Whether or not the boundaries between cultural territories become occasions for contestation depends in part upon the architectural and geographical settings where they come together. At the Federal Building and Courthouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for example, centuries of disputation along the border between science and religion were reproduced yet again in 2005 when opposing parties disagreed on whether “intelligent design” should be included in the curriculum of public school science classes. By contrast, all seems calm at Stanford’s Clark Center, a research facility (completed in 2003) where the potentially controversial boundary between science and politics is settled through the very design of the place. The Clark Center was built to materialize one particular set of political ambitions for science. Its spaces facilitate entrepreneurial, postdisciplinary, and rapidly reworked research. Yet most discourse surrounding the Clark Center avoids scrutiny of the boundary between science and politics, focusing instead on the building’s aesthetic beauty and functional efficiency.
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Keywords
- Intelligent Design
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Governmental Relation
- Cultural Boundary
- Federal Building
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Gieryn, T.F. (2008). Cultural Boundaries: Settled and Unsettled. In: Meusburger, P., Welker, M., Wunder, E. (eds) Clashes of Knowledge. Knowledge and Space, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5555-3_3
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