The historiography of architectural history

By most measures, the classical tradition is incipient in Brazil. The Renaissance barely made a dent in the forts and small settlements built by the Portuguese in the early colonial period. The baroque was more far-reaching, spanning most of the colonial era and used in urban churches and Jesuit missions; but even though it shaped entire urban ensembles in the prosperous mining region of Minas Gerais, it never dominated the built landscape of the country as a whole. 1 The neoclassical, brought by a French cultural mission in the early nineteenth century, gave the sheen of decorum to institutional buildings and urban plans, but it was neither widespread nor embraced as a national style. 2 It became a historicist, sometimes eclectic, academicism in the turn of the twentieth century, and its claims to representing the official image of Brazil were hotly contested, first by neo-colonialists and then by modernists. 3 However broadly one defines it, and with the exception of the baroque, the classical tradition is not strong in Brazilian architecture. Yet the classical tradition has loomed large in Brazilian architectural discourse-in debates, theories, critical assessments and historiographical accounts-and perhaps most strikingly, the long shadows of the classical tradition are not cast over the periods usually associated with classi-cism and its revivals, but rather over twentieth-century modernism. Architects, theorists and historians have entangled modernism with the classical tradition in different ways, from the 1930s foundational myth that Brazilian modernism descends from the Brazilian baroque, to recent revisionist readings that uncover Greek, Roman and neoclassical influences beneath the smooth surfaces of mid-century buildings. This chapter is less concerned with tracking down these influences in and of themselves, than with following the discursive constructions of Brazilian architects and theorists as they engaged or discarded historical periods. Their discursive constructions were not separate from built architecture; both fields informed and propped each other up. The classical tradition served proselytising and interpretive purposes in the self-understanding of Brazilian modernism. Unlike Europeans, Brazilian modernists did not feel compelled to antagonise all of history, and had a more flexible relationship with the past. 4 Brazilian cities were new, and newly growing; compared to their European counterparts, Brazilian architects had much more of a tabula rasa, with more room to build and more freedom to create. There was also a symbolic tabula rasa: the connotations of historical styles were more fluid in Brazil. In Europe, it

In 1911, a twenty-three-year-old Le Corbusier embarked on a six-month journey from Dresden to Istanbul, and back to his native Switzerland through Greece and Italy. Upon his return, the young architect unsuccessfully attempted to publish his travel notes as a book in 1912 and again in 1914. Only in 1965, forty days before his death, did Le Corbusier conduct the final revision of his 1914 typescript for publication. The next year, Le Voyage d’Orient was published posthumously. Previous scholarship on this book has overlooked the importance of Le Corbusier’s 1965 edits, consequently approaching the work as an authentic testament of the author’s youthful spirit. Based on a new and contextualized reading of the 1914 typescript hand-annotated by Le Corbusier in 1965, this article demonstrates how the late edits constitute a rewriting of a segment of Le Corbusier’s own history, especially in relation to his ideas of modernity, tradition, inspiration, and attachment to Mediterranean architecture. This essay concludes with methodological reflections on how previous teleological arguments on the impact of Le Corbusier’s trip onto his later career corroborate Eurocentric considerations of non-Western architecture.

In the late 17th century, Guillaume-Joseph Grelot wrote the first comprehensive study on Hagia Sophia. His contribution greatly improved the knowledge of the monument in Western Europe and offered at the same time a critical view on its architecture, which was in strong contrast with the opinion of previous travelers. Grelot’s study marks the starting point of a reflection on Byzantine architecture that developed throughout the Age of Enlightenment, especially in the second half of the 18th century. In their work, the theoreticians and first historians of architecture, such as Julien-David Leroy, picked Byzantine monuments instead of Western buildings as examples of medieval architecture. This choice reflected the importance attributed to the Byzantine dome on square in the history of architecture, and the idea that Byzantine architecture was less
degenerate than its counterpart in the West. Despite the new attention paid to Byzantine monuments, there was little progress in the actual knowledge of the buildings, besides Hagia Sophia, San Marco in Venice and San Vitale in Ravenna. By the early 19th century, the idea that the dome of Hagia Sophia was the first of its kind seemed no longer satisfying, and the question of its origin began to arise, for example in the work of Jean-Baptiste Séroux d’Agincourt. This shift is symptomatic of the beginning of a new interest in Byzantine architecture as such, and not merely as the forerunner of «modern» Western churches. The reflection on the origin and significance of different elements of Byzantine architecture, especially vaults, which culminates in the first decades of the 20th century, during the «Orient oder Rom» controversy, was therefore not new. Indeed, it was deeply rooted in this period I call the dawning of Byzantine architecture.

“Today, more often than not, a building is an attention-seeking object that glorifies its owner and architect and is oblivious…to its physical, and…social context. Its plan is diagrammatic—…and…[its] exterior [seems] reduced to one purpose: to excite the eye…by clever pattern.” This opening passage from Klaus Herdog’s epoch-setting, "The Decorated Diagram (1983)," could easily be supplanted for a gloss of the most press-worthy projects and buildings of this century.

Three decades after Herdog’s Diagram, Antoine Picon begins "Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity," citing the Viennese architect and theorist Adolf Loos’s famous “Crime and Ornament” essay from the early 20th century:

“Over the past 10 to 15 years ornamental practices made a spectacular return in architecture. To fully grasp the novelty and radical character of this revival, it is necessary to remember how modern architecture has been suspicious of ornament almost from the start...”

Owing to its subtly and complexity, Loos’s argument remains much debated and often misunderstood as many presume that he meant to equate crime WITH ALL ornament. He did not. He did take issue, however, with his fellow Viennese architects covering the surfaces of their architecture with patterns and images that had little to do with the building’s tectonics, their immediate situation, or the manner in which the building would be used.

In our current era, when that which was previously considered architecture’s ornament is equated to architecture itself; when form follows a digital program rather than a building program, when architects without architecture seem to have supplanted "Architecture without Architects (1964)," it seems propitious to rethink some of the operational polarities of 20th century architectural discourse – particularly those that situate the Venetian designer Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) and the German émigré Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) as opposite ends of an architectural spectrum in regards to their use of material and ornament.

This lecture focuses on a canonical work by each: Mies van der Rohe’s only alteration and addition project—the Resor House Project intended for Jackson Hole, Wyoming (1937), and Carlo Scarpa’s addition to the Gipsoteca Canoviana at Possagno (1955-57).

Narratives of Ottoman architectural historiography have been constructed on a well-established scholarly tradition of a great canon. Such narratives have generally been based on the periodization of the empire’s historical progression – namely the periods of rise, growth, stagnation and decline – or the stylistic evaluation of ‘great masters’ and their ‘masterpieces’. The periodization of historical events brings with it another paradigm in architectural historiography; the issue of ‘style’.
Particularly for 19th century Ottoman architecture, the great canon’s reliance on paradigms of ‘style’, ‘westernization’ and ‘decline’ has become a dominant tendency, used to identifying the changes in architectural practice. Both change and ‘decline’ have, in Western historiographical traditions, been discussed with respect to notions of modernization and westernization. Another pattern has been added to the discussion, namely the nationalist approaches in the construction of Ottoman historiography by Turkish authors. How the Ottoman past was treated by Turkish historians is a significant subject for the evaluation of the 19th century Ottoman historiography. The aim of this paper is to discuss architectural historiography on 19th century Ottoman architecture questioning the existing paradigms of decline, style and westernization.

Las historias del arte generales escritas por historiadores anglosajones presentan un mapa de la arquitectura gótica en el que España brilla por su ausencia. En este artículo se indaga cómo, cuándo y porqué se inicio esta tradición de marginación del gótico español, concluyendo que se remonta al historiador de la arquitectura victoriano James Fergusson. Por una parte, Fergusson argumentó que los edificios españoles eran imitaciones imperfectas de modelos europeos, y por otra que los españoles eran una raza semítica carente de genio artístico e incapaz de crear una arquitectura de valor. Estos argumentos de tipo formal y etnológico le llevaron a concluir que la frontera sur del gótico acababa en los Pirineos y debería excluir España. A un nivel más profundo, sin embargo, lo que de verdad se estaba cuestionando no era el mapa del gótico, sino el de la Europa occidental, y si España merecía ser incluído en él.

The surveys of art history written by anglophone scholars picture a map of the Gothic architecture that leaves Spain out. This paper inquiries into when, how, and why this marginalization begun, tracing it back to the Victorian historian of architecture James Fergusson. On the one hand, Fergusson argued that the Spanish monuments were imperfect imitations of European models. On the other hand, he claimed that the Spaniards were a semitic race, lacking artistic genius and unable to create any architecture of worth. These formal and ethnological arguments led him to conclude that the southern border of the map of Gothic architecture should end at the Pyrenees and exclude Spain. At a deeper level, however, what was really at stake was not the extension of the map of the gothic, but of Western Europe, and whether Spain deserved to be included in it.

Esta copia del artículo contiene correcciones de varias erratas contenidas en la publicación original. En numerosos casos, ésto ha afectado la maquetación pero no la paginación.

This thesis looks at the idea of past in four architectural histories: A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, An Outline of European Architecture, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, A Global History of Architecture. In history, past is the past of the things not merely the time before now, i.e. passed and past as such is the outcome of the research not its resource. As architectural past is the construction of historians' mind's encounter with the present reality, it may be understood by the twofold of " matter " and " form ". In architectural history, the matter of past is determined by historian's definition of architecture. His/her historical point of view defines the form; namely how the course of time is manifested in each historical research. The way in which time is manifested in history, named " historical time " is the meeting point of a logical order with a chronological one. The logic of historical time is the variant causing the difference of the historical time in each history. In historical research, the matter of the past is not transformed to the past of the research subject just because of its accordance with the historian's definition of subject; but a "historical Individual" is defined by historian to match the matter of the past with the logic of historical time. In A History of Architecture on the comparative method, the logic of historical time is growth and evolution and the Greek style is its historical individual. In An Outline of the European Architecture, the logic of historical time is the temporal change of the spirit of age represented in styles and the classic of each style is its historical individual. In A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, the logic of historical time is tradition and building type is its historical individual. In Global history of Architecture, the historical time is a modernity of each period as a rupture and monuments is its historical individual. Effects of historical time on essence and relations of history's elements, concepts giving to the time of each event, and periodization are explained in the third chapter.

Co-author Petra Brouwer. Published in The Journal of Architecture 2020, vol. 25, issue 8 (special issue European Peripheries of Architectural Historiography, eds. Petra Brouwer, Kristina Jõekalda), pp. 963–977.

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Informed by postcolonial theory and more recent attempts to write alternative global histories of art and architecture, scholars have increasingly criticised the persistence of the canon and its Eurocentric perspective, questioning related categories, narratives, and terminology. The aim of this special issue is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of historiography by analysing Eurocentrism in the writing of architectural histories from the inside; that is, from the less researched perspective of Europe’s own ‘margins’. We argue that it was the very method of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural history writing that conceptualised a binary world of exemplary and marginal architecture. The idea of a small core of historically and aesthetically representative monuments, and a large periphery of insignificant buildings was inextricably bound up with architectural history’s grand narrative of progress and modernisation. With accounts from Finland, Greece, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, this special issue breaks up the trope of Europe in a heterogeneous geopolitical and architectural landscape to address the troublesome relationship between the local, the national, and the general. In particular, we are concerned with looking anew at two recurrent historiographical debates that continue to shape the architectural image of the edges of Europe: (1) the paradigm of centre–periphery relations and its effect on architectural histories; and (2) critical regionalism’s claim of rewriting the history of modern architecture from the point of view of local and national cultural identities.