Has there been any significant study of what you might call “architectural recoding” where buildings are repurposed in a new way for a new political-cultural environment with little to no physical modification or aging?
Like Hagia Sofia: church —> mosque —> museum?
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Mansions are my use case. They signify feudalism as a default political implied context, but clearly mansions (unlike fortresses or palaces, which are adjacent) “mean” different things in different eras, but also clearly have a material continuity as an idea.
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Mansions are free-standing opulent (relative to the times) dwellings with significant private physical control of immediate context, with a set-back boundary, typically non-shared, and enough going on to constitute at least a tiny local economy. But their political meaning drifts
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That’s a modern context thing though isn’t it? And presumably shifting political significance of use will lead rather than lag civil codes...powerful people/institutions will decide what to do and get laws permitting them to do it if necessary, which may be easy/hard case by case
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the house my great grandparents built has been a house, a hippie commune, a school for wayward teens, and probably some other things over the past few decades
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Vegan coop house I lived in for 2 years in grad school was a zen temple before that. But it was just a regular Ann Arbor house physically.
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Yeah it’s a fuzzy boundary. I guess I draw the line where it’s obviously the same structure in identity continuity sense. Ship of Theseus test or something.
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Extreme examples: a lot of colonial buildings in India were just renamed. The Governor’s mansion in Delhi became the Presidential residence and a whole different political significance.


