Introduction: architectural identities of European peripheries

This session addresses the practice of writing architectural history in Europe's 'peripheral' regions in the 19th and early 20th century. Since the first 'general' histories of architecture were in fact predominantly focused on German, Italian, English and French architecture (and the monuments of Classical Greece), it is our aim to critically analyze Eurocentrism from the hitherto neglected perspective of Europe's 'margins'. Rather than looking at local and national architectural histories per se, the session is concerned with how these can be placed in a wider geographical and disciplinary framework. The contributions address the troublesome relationship between the local, the national and the general, reflecting on the construction of Europe's centers and peripheries with questions such as: To what extent were the surveys on local architectural history aimed at 'filling the gaps' in general histories? What other approaches were developed, and how convincing they were in providing alternative narratives?

In order to shed light on the ways in which the adoption of a historiographical point of view regarding the construction of national identity can be depicted through the conception of architecture exhibitions we could compare the following two exhibitions: World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation, which took place at the National Building Museum in 1994, and Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, which took place at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2011 and was transferred to the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris and latter to the MAXXI in Rome in 2014. The first exhibition included in its material a range of building projects undertaken during wartime; its main aspiration was to show how they contributed to technical innovations and social changes concerning postwar architectural production. The catalog that accompanied this exhibition addressed the chronology and architectural, technological, social, military and planning legacy of wartime. The exhibition aimed to show how the materials of wartime building and the visual language of their representation influenced architecture. The focus of the exhibition was centered on the nation, since, as the poster at its entrance reflected, its purpose was to present “how a wartime building change a nation”. By contrast, the second exhibition, which treated wartime technological products as components of the puzzle of the interactions of different national contexts, escaped the danger of celebrating economic productivity, political organization, and social consensus within the constrains of a national perspective. This was made possible through the inventive narrative zigzags of its sequence, which was based on cross-sections that shed light on the policies undertaken in parallel by the belligerents jumping from one significant place to another, from Los Angeles to London and from Auschwitz to Moscow. In this case, the use of archival material coming from different institutions in different national contexts as well as their historical interpretation played a key role. Its main purpose was to make visible and comprehensible to the spectator that every fragment of the history narrated can take on different meanings if the interpreter adopts a different point of view. The curator based the research and its display on archival material coming from different institutions in order to make explicit the deformations that can take place due to the change of the perspective from which the events are diagnosed. The historical archival research preceding the exhibition was based on material coming from different institutions. Instead of producing consistencies its narrative aimed to reveal disruptions. My presentation aims to show how architecture exhibitions are able to reveal different sets of cultural meanings through the strategies according to which the artifacts, that constitute their material, are articulated, and through the tactics according to which the sequence of their narrative is conceived, functioning as a vehicle of transnational historiographical research.

Architectural Histories , 2018

This position paper examines the complex boundaries that separate Europe from both its constructed margins and those of its imagined Others. Where exactly do we enter the Continent and where does it end? Is it while crossing the world-famous bridge on the Bosporus, for instance, that one receives the first impression of Europe, or is it somewhere farther west — past a 'wall' protected by a strong border regime? To address these questions, this paper tells two concomitant stories about the practices of urban governance and architectural design in Turkey in the early twentieth century by providing snapshots of numerous encounters and negotiations between multiple actors: American public health specialists, European-trained local bureaucrats, and a French city planner. While Turkey's dubious position between the West and the East provides the potential for rethinking the boundaries of the Continent, the paper uses the Turkish case primarily to unpack the idea of 'Europe' as both a fluid entity and a fixed location, an uneven terrain upon which canonical discourses of identity are constructed. In doing so, it points to the interchangeability of subject positions, which often result in competing narratives of modernization, urban design, and the whereabouts of the line separating Turkey from Europe.

Architectural Theory Review, 2007

2020

Europe is also architecture. When Jacques Derrida counts philosophy, democracy and the Enlightenment, architecture is an essential gap. There is a number of artistic expressions, but amongst them architecture, as the space that we live in, plays an exposed role. Architecture is a criterion, a tradition that truly belongs to Europe. A debate on the architectural artistic representation of Europe from the past to the future will consolidate a place for Europe in the world. And this place does not, at least not in the principal sense, yield to the imperialist tradition. On the contrary, Europe’s architecture consists mainly of civilian or clerical buildings. Built architecture though is subject to its deterioration, while the intellectual achievement of architectural projecting and design are what will be left of Europe’s history. Architectural ideas are almost timeless as they always negotiate ourselves in our environment. But ideas are rarely acknowledged as deserved. In most cases, ...

Architectural Histories

This introduction to the special collection 'The Meaning of "Europe" for Architectural History' raises issues about the relationship between knowledge and geopolitics, in particular the significance of 'Europe' for the production of architectural knowledge. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the European Architectural History Network, we invited scholars to join us in rethinking one of our founding questions, namely, how to interpret the inextricable ties between knowledge and geopolitics, an issue that arose from the naming of our network. How can we unpack the significance of 'Europe' for our scholarly domain today? What is the role that the idea, legacy, and institutions of Europe play within the new distributions of global power, and how does it currently affect the production of architectural knowledge? We dedicate this special issue of the EAHN's peerreviewed, public access journal Architectural Histories to these questions. Our questions pertain to the development of our disciplinary culture in and beyond the Age of the Three Worlds, to borrow Michael Denning's definition of 'that short half century between 1945 and 1989 when it was imagined that the world was divided into three-the capitalist first world, the communist second world, and the decolonizing third world' (Denning 2004: 2). The idea that 'Europe' as a geographical construct was split during this period between two 'worlds', and gradually retreated from controlling the 'third', testifies to the ambivalence and contingency of what we consider Europe. On the one hand, for the proliferating studies on ' other modernisms' 1 that go 'beyond Europe', 2 Europe continues to be the powerful foil against which knowledge is produced. On the other hand, the rise of our own network responded to the hegemony of the American Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), indicating the shifting powers within the First World and across the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, from the EAHN's first meeting in 2006, we debated whether the 'European' in our name refers to cultural identity, to a geopolitical construct, or simply to its bureaucratic registration in Europe. From the start we acknowledged the significance of Europe's fragile and dynamic boundaries for our discipline. Papers in this collection continue to raise similar questions: Do these boundaries include the colonial expansion to Asia

e point of departure for this paper is the idea that Europe as a concept is related to the project of thinking and accomplishing universality. It represents the potential for an enlightened resistance in a world that is progressively becoming dominated by the mono-perspectivism of globalism. In this sense, Eurocentrism is speci able only within the context of modernity and is crucial for thinking modernity. e tendency of architectural historiographies to place Eurocentric narratives under critical scrutiny since the dissolution of colonialist models is accompanied by the questioning of the earlier Zeitgeist theories, which had served to legitimize modernism. By depicting Europe and the West as a homogeneous power of domination over the rest of the world, postcolonial criticism turns Europe into the blind spot of its own discourse. e colonialist character of dichotomies, such as western/non-western or Eurocentric/non-Eurocentric, becomes evident if we bear in mind that various societies have adopted aspects of western modernity without fully adopting them, tting them into the indigenous culture. e tension between the scienti c ethos of the historian's task, which demands a commitment free of preconceptions and value judgments, and the political function of the project of history, which is based on a certain social order, has always existed since the emergence of the profession of the historian. e objective of the paper is to explore the place of the aforementioned tension within the framework of the e orts of architectural historians to shape models of architectural historiography that manage to challenge the western canon, it is indispensable to avoid labels such as "other" or colonial. Particular emphasis is placed on the complicity of architecture with structures of power and dominant ideological agendas in society.

2016

Czernowitz to Chernivtsi by Cernui. A multicultural townscape as heritage of a plural society / Paolo, Cornaglia. ELETTRONICO. (2016), pp. 105-117. ((Intervento presentato al convegno Fourth International Conference of the European Architectural History Network, EAHN Dublin 2016 tenutosi a Dublin (IE) nel 2-4 giugno 2016. Original Czernowitz to Chernivtsi by Cernui. A multicultural townscape as heritage of a plural society

Women in Scandinavian Landscape Architecture. Building Collaborative and Transnational Feminist Histories, 2024

In this introduction, we argue that there is a need to move beyond the patriarchic ideas of the singular hero, which has been so dominant in histories of modern architecture, landscape and urban design. Rather, we explore ways in which to study how the built environment is shaped by multiple individuals and collaborations. We do so by following the women who have been active in landscape architecture in Scandinavian countries and beyond. In this introduction, we show how the book contributes to this epistemological expansion of the history of modern architecture and we present the innovative methods that the book explores. Building on feminist and gender research, we developed methods for working collaboratively and transnationally in order to challenge the patriarchic structures within which academic work itself takes place.

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2018