Hernando Meza Ortega

Reading Bogota’s popular matter

Hernando Meza Ortega

Decoding places

1. What does Bourdieu do?

Pierre Bourdieu studies or codifies the plan of the Kabyle house which are a community living
in the mountains of Algeria. He discovers that the house is organized by a set of homologous
oppositions which leads to determinate the uses and dynamics of each space by their lifestyle
and cultural characteristics.

2. How does he do it?

He started to study each of the behaviors or practices in the house and how they were related
to each other. He realized that the main characteristic of the structure was the binary
oppositions which were: high/low, light/dark, day/night, male/female, fertilizing/able to be
fertilized, etc. He realized that some of these were clear evidences of how the gender traits
influence the different spaces in their architecture, and this led Bourdieu to conclude that the
gender ideologies and social dynamics affect not only that architectural morphology but
almost everyone in the world, as is explained that other cultures like the Australian were, just
only by the social spaces, a different dynamic than the Kabyle house social spaces.

3. Where does he do it?

Bourdieu studied the architectural relations with gender ideologies in Algeria, north Africa,
with the Kabyle community.

4. What can be done with Bourdieu’s analysis?

Bourdieu’s analysis allows people to recognize easily how the different social values as gender
ideologies tend to shape different relations everyday even in architecture where each space
says lots of thing about the ones who inhabit those spaces, this may also apply when designing
for a foreign community or society where their social and gender structures might not be the
same, but with some immersion into the culture, the design might work very well by
understanding how things work for different people.