Prof. Silke Steets: Forms of everyday dealings with architecture

How do people handle architecture? What can architecture mean, how does it help us to interpret our environment? And what roles do the functions and social statuses of those who deal directly with architecture play? Education, social status and origins play a fundamental role in determining how people react to architecture. But the buildings themselves are more than just a projected image of individual perspectives. They reveal their own lives and suggest a collective understanding of the world. But that does not mean that such an understanding cannot be changed.

Silke Steets is a Professor of Sociology. Her work focuses on sociological theory at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. She completed her doctoral degree in 2007 at the TU Darmstadt with an empirical study on the spatial everyday practices of members of cultural and creative industries in Leipzig. Her thesis, entitled »Wir sind die Stadt!«, was published in 2008 by Campus-Verlag. Habilitation followed in 2013, also at TU Darmstadt, with the development of a sociological architectural theory, published by Suhrkamp-Verlag in 2015 under the title »Der sinnhafte Aufbau der gebauten Welt«. Steet’s worked as Professor of Urban and Spatial Sociology at the TU Darmstadt from 2013 to 2015. In 2016/17 she successfully coordinated the submission of a proposal for the SFB 1265 »Re-Figuration von Räumen« at the TU Berlin, which began work in January 2018. From 2017 to 2019, she received the Heisenberg scholarship at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig.

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