Iconic architecture, meaning-making, and the social drama of Antwerp’s Farmers’ Tower (upcoming)

This article examines how urbanites debate city transformations through the symbolic medium of iconic architecture. In the Belgian city of Antwerp stands the so-called Farmers’ Tower (Boerentoren), a 1931 Art Deco icon, long celebrated by architecture enthusiasts and locals alike. An episode of public controversy emerged, however, when industrialist and art patron Fernand Huts privately purchased the tower and circulated sketches and renderings of its exterior redesign – the latter commissioned from architect Daniel Libeskind and, under mounting public pressure, ultimately withdrawn. Building on the Strong Programme in cultural sociology, this controversy is reconstructed as a ‘social drama’ consisting of a breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration. Across a five-year period (2020–2025), the Farmers’ Tower constituted a symbolic surface through which the drama’s protagonists and antagonists – Huts and Libeskind on the one hand, and an amalgam of architecture critics on the other – developed competing understandings of the city’s community bonds, temporal trajectory, and changing role on the world stage. The article thus reveals how architectural icons become objects of conflictual meaning-making among social actors endowed with unequal levels of performative power.

Also presented at the 10th Mid-Term Conference of the European Sociological Association Research Network 7 (Sociology of Culture), ‘Cultural Vulnerabilities and Planetary Problems: Creating New Sociological Studies of Culture Between Fragility and Fortitude’, Sapienza University of Rome, 21–23 January 2026