> What could be more 'embodied and emplaced' or more 'sensuously particular' than social housing - where people actually live and spend most of their time?
Sounds like you're a candidate for Boudon's study of Le Corbusier's Pessac housing project:
<http://agingmodernism.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/pessac-stifled-alterations/>
> And yet champagne socialist academics like Foster blithely ignore this vital issue of social architecture in favour of meretricious trophy buildings, nitpicking over which starchitect or usual-suspect artist concurs with his latest ivory tower theory.
Perhaps there are more insidious reasons, but when Foster came of age as an academic, "social architecture" had pretty much been studied out. The remainder of the 1970s featured Annette Michelson's _October_ magazine and Sherrie Levine's "sampling" of famous photographs as the hot thing. Where to go with your career?
C.