Seven Views on the Meaning of ‘Europe’

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, ...

The 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 specifiable only within the context of modernity and is crucial for thinking modernity. The 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. During the last four and a half decades, in many cases, the endeavors to incorporate postcolonialist criticism into architectural discourse failed to go beyond the peril of “provincializing” Europe. 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. The fallacious character of dichotomies, such as western/nonwestern or Eurocentric/non-Eurocentric, becomes evident if we bear in mind that various societies have adopted aspects of western modernity without fully adopting them, fitting them into the indigenous culture. The tension between the scientific 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. The objective of the paper is to explore the place of the aforementioned tension within the framework of the efforts 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.

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.

The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice, 2017

The 40th anniversary of European Architectural Heritage Year (1975-2015) / Un Avenir pour Notre Passé. 40e Anniversaire de l'Année Européenne du Patrimoine Architectural (1975-2015), herausgegeben von / edited by / édité par Michael Falser and Wilfried Lipp (ICOMOS Österreich/Austria/Autriche), = Monumenta III, Berlin, hendrik Bäßler Verlag, 2015, 674 pp., EUR 39.90 (hardback), ISBN 978-3-945880-03-6 'A Future for Our Past' was the motto of the European Architectural Heritage Year (EAHY) 1975. On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, a weighty volume bearing the same title has been edited by Michael Falser and Wilfried Lipp, Austrian members of the International Scientific Committee on Theory and Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), and published in the 'Monumenta' series of the joint Austrian, German, Luxembourg and Swiss national committees of ICOMOS. Representing an important celebration of a major European event, the book is introduced with prefaces from institutional authorities and the editors, followed by five constituent parts. The first, entitled 'Contexts' , comes in two German, two English and one French-language essays on the origins of EAHY 1975. The second, on the 'Participating Countries' , is the most extensive with 21 contributions of which 11 are in German, 7 in English and 3 in French. The third is devoted to the 'East-European Countries and the Campaign of 1975' , gathering one German and five English-language essays that deal with Finland, the German Democratic Republic (GDR; the former East Germany), the USSR, the former Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Croatian part of former Yugoslavia. The fourth is dedicated to the 'Non-European Reception of the EAHY 1975' , and seven essays in English and two in French explore EAHY's impact on the U.S.A., Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, the Maghreb countries, the Levant, China, Japan and Australia. And the fifth, on 'Thoughts about the Afterlife of EAHY' , consists of one French and five German-language papers that reflect on EAHY's legacy from today's perspective. An extensive annexe includes the 1975 'European Charter of Architectural Heritage'-the 'Amsterdam Declaration'-which was signed at EAHY's crowning event, the Amsterdam Congress in October 1975, and has been a pioneer of historic urban regeneration; and lastly a facsimile of the 'Memorandum for the Council of Europe' by Ludwig Weiss. This last, dating from 1963, gave the impetus to celebrate this major European event and impressively documents the long preparatory period. The annexe is followed by lengthy information about the two editors and is accompanied by a list presenting the contributing authors. Michael Falser and Wilfried Lipp succeeded in mobilising illustrious authors for their book.

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

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.

The Caucasus Globalization, 2009

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