more materialistic approach which stresses technique.[3]
I do not think that the question “Which one is more effective, physical or social?” is important. A community cannot live in a house which is extremely cold during winter; they cannot live isolated from the other members of the clan they are part of if they are belonged to a clan as well. The important question is that how can they live ‘prosperously’.
Therefore, the thought, ‘My basic hypothesis, then, is that house form is not simply the result of physical forces or any single causal factor, but is the consequence of a whole range of socio-cultural factors seen in their broadest terms. Form is in turn modified by climatic conditions (the physical environment which makes some things impossible and encourages others) and by methods of construction, materials available, and technology (the tools for achieving the desired environment). I will call the socio-cultural forces primary, and the others secondary or modifying.’[4] fits my point of view perfectly.

SHELTERING AS A SOCIAL ISSUE: SOCIOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONCEPT
“Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.” Spiro Kostof

Sheltering, in terms of architecture, is not only an artistic issue, but also a scientific one. The scientific approach based on two observations and inferences: physical and social.
Ecologists name the big and complex system which also includes the interrelationships between the natural environment and the social/cultural system above this environment as ‘ecosystem’. The term ecosystem is not much different from the term ’bütüncü kültür’ of anthropologs. Every society or living colony has its specific ecosystem. It is known that a few thousands of society exist on the earth. Describing all these specific ecosystems (cultures) one by one might be an endless interference. Instead, the study of the basic principles which organize the culture-natural environment or technology-natural environment relationships is being preferred. Like all ecological relationships, the most important dimension of the relationship between the society and the environment is that the production and distribution of the energy which is necessary for subsistence, operation and growth of the metabolism.[5]
In every society, the technological level of the food production determines how much energy is to be produced and how it is to be distributed. The elementary factor is technology. Besides, the efficiency of the natural environment, magnitude of population, the speed of the population growth (nüfusun artış hızı), the distribution of the population according to age, sex and emplacement, production/consumption balance and the number and the rate of the employees of the production also affect the ecosystem.[6]

The rate of total energy to the energy used for the production of food is an indicator which determines the prosperity of the society. The bigger the ratio, the more prosperous and wealthier the society.[7] Thus, we can emplace the concept of technology, specificly appropriate technology to the ecosystem and therefore the culture of a society.

In terms of food and energy production, technology is not the only variant or an independent system. Technology must be analysed as an ecosystem with the natural environment variant. [Therefore,] the protection of natural environment and supplying the suitable environment for the evolution of biological existences is the greatest problem of our era.[8]

Cultural Issue and Rapoport’s Approach

Rapoport, an Australia born architect and theoretician, focuses on the culturel side of architecture in his various studies. His studies such as House Form and Culture[9] and Culture, Architecture, and Design[10] all focus on the cultural view and ‘human factor’ in architecture.

…people with very different attitudes and ideals respond to varied physical environments. These responses vary from place to place because of changes and differences in the interplay of social, cultural, ritual, economic, and physical factors. These factors and responses may also change gradually in the same place with the passage of times.[11]

Within the same passage, Rapoport states that house is not only a structure but also yields a cultural meaning.

The house is an institution, not just a structure, created for a complex set of purposes. Because building a house is a cultural phenomenon, its form and organisation are greatly influenced by the cultural milieu to which it belongs.[12]

Rapoport’s point of view based on an environmental looking which is a consideration on the interaction between nature (environment) and the social behaviour.

Given a certain climate, the availability of certain materials, and the constraints and capabilities of a given level of technology, what finally decides the form of a dwelling, and moulds the spaces and their relationship, is the vision that people have of the ideal life. The environment sought reflects many socio-cultural forces, including religious beliefs, family and clan structure, social organization, way of gaining a livelihood, and social relations between individuals.

Within the various economic and geographical constraints, the biological, physical, and psychological makeup of man, and the laws of physics and structural knowledge, there are always numerous choices available. Socio-cultural forces, therefore, become of prime importance in relating man’s way of life to the environment.[13]

Rapoport figures out the most important aspects affecting the form of the building as (1)Some basic needs, (2)Family, (3)Position of women, (4)Privacy and (5)Social intercourse.

At his Culture, Architecture, and Design, Rapoport suggests a term Environment-Behavior Studies (EBS). He builds his approach on three basic questions:[14]

The field of EBS is best described by what I call the three basic questions:

(1) What bio-social, psychological, and cultural characteristics of human beings (as member of a species, as individuals, and as members of various groups) influence (and, in design, should influence) which characteristics of the built environment?

(2) What effects do which aspects of which environments have on which groups of people, under what circumstances (i.e., in what context) and when, why, and how?

(3) Given this two-way interaction between people and environments, there must be mechanisms that link them. What are these mechanisms?

Within these questions, Rapoport talks about the importance of knowledge about humans, identification of mechanisms that link people and environments, which are physiology, anatomy, perception, cognition, meaning, affect, evaluation, action and behavior, supportiveness and some of the components of culture.[15]

Rapoport especially emphasizes the interdisciplinary characteristic of EBS. Fields studying anthropos (humans) indirectly concerns EBS. Therefore, psychology, sociology, history, pre-history, human (or cultural) geography, human landscape and urban ecology, evolutionary science, palaeoanthropology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, brain science, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence and computational approaches, generally, behavior genetics, biobehavioral sciences, psychobiology, etc., economics, political science all participants in EBS.

Rapoport asks the question “what activities take place where”[16]. He studies the organization of houses in different cultures and achieves a broader approach: “Furthermore, the system of settings that is the dwelling is part of a larger system – the block or compound, neighborhood, settlement, and even larger units. These contain other settings that are important for those activity systems that are specifically or directly domestic.”[17] Also he focuses on the rules in systems of settings, “rules about what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior in different settings (who does what, where, when, including/excluding whom, and why), and such rules are part of culture.”[18]

According to Rapoport, the environment can be understood as:[19]

(a) The organization of space, time, meaning, and communication
(b) A system of settings
(c) The cultural landscape
(d) Consisting of fixed, semi-fixed, and non-fixed elements.

It can be stated that, amongst lots of alternatives, man chooses ‘a’ thing, which directly refers to his cultural accumulation and substructure, and expresses himself as what he ‘is’ and what he ‘was’. Bernard Rudofsky gives some examples in his Architecture Without Architects[20] on site selection which relates quite to the society instead of physical restrictions. Figure 2 (Phira, Greece) illustrates the physical freedom of people. “Neither privations nor danger will deter man from selecting a spot that provides him with the exhilaration generated by a superb landscape. …Periodically devastated by earthquakes, the island has never been abandoned.”[21] Figure 3 is another example from Dogons (Sudan). “The absence of any large buildings, vehicles, or even streets, would suggest to us barbarian conditions had not extensive ethnographic investigations disclosed a highly sophisticated culture. The Dogons’ architecture expresses communal organization.”[22]

Conclusion: Making Culture Usable

In the same titled chapter of Culture, Architecture, and Design, Rapoport complains about the situation of culture-environment relations stating “everyone talks about it but no one seems to do anything about it.”[25] He accentuates the conceptual being of culture: [26]

...’culture, ’ which is an ideational term, a concept, a definition, which, ...has referred, since it was coined in 1871, to all (or most) things that people believe, think, do, or create. As a result, culture is not a ‘thing’; no one will ever see culture but only its outcomes and possibly its constituent parts.

...reason why ‘culture’ as such is not useful in either research or design is that it is impossible to use, either to try to understand how environments arise and are used, or to design environments. To be asked to “design for culture” is, I would suggest, an impossible task. To be asked to design an environment for a specific culture (say group A) is still impossible, as is the task of designing a more specific environment (say housing) for group A. The reason is that, ...’culture’ is a definitional concept, a label as it were, for a wast range of human phenomena. As a result, it is both too abstract and too general (or global) to be useful.

As a solution, Rapoport suggests a method, dismantling, the partitioning of the whole for better understanding, analysis and practical use:[27]

As already suggested, it is often extremely helpful to clarify excessively broad and abstract concepts by distmantling them and studying the components and expressions and the ways in which they interrelate with each other and, more importantly, with other variables – in this case, components of built environments

Rapoport’s first dismantling is on the social variables.[28]

Rapoport also defines the excessive breadth of ‘culture’, or its global nature. “The proposed dismantling is based on the idea that particular parts or components of the environment (recall that ‘environment’ is also to be dismantled) are congruent with, or supportive of, particular ‘lower-level’ components of culture.”[29] His second dismantling derives a sequence of components of culture.

And finally Rapoport combines these two dismantling diagrams.

As final words, we have to look at architecture not only as a value of aesthetics, but also as a physical-social fact. Rapoport combines the physical and social facts in terms of ‘Environment-Behavior Studies’ that focuses basically on the cultural side of architecture, which is affected by physical conditions. Therefore, EBS focuses on the ‘anthropo’. We must consider the term 'sheltering' with a human-based point of view and from the social sciences perspective. As Samuel Mockbee said, “Architecture has to be greater than just architecture. It has to address social values, as well as technical and aesthetic values.”


Akif Tek
[1]Rapoport, House, Form, Culture, 1969
[2] id
[3] id
[4] id
[5] Translated by myself from İnsan ve Kültür, Bozkurt Güvenç, 1974
[6] id
[7] id
[8] id
[9] Rapoport, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969
[10] Rapoport, Locke Science Publishing Company, 2005
[11] Rapoport, House Form and Culture, p.46
[12] id, p.46
[13]id, pp.47,48
[14] Rapoport, Culture, Architecture, and Design, p.10
[15] id, pp.12, 13, 14
[16] id, p.20
[17] id, p.22
[18] id, pp.23, 24
[19] id, p.24
[20] Rudofsky, Duobleday&Company, Inc., 1964
[21]id, figure 32
[22]id, figure 41
[23] From the world wide web: http://www.mankan-te.de
[24] From the world wide web: http://www.putovanja.info
[25] Rapoport, Culture, Architecture, and Design, p.92
[26] id, pp.92, 93
[27] id, p.93
[28] id, Figure 43
[29] id, p.94