Taking Berger and Luckmann to the Realm of Materiality: Architecture as a Social Construction

Although objects and buildings form an integral part of the reality of everyday life, they have seldom been explicitly discussed in social theory. This article starts by exploring how various classical approaches relate the social to the material world in order to show, in a second step, how this can be done with the help of the ‘new sociology of knowledge’ formulated by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in 1966. Central in this effort is the concept of ‘material objectivations’. Drawing on Émile Durkheim’s first and most basic rule of sociological thought, according to which sociologists should consider social facts as things, I pose the question: what happens when this rule is reversed and things are conceptualized as social facts or – to use the terminology of Berger and Luckmann – as material ‘objectivations’?