Identification of concepts related to materialism by content analysis method in modern architecture historiographies

Abstract

This paper shows the results of a content analysis research from a digital books selection about the topic of philosophical materialism. The universe of discourse was classified according to the citations received between January 2004 and December 2017 from different databases by mean digital tools. The objective was the creation of categories by inductive content analysis, with the purpose of building a categorization system to identify the idea of materiality in modern architecture. According to this, was possible to establish content categories related to materialism characterized by a strong context unity and enough descriptive capacity to searching in selected historiographies of modern architecture. These categories or meaning units were used to measure the degree of similarity between codes and materiality categories. An important result was that the trend focused on idealism category, this could serve as a review of a current theoretical conclusions about modern architecture, which refers to the fact that this architectural period was not defined by the nature of its object but by a social ideal.