The Laws of Foreign Buildings: Flat Roofs and Minarets
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663910376990 |
| Author | Michael Guggenheim |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Laws of Foreign
Buildings: Flat Roofs
and Minarets
Michael Guggenheim
Department of Anthropology, University of Zu
¨rich, Switzerland
Abstract
This article looks at how building codes and zoning laws mediate the relationship
between foreign building types and their uses. The article is based on insights from
actor-network theory and analyzes buildings as quasi-technologies. It draws on two
case studies in Switzerland. The first looks at the introduction of flat roofs along with
modern architecture in the 1920s that led to the introduction of building codes in
Ascona. The second is contemporary: it looks at the disputes about the right of
Muslims to add minarets to prayer spaces that eventually led to an initiative to ban
minarets altogether. In each of the cases I show how the building code mediates the
travelling element and the associated lifestyle of the implicated groups and leads to a
new definition of what those building types are. The law emerges as an important
mediator of building types because it constantly shifts building types as being defined
as material or social.
Keywords
actor-network theory, architecture, building codes, buildings, materiality, mosque,
objects, zoning
When, on 29 November 2009, 57 per cent of the citizens of Switzerland voted for
banning minarets, shockwaves went through the media throughout the world
(Cumming-Bruce and Erlanger, 2009). Switzerland was portrayed as denigrating the
religious rights of a minority. While the issue has been given a lot of attention from
the viewpoint of religious freedom and the seeming dangers of direct democracy, the
legal cum architectural issues behind the decision have hardly been discussed. This
article uses the case of banning minarets to analyse the relationship between the law
and foreign building forms.
I compare the case of minarets with a case that stood at the very beginning of Swiss
building codes, namely the import of flat roofs and modern architecture in general. The
Social & Legal Studies
19(4) 441–460
ªThe Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910376990
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441
import of flat roofs is an illuminating comparison, because of some similarities but also
differences. In both cases, a building part was resented by the local population and fought
with building codes. In both cases, the building part was taken to embody a foreign life-
style. But whereas in the case of flat roofs, it is a modern lifestyle that attempts to destroy
the traditional order of Switzerland, in the case of the minaret it is a traditional order that
probes the modern order of Switzerland.
In both cases, the crucial legal problem is how the building parts relate to the social
order. The two respective questions for the law are as follows. Is a minaret necessary for
Muslims to perform their religion in a mosque or are they just religiously meaningless
towers on buildings? Are flat roofs signs of modernity or of dangerous immigrants? The
goal of my analysis is not so much to answer these questions from the viewpoint of
minority rights, but to analyse the legal theories of architecture behind these issues. I use
the two cases to elucidate how building codes struggle with what I call the quasi-
technicality of buildings.
Recent scholarship in socio-legal studies has increasingly focused on the relationship
of space and the law and specifically on the city (Ben-Joseph, 2005; Blomley et al., 2001;
Butler, 2009; Manderson, 2005; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2007). This research
showed that the law also regulates the spatial distribution of social practices. An impor-
tant part of this research looks at the use of building codes and zoning laws to negotiate
space use by different groups (Frug, 2001: 153–64; Oh, 2005; Perin, 1977; Ranasinghe
and Valverde, 2006; Ritzdorf, 1994; Valverde, 2005; VanderVelde, 1989). These studies
focus on the effects of zoning on specific – usually disadvantaged – groups such as
migrants, women, the elderly, or unwanted activities such as abortion clinics or porn
movie theatres (Papayanis, 2000). They look at zoning as having indirect effects on those
groups and activities by its use to achieve what cannot be regulated with more direct laws
directed at humans, such as vagrancy laws.
1
Zoning is directed at regulating human
groups by imposing a normative view of how to spatially order society. By doing so,
zones and the buildings therein become replacements for human groups and lifestyles.
In this article, I build on these studies and expand the argument by taking the under-
lying architectural problems more seriously. My argument is based on an understanding
of buildings in the context of actor-network theory: buildings are not technologies that
merely enforce certain uses; rather they are quasi-technologies, whose relationship to use
is vague. As I show, legal regulations of buildings mediate the relationship between the
law itself, the building form and their users. Thus the effects of regulating buildings are
vague and do not directly translate into the intended effects on the implicated lifestyles
and groups.
To elucidate this problem I focus on the architectural theories implied in legal argu-
ments. How are buildings as building types classified and given names and qualities?
How are these qualities linked to groups of people and defined as foreign? I want to show
that because building types are quasi-technologies, they result in difficult legal conflicts
where buildings and uses are sometimes identified with each other and sometimes kept
apart. Furthermore, I wish to show that those processes of identification or keeping apart
are not stable across cases because the law lacks a consistent theory of buildings. The
article starts by elucidating the relationship between foreign building types and the law.
I then move on to the two case studies and finally, to a comparison between them.
442 Social & Legal Studies 19(4)
442
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