Man-Made Mountains and Other Traces of a Fluctuating Market

An Anthropological View on Unintended Design

Abstract

Though the financial crisis in 2008 did not hit as hard in Denmark as elsewhere, its imprints make visible how fluctuating market forces take an active part in the shaping of architecture and urban spaces. Recent theoretical developments in the field of architectural anthropology stress that architecture, rather than being a static entity, is a moving project in which numerous human and nonhuman actors continuously entangle. This paper builds on and advances such an approach by focussing on the vicissitudes of the market as an actor in the complex ecology of architectural design. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in what is here referred to as the place-making processes of new Danish residential architecture; that is, the ways in which architects, users, investors, branding strategies, building materials and financial fluctuations all interact in the continuous creation of places. The paper demonstrates how the contemporary architect designs places in interaction with the global market as much as in interaction with building sites and materials. Consequently, it introduces the concept of ‘unintended design’ in relation to architecture, and argues in favour of an architectural anthropology that studies place-making across the habitually distinguished phases of design and use.