Global History of Architecture

This paper contrasts comparative histories of architecture, prevalent from the 19th and 20th centuries, to the critical method of history that is claimed by recent works. Comparative history arose out of the Ideal- ist philosophy of history and combined its deterministic narrative with a disciplinary bounding of architecture that followed modern assumptions about decision-making in design. Critical history, on the other hand, is a materialistic approach that sees the discipline as one aspect within broad- er social forces. Whereas critical history may lay claim, nowadays, to be- ing the only proper form of historiography, comparative histories were more closely linked to the methods and categorizations of the discipline of architecture. Some 21st century architectural history textbooks, com- mitted as they were to the critical method, nevertheless allowed Idealistic determinism to creep into their narrative structure. I argue this creep is not a shortcoming of these individual works, but a consequence of the contradictions between the non-disciplinary project of critical history and its uncertain place in the professional architectural education. I further develop on this contradiction by comparing it to the broader problem of how the critical history of architecture relates to supporting disciplines such as building archaeology, the archaeology of architecture, or the scholarship of vernacular environments. These fields interact with histo- ry by providing source material and preliminary interpretations, yet they have an uneasy relationship to critical history due to their partial reliance on concepts and categories developed in the professional practice of archi- tecture. The inability of critical architectural history to come to terms with the historical legitimacy of its supporting disciplines is akin to its inability to acknowledge the persistence of Idealistic assumptions in textbooks that cater to the professional education market.

16th Congress of the ISECS International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies / Sapienza Università di Roma – Università degli Studi di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’

Congress Theme: "Antiquity and the Shaping of the Future in the Age of Enlightenment", Session "Building up Identities. Cultural Process, Collecting Practices, Visual arts in Modern Europe", dir. Maria Toscano (Warburg Institute).

Abstract:
During the eighteenth century, many travellers returning to Western Europe from various parts of the world published prints showing temples, palaces and townhouses from these regions. This allowed an educated public, for the first time, to perceive a large portion of world architectural history. The images, however, remained spread out across a large number of expensive volumes, until a professor of architecture at the Paris École Polytechnique, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, took it upon himself to publish a series of plates – his Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre anciens et modernes (1801) – reproducing many of these buildings in plan and/or elevation. Durand was faced with the daunting task, not only of collecting, studying and reproducing countless images, but also of devising a system to organise them. He succeeded in creating a highly flexible scheme, disposing small figures in his plates as though in a mosaic, that could follow modes of classification that were sometimes chronological, sometimes functional, and sometimes typological. The suggested paper shall examine the relation of these modes, and of the global scope of Durand’s project, to organisational methods developed in the plates accompanying eighteenth-century publications on natural history. It will argue that Durand’s volume, by setting buildings from different parts of the world side by side, aimed to encourage students and other viewers to analyse their architectural similarities in order to formulate universal principles, based on the study of history, that could be applied to future architectural projects.

The book edited by Jiat-Hwee Chang and Imran bin Tajudeen, emerges from anxieties about ‘the validity and utility of Southeast Asia as a geographic entity and taxonomic device for framing and understanding the built environment’. By offering a selection of texts that engage with social, cultural and political dimensions of the built environment, the book hopes to explore the histories and historiography of Southeast Asia’s architecture in the twentieth century and consequently, question ‘he self-certainties of both regional and global architectural histories’. In so doing, the book intends to be an antidote to the ‘existing regional architectural histories of Southeast Asia’ that, according to the editors, are ‘either compilations of discrete architectural histories of individual nations or component parts in larger global architectural histories’. To achieve their objective, Chang and Imran Tajudeen have compiled the work of nine scholars whose academic activities centre around the Pacific Ocean: Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia and America. The authors’ contributions are selected and organized around three themes: translation, epistemology and power.

While I welcome the publication, I am not convinced about its self-proclaimed innovative character. The main reason for this is that many architectural historians have already adopted the multifocal, interdisciplinary and transnational approach without abandoning their discipline’s core values and methodological paradigms. Placing the book within this global perspective, the case studies individually and collectively are not as ground-breaking as the editors argue. This is not a problem but potentially a caveat for anybody interested in architectural history at large and expecting something entirely revolutionary. Within a Southeast Asian context however, the book offers an interesting first glimpse into what is potentially a plethora of thematically and nationally varied narratives about twentieth-century modern architecture.

https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/publication/2484

The Tropicana cabaret was one of the most famous sites of Cuban nightlife in the 1940s and 1950s. Located in the residential district of Havana, it brought a new type of venue to the city famous for its musical culture and nightlife. The promotion of the club was professionalized in the early 1950s, by means of a spectacular new building and the development of a corporate design. Although the club flourished mostly, thanks to tourists from the United States and the money they lost on gambling, the networks of its architectural, musical, and performative program go beyond an U.S. American influence and are both decisively bound to the local sphere and entangled with transnational cultures. The Tropicana is thus a venue that uses its picturesqueness to market Havana as a “place”—and a meeting point for artistic and creative culture.

From Ottoman coffeehouses to Japanese teahouses to Parisian cafes, the consumption of substances such as coffee, tea, and tobacco has long created distinctive material cultures, artworks, and architectural spaces. In this course, we trace the dissemination of these stimulants across the globe from the sixteenth century onward. We will examine the material context of the substances in different scales, ranging from utensils and architectural spaces to urban landscapes and sites of cultivation. Routes of transfer will be explored along with the development of new forms of sociability, material objects, and architectural types such as coffeehouses and teahouses.

climatic architecture, like Islamic architecture and any other traditional architecture, is related to worldview. Traditional Iranian architecture, in a particular way, is an allegory of the universe of existence and human, in its cosmic form. Islamic civilization is a prominent example of a traditional civilization, in which there is the presence of certain extreme principles that shadow the civilization over time and space. Islamic art is nothing more than the reflection of soul in this mundane world. From this perspective, it seems that the definition of sociologists from religious art and Islamic art is different from the sociological definition of art in general [1]. The relationship between architecture and environmental features is important not only for native architects, but also for non-native architects who have grown in a different cultural context. Exploring such an interactive process is full of unique and tricky perceptions, both for non-native architects and for audiences, employers, and analysts. One of the doubts is that in today's world, where the boundaries of countries have lost their credibility in the eyes of architects, and they are always looking for new opportunities in new environments, does this recommendation that the work of architecture should interact with the cultural platform make any sense? The new ideas of globalization, which respect regional attitudes, respond positively to the above question, which ultimately suggests that today, political, social and cultural decisions are made in different parts of the world based on a global-indigenous attitude [2]. INTRODUCTION Climatization is an analytical perspective that pritorizes emphasizes on maintaining specific ethnic and traditional features of the region for the specific identity of the region versus universal characteristics. The current paper studies the background and evolution of regionalism theory in architecture by analyzing the views of experts in explaining the dominant approaches in this field. This is a qualitative, analytical-interpretative method paper based on documentary method. The results of the studies indicate that regionalism theory has shifted from nativism with emphasis on physical perceptions, and the style, form and aesthetics of the region to modern approaches focusing on social, cultural, ecosystem and human communication, in search of modifying past bias and limitations, as well as strengthening the interactive approach and the use of global advantages. Accordingly, emphasis on people's participation, and design focusing on local needs and capabilities for sustainable development, a bottom-up approach in the design instead of the centralized top-bottom method, attention to the real realities of mankind and cultural, social and normative values in order to resist the same artifact environment, to strengthen the sense of place, creative protection instead of retrospective look, critical regionalism and interregional

https://hpa.unibo.it/announcement/view/407

CfP:
Today’s general perception of Gulf cities is based on the assumption of a futuristic vision; a visionary development and a cluster of hi-tech constructions.

Since the striking of oil, this ‘brave new world’ has been a testing ground for experimental, risk imbued architecture and real estate. The sudden affluence and ambition of the rulers to demonstrate progress and social advancements (sometimes expressed through outlandish ‘iconic’ designs) has certainly fired this drive. The building of cities seemed an appropriate culvert for the vast funds generated, turning what was once barren into a fertile land.

Furthermore, there is an ever-present sense of the ‘tabula-rasa approach’ that forced (or perhaps tempted) architects to pursue different and alternative design processes. Gulf cities seem to permit the idea, if not always the reality, of being able to ‘start again’, to be re-made, re-imagined and re-Modernised. There is a sense of being forever in the ‘now’, with ‘historical’ projects stretching back mere decades. Perhaps this desire to continually reinvent brought about shortcomings in early Modernist paradigms, and the rapid rise of new social/cultural/artistic concepts (such as pop art/metabolism/structuralism/post-modernism/idiosyncratic and so on).

These preliminary reflections offer an image of the Gulf as a fluid ambit that challenged designers for several decades in the light of a central question: how do architects build in a place with a constantly changing context? How are ideas of history, tradition, memory, and heritage constructed in this flux?

In the second half of the 20th century, (...)

This study, conducted in 2017 on behalf of the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC), illuminates how global architectural history is currently being taught worldwide. Ninety-four instructors from 88 institutions representing seven countries participated in the study, which consisted of collecting and analyzing syllabi followed by an online survey.

The results of the study reveal that, despite a diverse range of academic
contexts, there is significant common ground within the field of architectural history when it comes to what and how to teach. The vast majority of instruction is conducted through lecture format and includes required readings and research papers. Course content tends to be organized chronologically and covers pre-history to the present day. Moreover, roughly three-quarters of respondents noted that local sites are featured somehow in the course’s content or learning activities.

The hope is that the results of this study spark critical discussion, inspiring creative strategies and further inquiry into the subject of teaching global architectural history.

Aims and Scope

This book unravels the formation of the modern concept of cultural heritage by charting its colonial, postcolonial-nationalist and global trajectories. By bringing to light many unresearched dimensions of the twelfth-century Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat during its modern history, the study argues for a conceptual, connected history that unfolded within the transcultural interstices of European and Asian projects. With more than 1,400 black-and-white and colour illustrations of historic photographs, architectural plans and samples of public media, the monograph discusses the multiple lives of Angkor Wat over a 150-year-long period from the 1860s to the 2010s.

Volume 1 (Angkor in France) reconceptualises the Orientalist, French-colonial ‘discovery’ of the temple in the nineteenth century and brings to light the manifold strategies at play in its physical representations as plaster cast substitutes in museums and as hybrid pavilions in universal and colonial exhibitions in Marseille and Paris from 1867 to 1937.

Volume 2 (Angkor in Cambodia) covers, for the first time in this depth, the various on-site restoration efforts inside the ‘Archaeological Park of Angkor’ from 1907 until 1970, and the temple’s gradual canonisation as a symbol of national identity during Cambodia’s troublesome decolonisation (1953–89), from independence to Khmer Rouge terror and Vietnamese occupation, and, finally, as a global icon of UNESCO World Heritage since 1992 until today.

The writing of architectural history shifted with the turn of the century. By 1999, there is an urge to understand architecture from a global perspective, under the lens of postcolonial theories. Sibel Bozdoğan set the task: to write an 'intertwined history,' which shows that the western canon and the cultural production of societies outside of Europe and North America are not separate and independent, nor is the latter to replace the former. Subsequent literature failed to look into subtle instances of cross-cultural exchanges and universally shared values, thus neglecting to revise the notion of universalism. This paper analyses the resulting literature on global architecture published between 1999 and 2014, and more recent scholarly discussions to understand what remains for historians to do today. Though it may be that 'global' has lost its criticality as category to comprehend the present, the historiography of global architecture is yet to be written.

Exhibited at The World in Our Eyes as part of the 4th Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Lisbon, Portugal, October 6, 2016 – January 15, 2017.

This exhibition juxtaposes two large-scale panorama drawings of visionary cities in search for new forms of architectural urbanism. One drawing, “City of Architectural Fictions,” represents unbuilt but architecturally significant proposals while the other, “City of Urban Facts,” shows built innovations that are largely unknown. In addition, each drawing is supplemented by a catalog that documents the examples that can be found in the drawings — a 400-page catalog on the history of visionary projects on the city and a 250-page catalog on the breath of urban innovation.

Chicago Team: Paul Mosley (project manager), Matthew Busscher, Hannah Hortick, Miguel Macias, Daisey Martinez, Pedro Medrano, Kyong Park, Ashley Rogow, Alex Saavedra, Janina Sanchez, Anton Tonchev

The project is part of O Mundo dos Nossos Olhos / The World in Our Eyes, curated by FIG projects (Fabrizio Gallanti and Francisca Insulza), at the 4th Lisbon Architecture Triennial. A statement by the curators reads as follows: “The World in our Eyes observes how contemporary practitioners are engaged in the description of the city, and the different ways they observe and engage with the transformations of the urban condition stemming from the processes of globalization. The selected projects have been arranged according to seven thematic categories that respond either to the methodology used in the works or to the main object of description. Description thus range from the urban fantastic, where design envisions future urban configurations, rooted in reality but as well charged with an utopic vision to structures and superstructures, where graphic tools are employed to read underlying systems (political or economical) that organize cities and territories; from notations of the spontaneous city, where the uses and unplanned transformations are portrayed within more rigorous analytical frames to the predominance of geometry, where the physical form of the city is seen as the dominant factor in its organization; from taxonomical indexing that gathers examples of collections of samples and case studies as means to organize knowledge; to for and against sprawl, dedicated to the expansion outside the consolidated city and vast geography where the architectural expertise is applied to extended territories.”

Special thanks to: Fabrizio Gallanti and Francisca Insulza as well as André Tavares and Diogo Seixas Lopes.

With the generous support by: The College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Exhibition Catalog: The Form of Form

A thematic issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, drawing on work presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Chicago, 2015.

*

The community of scholars served by SAHANZ is quite naturally preoccupied with the Pacific. So many islands are surrounded by it. It is the edge of so many continents. The Pacific presents historians of architecture—defined in the most generous terms—with an incalculable number of subjects of study in its own right, even as it serves as a setting that shapes the kind of scholarship and the kinds of problems towards which scholars who are one way or another defined by the Pacific are drawn. It determines, to varying degrees, the outlook of the architectural history that happens in and around it, be it the study of contemporary South Pacific architecture by Jennifer Taylor and James Connor (reviewed in volume 25 of this journal); or the Mike Austin’s decades’ worth of scholarship on the “Pacific” worldview; or, further afield, Reyner Banham’s reflections (in Los Angeles) on the relationship between maritime settlement and westward expansion in shaping the Pacific’s import to the cities of the American West Coast.

Naturally, then, almost every issue of this journal contributes to a growing body of research on the Pacific as a setting, theme or problem: the architecture and planning of islands and continents; the soft architecture of the complex geopolitical and trade relationships that nations with a stake in the Pacific at once foster and challenge; and the question of the relationship of this semi-global territory to the world as a whole.

The papers that appear in this issue of Fabrications therefore amplify attention to a geography that is rarely overlooked in the pages of this journal, but which is here posed a little more forcibly. What, for architectural history, is the Pacific Basin, encompassing the Pacific Ocean, its borders across the Americas, Australasia and Eastern Asia, and the many dozens of its islands? What does it offer—as a subject, or a territory—to a disciplinary field that has become preoccupied with the global? A field that has absorbed the lessons of postcolonialism? And that has grasped as well as any field might grasp the importance of studying works of architecture alongside modes of intellectual and technical exchange? What is the Pacific as an idea? And how has the idea of the Pacific interacted with the various “realities” toward which it leads? How does the significance of the Pacific change for architecture’s various agents in Russia, Peru or Taiwan? In Norfolk Island, Kiribati or Canada? To what extent is the Pacific a complex field, unified by water, and to what extent a series of discrete cultural settings made complex at the edges?

In asking if we can speak of an architectural history of the Pacific Basin, this issue of Fabrications invokes three ways in which the Pacific already figures in architectural history. The first is as an idea, bound to the tradition (Romantic, imperial, colonial) of imagining the Pacific outside of experience. The second: as a setting, in which buildings are needed, architects put to work, technologies developed or applied, or events occur that result in historically noteworthy works of architecture and urbanism. The third of this is in its absence, as a condition to be overcome, an obstacle removed by thinking about the relationship between one part of the world and another in different ways. This latter Pacific embodies distance as a dimension of architectural work that allows for a kind of practical simultaneity that eliminates altogether the obstacle of the ocean, while at the same time invoking it as a precondition of the relationships prevented by the problems of time and navigation.

It was not always as easy to overcome the Pacific as it is now, and the papers that follow demonstrate the different ways in which the Pacific is brought into play. Anoma Pieris recalls a period when the Pacific was a battleground, prompting a new cartographic layer of prison “islands” demarcated along lines of aggression and allegiance and interacting with a global network of islands on one side or another of the Second World War. Christoph Schnoor takes a single island as his setting, testing the conditions of architectural production on Samoa across different phases of its modern colonisation and independence against the images of a Pacific architecture that occupy the minds of writers, artists and architects alike; and that assume importance, therefore, for their political potency. An article by Jeffrey Ochsner then tests the import of the Pacific for the architecture of Seattle in the American North-West, and in particular the mechanisms by which knowledge of Japanese architecture was invoked in the modernism of this region. Ke Song and Jianfei Zhu present a series of instances whereby an image of American modernity was invoked in a Chinese architecture making overtures to the western world from within the depths of the Cold War. This timing coincides, too, with the trajectory of Philip Goad’s study on the evolving relationship between Australian and American architectural practices that shaped the nature of Australia’s import for Asia and the South Pacific in the second half of the twentieth century—but a relationship predicated on the mobility of culture and personnel across a distance that still demands more than ten hours of air travel to traverse.

The theme of this issue was initially explored in a session supported by SAHANZ at the sixty-eighth annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held April 2015 in Chicago, asking the question of whether we could yet speak of “an architectural history of the Pacific Basin”, encouraging a particular focus on the post-World War II. That session included work by five speakers, including Philip Goad, Jeffrey Ochsner and Christoph Schnoor, whose papers appear here in extended and revised form. It included, too, a contribution by James Weirick, who offered a pre-history to the session’s problem by studying the diffusion of the Chicago School across the Pacific in the early decades of the twentieth century that predicated relationships of a kind explored here by Song and Zhu and Goad. The session also included a paper by Arief Setiawan, on the Hawaiian houses of Vladimir Ossipoff.

The articles that follow—together with Bill McKay’s review of the recently published Cook Islands Art and Architecture—advance the project of positioning the Pacific in architectural history. They advance, too, the task of working through the complexity of the Pacific as a subject that resists synthesis. In this, we still have much to do.

Note: this is the pre-production text of the editorial for this issue.

Contents:
Anoma Pieris / Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps
Christoph Schnoor / Images of Principles of the Pacific? An Investigation into Architecture in Samoa
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner / Seattle, the Pacific Basin, and the Sources of Regional Modernism
Ke Song & Jianfei Zhu / The Architectural Influences of the United States in Mao's China (1949-76)
Philip Goad / Importing Expertise: Australian-US Architects and the Large-Scale, 1945-90