Favorite footnotes – part 3

Did I already mention that I'm a big fan of footnotes? "Bavarity" features a number of footnotes that I enjoyed writing. They offer room for detail and the opportunity to clarify things, based on available literature. They also allow authors to make a statement. In chapter three on "Space for Building Culture", the footnote on page 43 presented here allowed me to harmonize different understandings and conceptualizations of different forms of culture. All of them are relevant to an understanding of building culture that is fundamental to the book. The fact that I refer to the great structuralist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, shouldn't come as a surprise to readers:

"I propose a notion of building culture that is based on the idea of culture as proposed by Lévi-Strauss (1977): "Culture consists of intrinsic forms of exchange (such as language)" as well as "rules that are applicable to all kinds of 'games of exchange', whether they take place the realm of the natural environment or the sphere of culture" (322). I consider this constitutive for other definitions, such as building culture as "synonym for the quality of planning and building" (Durth & Sigel, cited in Nagel, 2018, p. 132), or building culture as a process of learning (Durth, 2016, p. 8 f.), or building culture as a term describing "the production of the built environment and the manner of dealing with it" (Durth, 2016, p. 10)."

For this purpose, I referred to the following sources: Durth, W. (2016). Baukultur als Lernprozess – Rückblick auf die Gründungsgeschichte der Bundesstiftung Baukultur. In Bundesstiftung Baukultur (ed.) Wir sind Baukultur, 8–19. Berlin; Lévi-Strauss, C. (1977). Strukturale Anthropologie I. Suhrkamp; Nagel, R. (2018). Baukultur. In Akademie für Raumforschung und Landesplanung (ed.) Handwörterbuch der Stadt- und Raumentwicklung, 131–137. Verlag der ARL; and, additionally: Durth, W., & Sigel, P. (2010). Baukultur. Spiegel gesellschaftlichen Wandels.

"Bavarity – Coping with Crisis in the Space of Building Culture" is available from Springer Spektrum and all booksellers.