Acceso usuarios
Monika Grubbauer
In recent studies on the role of architecture in urban restructuring, city marketing andthe related struggles for meaning, there has been a focus on high-profile architects andiconic architecture. In this article I wish to examine architecture and building types as‘socially signifying devices’, in order to take more everyday buildings and their imagesinto account as well. Using Vienna as a case study, I explore how the commercial officetower is utilized to represent the internationalization of the local economy and rendernew urban political-economic strategies socially meaningful. This is done byexamining recent shifts in urban policy, and the means, channels and practices ofdiscursive and visual representation of the local office architecture. Connecting theconcept of economic imaginaries from cultural political economy (CPE) with asociological approach to building types, I argue that economic imaginaries gain inplausibility if they are discursively and visually anchored in urban space. However, itis also shown that this kind of spatialization of new economic imaginaries isconstructed on a selective visual representation of buildings: the assignment ofinternational economic activities to local office towers is revealed to be only partiallytrue in the case of Vienna
