The curious case of atrium urbanism: voids in and of capitalism

Abstract

All produced spaces are curious since they could, by definition, be different. Atriums—double height or greater vertical voids typically to be found in skyscrapers’ lobbies—are an interesting illustration of this general contention. An internal feature of super-tall architecture the world over, the atrium flourishes in parts of cities where land value is high and given that atria could be occupied with directly rentable space this is an ostensibly puzzling affinity. Drawing primarily on the ideas of Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin, this paper suggests that the presence of atria in major commercial—and increasingly public—buildings grows from oblique attempts to generate surplus value. Paradoxically, it is the voided space of the atrium that explains this strategy. My argument is that voids of open space can actually increase the value of objects, bodies, and practices that are assembled in and around them; paradoxically ‘emptiness’ itself can be monetised in a context of rentier capitalism. Defamiliarising the atrium, which is a distinctive and singular architectural feature of this moment, suggests a wider research agenda for those interested in critical analysis of the contradictory spaces that are produced when capital builds.

Keywords:

• architecture
• voids
• capitalism
• atrium
• space

Introduction

Cass Gilbert, the architect of the Woolworth Building in Manhattan, described skyscrapers as ‘machines for making the land pay’ (Irish 1988). Gilbert’s well-worn maxim implies a particular architectural configuration, with floors of rentable space stacked atop each other in very tall structures to maximise economic returns available on a given footprint of urban land. The resulting skyline-dominating buildings are symbolically and materially profitable for their owners, who benefit from the increased volume of rental space and the enhanced reputational status that emanates from this attention-grabbing architecture (Gassner 2020; Graham 2016; Jones 2009; 2015; Sklair 2005). The atrium is a voided expanse of space frequently to be found dominating the interiors of skyscrapers, and the suggestion here is that this architectural feature occupies distinctive—and counter intuitive—role in how super-tall buildings ‘make the land pay’. How and why ‘emptiness’ comes to add value in contemporary formulations is a key, but counter-intuitive, part of this question. The voided space of the atrium reflects a paradoxical symbiosis between space and capitalist social order, illustrating the creative architectural experimentalism aimed at rendering contemporary economic projects socially resonant and the fragility of such attempts.

The paper is in three main sections, plus this Introduction and a Conclusion. In Part One, the paradoxical relationship between voided urban space and capitalism is suggested as one worthy of critical inquiry. This part of the article sets up the subsequent engagement with the atrium in Part Two, which draws from the work of Henri Lefebvre to situate the atrium as an experimental architectural form and a produced voided social space that grows from, and facilitates further, capital extraction from urban land. Next, and taking some cues from Walter Benjamin’s poignant analysis of the Parisian arcades (2002),¹ Part Three speculates on the future obsolescence of the currently popular atrium. As architecture is inextricably wedded to capital flows, the atrium will continue to reflect the waxes and wanes of the volatile nature of capitalist cycles, with the future decline of the atrium possibly resulting in its ruination in Benjaminian terms. Overall then, this is an exploratory paper about a social space—the atrium—whose contemporary manifestation owes much to capitalist logics, and whose future remains entangled with their crisis-prone nature. Guided by a sense that architectural elements could always be other, my discussion seeks to illuminate something of how analysis of the atrium can ‘[alert] us to the illusory compensations of making-do with reality’ (Coleman 2015, 118) associated with not going beyond the surface appearance of specific architectural manifestations.

The paradox of voided space

We are surrounded by emptiness, but it is an emptiness filled with signs. (Lefebvre 2000, 72)

Henri Lefebvre’s brilliant and complex theory begins from a deceptively simple starting point, namely that ‘humans create the space in which they live’ (Molotch 1993, 887). In the process of this creation, all manner of assumptions—including attempts to exploitate labour, to represent and celebrate capital and political institutions, and to explore and create alternative futures—are given spatial form. As one prominent way in which such spatial form is produced, architecture is a site in which many differing and competing interests are made explicit and material (Coleman 2015; Jones, 2009, 2015, 2023; Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 2014; Stanek 2011). Arguably, it is precisely because space, of which architecture is a constituent part, combines symbolic and material dimensions that it serves as such an effective touchstone for contestation; the dual nature of architecture in this regard means that [p]eople fight not only over a piece of turf, but about the sort of reality that it constitutes’ (Molotch 1993, 888). Architects’ capacity to imagine and make new spaces for successful capital extraction sees the profession and the environment they design as centrally implicated in the production of space in capitalist societies (Gottdiener 1985; Lefebvre, [1974] 1991; Stanek 2011). As a constitutive ‘force in structuring what can be done in space itself’ (Molotch 1993, 888), architecture provides both the material sites through which surplus value is generated and also the cultural forms mobilised in narrations of the very accumulative activity that facilitates its commission and realisation (Jones 2009).

This starting point has implications for how we understand the factory, the call centre, the high street, the university, the pit, the theme park, the farm, or the Amazon distribution centre (Maddock-James 2023), examples that all serve to illustrate how space is organised to further different types of economically profitable exploitations of labour and consumption. These arrangements imply architecture, with specific building types constitutive of the production of these spaces, which afford their organisation. As a result of its inextricable material connection with labour, consumption, and the symbolisation of both, the architectural production of space is always contested; material sets of interests regarding how the world should be played out in architecture that stabilises some sets of arrangements and makes others less possible. Put another way, architecture helps us not only to imagine ‘what is already imaginable and possible’ (Coleman 2015, 24) in a symbolic way, it also provides the material sets of structures in and around which labour and consumption are facilitated. While architecture is not reducible to the means of production within which it exists (Coleman 2015; Jones 2009; Lefebvre [1974] 1991; Stanek 2011) it does render some practices more possible, others less so, and allows the celebration of some things and the marginalisation or obfuscation of others. So, while architectural spaces are not created purely for the extraction of surplus value, this context-creation they produce is crucial. More forcibly, capitalism’s very survival is predicated on a capacity to systematically rework architecture in such a way to maintain profitability in the context of wider crises (Lefebvre [1974] 1991; Stanek 2011).

Summarising one of the many lines of inquiry emerging from the work of Lefebvre, Stuart Elden notes that ‘sometimes spaces are produced by the contradictions in the mode of production’ (2007, 108). To the extent that architecture provides the sites in which capitalism happens and it is made resonant architecture is also always irrational, reflecting and compounds the radically uneven nature of life in capitalist societies (Stanek 2011). Whether it is the Gothic facade of the aforementioned Gilbert-designed Woolworth Building (Irish 1988), the race for the tallest of super-tall buildings (Graham 2016), the luxurious sweeping staircase in Harrods’ department store (Lanci 2022), or the historically themed design of shopping malls (Shields 1989), architectural interventions, and their commissioning, cannot be explained by reductionist economic rationales. The production of economically profitable space often involves the development of architecture that is culturally meaningful but that prima facie is not economically justifiable. Accordingly, critical analysis of architecture must be attentive to the culturally meaningful and counter-intuitive, often surprising, outcomes that emerge when capital builds and the uneven, contradictory distribution of space in capitalist societies takes architectural form.

Aganist this backdrop, and crucially, Lefebvre refuted ‘the [erroneous] idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it’ ([1974] 1991, 15), that space is a synonym for emptiness. Thinking with Lefebvre, the socially produced voided space poses some fundamentally intriguing questions for critical urban studies. Do designed empty spaces reflect the uneven ways in which ‘[c]apital circulates through the built environment in a dynamic and erratic fashion’ (Weber 2002, 520)? There is the tantalising possibility that such voided emptiness is a spatial formulation that is mobilised further capitalist action. As we will see, atriums are purposefully designed, active spaces, made with the generation of surplus value in mind, but that such production reflects and embeds all manner of contradictions.

On the atrium as a social space

[E]very society—and hence every mode of production […]—produces a space, its own space. (Lefebvre 1991, 31)

A double-height or larger void internal to a building, atriums—more properly atria in the plural—are closely associated with skyscrapers the world over. As a tall, opened ‘gap’ enclosed on four sides by the building’s internal walls, the atrium has features in common with an entrance hall or a galleria, but it is the large vertical volume of space that is its definitive characteristic. The contemporary popularity of the atrium has seen it become a prominent interior feature of multiple hundreds of major high-rise new buildings in urban settings across the world (Jones 2023, 4). Despite an ancient lineage stretching back to courts in townhouses in ancient Rome, prominent late 20th-century examples of the atrium were to be found in casinos, shopping malls, apartments, corporate headquarters, and international hotel chains. Maverick US architect-developer John Portman designed many prominent atria in this period, creating out-of-the-ordinary, heterotopic spaces, variously including live birds, thousands of plants, a lagoon, or bars, restaurants and exclusive shops all folded into a vast volume of vertical voided space (Jones 2023, 5–7). Portman’s expressive, symbolically rich, referential atrium spaces blurred fake and real/inside and outside, and were securitised and enclosed from the poverty of parts of the cities in which they stood, and so captured much about the aestheticized, themed spectacles associated with postmodernism urbanism more generally. The outcome of his designs was very popular with international hotel chains such as the Westin and the Regency, who sought spectacular spaces to wow their tourists; they also attracted the attention of postmodern analysts such as Fredric Jameson, who saw the atrium space in hotels such as the Bonaventura reflective of a broader postmodern urbanism that facilitated a superficial replacement of the city with a controlled site of consumption (Jones 2023).

Despite the conceit of those commissioning and designing such spaces that the atrium is a site that sees the melting away of strict boundaries between work and consumption, or between production and leisure (Whole Building Design Guide 2017), this misunderstands the relationship between the discursive representation of the site and the practical work required to produce and maintain such a space. From Lefebvre, the consumptive practices taking place in atria—the coffee drinking, the lunch eating, the gambling, the art purchasing, the shopping, the financial trading, etc—should not be considered apart from the space that makes them possible. In most of its manifestations, the atrium is an embedded and constitutive site of capitalist activity, and of labour as well as consumption; to consider it ‘empty’ misunderstands its animation by all manner of social life. The atrium is social space in Lefebvrean terms, and should not be understood as ‘emptiness-as-absence’, defined by the absence of material considerations, or considered a neutral backdrop for practices or an empty container (also see Massey 1996; Löw 2008).² Not only is the architecture of the atrium the product of architects’ careful labour, its very design and realisation is saturated in assumptions regarding use and exchange values, and the exploitation of labour. In capitalist societies, the atrium has a close affinity with labour, not just in terms of the architectural design and construction work needed for its realisation, but also for the ongoing activity that the space implies. A paradox can be drawn here: despite being formally empty, the architectural intervention of the atrium can add symbolical and material momentum to labour and consumption processes by its very presence.

At atria across the world in casinos such as The Luxor in Las Vegas (the largest atrium in the world by volume), and hotels such as the Leeza in Beijing (currently home to the world’s tallest atrium, at 159 m), there is oftentimes affinity between the space and consumption and trading activity. As is the case with the Leeza hotel, for example, the expansive sightlines up and across such spaces appeal to the tourist consumptive serving to showcase the luxurious consumption activity, of space as well as commodities, at hand. More tentatively—as has been observed in religious buildings as well as secular ones—large volumes of vertical space influence bodies and objects within them.³ While the atrium makes it more possible to assemble some types of bodies and activities than it does others, and can be assumed to have some empirically open effect on people's experiences, it is not an over-programmed space in Lefebvre’s terms ([1974] 1991), at least in my understanding. As is argued below, and although profit-making activity currently most often accompanies the space, a whole variety of practices are in principle possible in the atrium (see Figure 1).⁴

Figure 1: Atrium of the Leeza Soho, Beijing.

As ‘the political economy of space is based on scarcity’ (Elden 2007, 106), the atrium then reflects a paradox: how, in the words of Stephen Graham (2016, 757), ‘[a]ir … [can] itself be monetised and enclosed into rising towers’. This could be expressed as a hypothetical assertion: the voided space of atrium urbanism predominates in those urban settings where land value is highest. In major cities the world over, atria are prominent features bringing prestige to new build, super-tall buildings; large volumes of airy, voided space create a luxurious look and feel, in part because it is at odds with the density in evidence in neighbouring spaces. Indeed, atrium urbanism is contingent on ‘an abundance of space for the rich and too little for the poor’ (Elden 2007, 106). Atrium space such as the 120 m tall atrium at 1 Bligh Street in Sydney illustrates how a large void of space can in and of itself confer symbolic status that can be monestised, as it allows offices breath-taking internal views down through the building’s central internal void as well as out over the city. This atrium’s luxurious associations here as elsewhere derive in part from the flaunting of expansive volumes of enclosed air, a very evident surplus in the context of scarcity (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Atrium at 1 Bligh Street, Sydney.

Further, the creation of very tall atria allows for the design of extremely high massings of architecture, even when the occupancy rate of the building seemingly does not necessitate such height to realise its operations. As commissioners—be they public or private actors—seek to benefit from the skyline-dominating symbolic status offered by the association with such structures (Sklair 2005; Graham 2016), then there is a further paradox at play here: despite being empty [sic]— inasmuch as atria could be filled with a greater volume of directly rentable space (in the process, their emptiness absorbs over-accumulated capital) – large volumes of atrium air lend symbolic status associated with super-tall iconic architectural structures, which can in turn increase the land value of connected internal spaces.

Accordingly, the atrium enjoys an ostensibly counter-intuitive relationship with models of rentier capitalism, as commercial, or otherwise rentable space, such as hotel rooms, apartments, or offices, or clinical or educational space is de facto reduced by the presence of the void. However, value is added to the space in the process. On the one hand, this can be through the opportunity for spectacular internal views offered for hotel or office residents, or on the other the corporate look and feel afforded by hospital, educational, or library and museum atria that allow for institutional self-representation and the creation of spaces for consumption previously less central to the organisation of such buildings.⁵ The atrium both facilitates the economic exploitable sightlines internal to the building, and the super-tall external massings of buildings that allow symbolic and material capital to be maximised. The atrium at the Toreo Parque Central in Greater Mexico City reflects much of the commercialised aestheticisation of atrium space, where a formal openness is accompanied by social closure; large volumes of air are part and parcel of the exclusionary and bounded commercialised activity that takes places therein (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Atrium of Toreo Parque Central, Mexico City.

Production of space entails the creation and spatialisation of thresholds and exclusions (Gottdiener 1985; Lefebvre 1991; Stanek 2011, 85), with ‘boundary setting’ (Löw 2008) integral to the social ordering in the form of the production and stabilisation of certain insider-outsider dynamics evident in the production and use of atrium space. While the experiences afforded by the atrium may in principle be widely popular, it marks an exclusionary boundary for others, as surveillance and policing of the void can see it becoming a space that demarcates rights to the city, with inclusion for some and exclusion for the many (Lefebvre [1974] 1991; 1991; 2014); making collective appropriation less possible (Stanek 2011, 111). The atrium, then, offers up another type of paradox: this is a voided space that simultaneously promises openness and transparency for some, but that serves as an exclusionary, hard boundary for others, revealing the contradiction of a simultaneous ‘structural openness of the modern city [for some], and a spatial exclusion logic’ (Löw 2008, 26). Understood in this light, atria are an example of how architecture is reflective of how in capitalist societies social ordering is folded into the production of space. Against the backdrop of these spatial contradictions and tensions, a key temporal issue associated with atrium urbanism is uncovered; as the next section goes on to suggest, thinking of these voids in time reveals that ‘[a]ll the hands have not yet been played’ (Lefebvre and Régulier 1985, 195).

Today’s atrium is tomorrow’s ruin

Ruins are in the realm of things. (Benjamin 2002, 178)

Although I am acutely aware of the bombast of the comparison, the atrium puts me in mind of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the Parisian arcades (2002). Famously, when Benjamin found the arcades they were run down, derelict, and uncared for sites of a previous period’s economically successful architectural experiment, spatial reflections not just of a different time but of a different way of being social, including way of seeking to extract profit from the city. By the 1920s, when Benjamin started his project, the arcades’ previous allure was lost; the designed elements and ways of being that they suggested—that had made for cutting-edge commercial space in the mid-late 19th century—had since fallen from fashion; the aesthetically and spatially restless nature of high-end urban consumption had moved on to department stores and high streets. One of the many poignant things about Benjamin’s analysis is that it encourages reflection on a set of material architectural arrangements that once appeared solid, but that had since melted into air. Benjamin’s tantalising account entwines the changing nature of profitable space from a standpoint in time that has seen it fall from prominence; the tension of being ‘in’ time—in keeping with, or rakishly ahead of, contemporary aesthetics—saturates contemporary cityscapes (Gassner 2020) and architectural design (Jones 2020), meaning that the built environment is not ‘empty time, [but] filled by the presence of the now’ (Benjamin, On the Concept of History XIV).

The future decline of a current architectural-spatial zeitgeist is difficult to conceptualise from the standpoint of today, so powerfully persuasive are the cultural symbols of so entrenched are contemporary patterns of work and consumption that become normal today. Architecture’s combination of symbolic and materiality serve to bolster present-day sets of assumptions concerning reality, adding verisimilitude to a false impression of social permanence of current arrangements. Architectural production is itself conditioned by a ‘requirement for cultural objects to materialise time’s otherwise abstract nature … [adding] momentum to some practices and remov[ing] it from others’ (Jones 2020, 62); in this process the built environment not only objectively records previous experiments with other ways of being, but rather contains some elements of previous experiments, the reworking of some, and—in capitalism—the currently ‘in time’ ways of making profit from space. Contradicting this false sense of constancy, architectural production actually rests on, and adds credence to, a crisis-prone, unstable system of accumulation. Crucially, these processes are not frictionless, but typically involve demolition of some social spaces, dispossessing and dislocating of residents, workers, and whole communities of users—to make way for newer (experimental) social spaces (Paton 2023). Capitalist cities are restless terrains for experiment with spaces that no longer maximise the extraction of surplus value from available space (Smith 1987).

Benjamin’s sprawling, brilliant account in Arcades contains many fragments that are of use in illuminating these processes. For Benjamin, ruination often means more than the deleterious effect of time passing; capitalism itself creates ruins, spaces a that moment obsolete to the quest for economic profit (Gassner 2020). However, in amongst this dynamic mix, ruination of architectural form is not solely because sites become economically unprofitable, but that rather for a complex mix of reasons it has becomes a less than optimal space from which to generate value more broadly. Like the arcade, the atrium is charged with possibilities. The normalisation of capitalism in our cities can make atrium urbanism seem normal, paradoxically even as its spectacular and out-of-the-ordinariness are key to its operation. Just as the atrium gives form to the present, it also reflects the collapse of the previous spatial productions and the possibilities of its own negation; perhaps the seeds of an anti-capitalist space exist in the atrium. Certainly the atrium exists in a contempraneously culturally dynamic moment, in which demands for new types of capitalist space imply combinations of aesthetic and semiotic and the satisfaction of supporting ‘hard’ issues of maximising land value and exploitation of labour. Analytically speaking, care must be taken to not flatten out the complexity and local specificity that characetrises such and that must not be reduced into each other (Jones 2009, 2015).

Attempts to encourage and facilitate the generation of surplus value by mobilising architecture are far from always being successful,⁶ and speculation to secure the right type of space to accumulate value leads to highly dynamic experiments with space and architecture. Accordingly, as developers attempt to produce profitable space, the temporal as well as spatial implications of architectural production is made evident; as yesterday's centre of power becomes today's ruin, it can in turn be tomorrow's ‘opportunity’. An intriguing possibility in this context is that the atrium is a ‘frontier’, in Neil Smith’s sense of the term (1987). As difficult as it is to imagine dereliction for newly built atria, perhaps this is their fate; today’s prestige architectural spaces that encourage economic accumulation can be tomorrow’s ruins. Like the arcades made famous by Benjamin (2002), atria may fall from fashion and be considered obsolete ways of producing surplus value by those producing space, perhaps then becoming the sites of renewed experiment with frontiers (Smith 1987). Should very different types of socio-economic arrangement become dominant, then the atrium will find its place in very different types of spatial productions.

Conclusion

All produced spaces are curious since they could, by definition, be different. This paper has attempted to denaturalise the atrium to make sense of the sets of taken-for-granted social assumptions that see significant volumes of vertically voided space characterising high-rise buildings in capitalist contexts the world over. Although there are tensions between their analyses, the respective ideas of Lefebvre and Benjamin help to illuminate the atrium; from their distinct-but-related positions, when seeking to develop a critique of the notion that voided volumes are ‘empty’, both convincingly reject the essentialism that would equate Space X with Outcome Y. For them both, the production of this space in capitalist contexts is not the outcome of chance, or one that should be taken-for-granted; on the contrary, space in capitalist cities is produced—by humans— who, amongst other things, seek to further capitalist strategies. This starting assumption points us in a somewhat counter-intuitive direction to understand voids as spatial contradictions of capitalism.

At one level, the deployment of voided atrium space into urbanism sees an embedding of temporal assumptions. On the one hand this voided space can help to add momentum to elite-envisioned capitalist accumulation strategies—for example through the enhanced consumption associated with increased sightlines of out-of-the-ordinary contexts, via reputational enhancement via high rise architecture that it facilitates, and via the exclusionary social ordering it allows. On the other the atrium folds in a future spatial obsolescence of capitalism. Despite being defined by an ostensible absence, the atrium is an active social space that makes visible a series of ethical controversies and contradictions associated with the form that contemporary extractive economic relations can take. Generally, emptiness fits uneasily within critical accounts of architecture in cities, but the presence of the void needs to be understood as active rather than passive; as ‘[t]oday more than ever, the class struggle is inscribed in space’ (Elden 2007, 106), then the atrium is part of such a conflict.

Just as the current moment sees voided internal space of the atrium as an aesthetic experience considered desirable amongst some international elites, the dynamic nature of the production of space will eventually see this currently luxurious configuration fall from favour. It is through critical research that we can gain understanding of the contradictions that emerge when capital builds. As the case of the atrium reflects, this includes fundamental uncertainties and conflicts associated with both time and space. Approaching the landscapes of atrium urbanism from a critical perspective invites us to consider an overarching paradox of out-of-the-ordinary designs that can facilitate social reproduction. Fundamentally, the status of the void itself is crucial to understanding why this happens, with the putative ‘emptiness’ of the atrium making visible some crisis-prone elements of capitalist accumulation strategies that are otherwise opaque. Watch that space … 

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the following people for giving me improving suggestions on this paper: Steven Graham, Joe Greener, Alexandra Harris, Leon Moosavi, and Maike Pôtschulat. And many thanks also to the expert anonymous reviewer who helped me shape the article, in the process particularly deepening my understanding of Walter Benjamin’s work on ruination.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Jones

Paul Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. His research most often addresses one of two things: (i) what he sometimes refers to as ‘sociology of architecture’, or (ii) critical reflections on the theoretical assumptions that underpin contemporary sociological analysis. For an example of the former, he published a piece entitled ‘Architecture, time, and cultural politics’ in Cultural Sociology 14(1): 61–79. For an example of the latter see ‘The student experience’ and the remaking of contemporary studenthood: A critical intervention’, written with M Pötschulat and M Moran in The Sociological Review 69(1): 3–20 (2021). Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Combining perspectives from Benjamin and Lefebvre in the paper is a way to approach the atrium from distinct—but occasionally overlapping perspectives both of which are illuminating of key contradictions of the space and the type of urbanism that gives rise to it (pun intended). Frank Cunningham (2010) skilfully weaves the respective ideas of these thinkers—and Tafuri—into a dialogue concerning utopia and social order, in the process offering a useful summary of the commonalities and disjunctures between them.

2 Arguably, critical urban studies with an empirical component tend to focus on the materially present. Although voided space is itself the result of human action it is perhaps more difficult to identify as such.

3 This general principle is in evidence in Benjamin’s analysis of the arcades, whereby glass windows, expansive sightlines, and a general ordering of the environment increased the value associated with objects and bodies therein (2002).

4 While the atrium is a site designed around the consumptive gaze, with all the ableist and economic exclusions that this implies, this does not always imply a straightforwardly panoptic surveillance in the Foucaultian sense; pursuing this line of inquiry further would invite consideration of the atrium as a synoptic site, based on visibility.

5 Of course, emptiness is valued differently in different contexts. The discourse of emptiness is problematised in some discourses in some spaces, for example when regeneration discourse seeks to create a ‘blank slate’ for development; models, photographs, and policy documents can be mobilised to this end. See Maddock-James (2023) on Teeside, or my earlier paper in this journal (2015) on urban development in Liverpool; in both cases discourses of relevance and obsolescence become applied to working class communities as well as spaces they inhabit. Both studies include analysis of ways in which new spatial formulations displace previous ones, while incorporating and reworking meaningful elements of what went before.

6 I am very grateful to Christopher Pickvance for making this point quite forcibly in response to a presentation of mine at University of Kent. He was completely correct; I had assumed that capitalist developers’ architectural spaces are singular and de facto successful in producing economically profitable space. I learned a lot from his intervention then, and our subsequent email exchanges afterwards.