Session #8: What’s in a name? The title “architect” has been around for 2500 years, and “architecture” for 2000. Throughout this time, great care has been taken by architect-authors to define and delimit these Greek and Latin terms. In...
moreSession #8: What’s in a name? The title “architect” has been around for 2500 years, and “architecture” for 2000. Throughout this time, great care has been taken by architect-authors to define and delimit these Greek and Latin terms. In recent years, however, “architect” and “architecture” have been put into question. In a 2010 “Backseat Interview,” Mark Jarzombek opined that “architecture [with its Euro-centric ideology] is out,” and that any word whatsoever would be just as good to name the discipline. Similarly, in a 2011 lecture called “Architecture After Discipline,” Mason White surmised that we ought to substitute the title with another that better speaks to architecture’s “expanded field.” With this, he echoed not only Rosalind Krauss but Anthony Vidler, who in a 2004 essay sketched a kind of architecture that is “not exactly architecture”.
Like Shakespeare’s Juliet vainly wishing that her loved one could “O, be some other name”, a growing number of architects seem to be longing for a terminological fix to their disciplinary crises and cross-disciplinary infatuations. This session asks: What is at stake in this anxiety over the architect’s name? What would be lost if the title were changed? What might be regained if its full social implications were recovered? And, what examples from the history of architectural discourse can best help us to (re)contextualize and (re)consider such questions?
This session seeks papers considering the meanings, etymologies and rhetorical effects of “architect” titles in any period or language. Especially welcome are studies of the original emergence of the title in the fifth century BCE. Also welcome, are studies from the Middle Ages, when the term “architect” passed through curious vicissitudes, as Nikolaus Pevsner suggested in an important 1942 essay. Papers may also address figures performing the role under other names, such as the Turkish “Mìmār,” or consider the metaphoric capacity of “architects” in any genre of literature.
"SAH Conference April 10-14, 2013. (call for papers closed)
Lisa hosted this paper session called "An Architect By Any Other Name? (Re)Contextualizing 'Architects' ”
Session chair: Lisa Landrum, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba;
landruml@cc.umanitoba.ca.""
