Subject Semester HS22 (Fachsemester) in the Field of History and Theory in Architecture gta(Delbeke)

Abstract

A History Research Studio fostering in-depth research. We will be working together on a specific theme of the early-modern period, with each student developing an individual project.

Objective

Working together, we will identify and collect different case studies. You will collaborate on in-depth research through historical materials and methods (field research, archival material, secondary bibliography), and you will develop individual projects in whichever medium fits your interests and your topic (text, drawing, image, video). The outcomes will be presented together at the end of the semester, and can have different forms: essays, drawings or other visual materials, maps or guides, models, films or exhibition concepts. The course will be organized in weekly meetings: We will begin with some introductory lectures and reading sessions, but we will mostly focus on discussing your findings and work, sharpening your tools of analysis and fostering the development of each project. Rather than individual ‘desk crits’, we will discuss each project collectively, in a round table, to enable mutual feedback and a more collective exchange of ideas. As each project develops, there will also be individual feedback sessions. This Research Studio will teach you to be both historically and critically competent. By combining different historiographical approaches, you will develop the skills to articulate research questions, carry out appropriate primary and secondary study and you will be trained in academic research and writing.

Content

What do buildings mean? An iconography of architecture Meaning in architecture is often a more fraught question than in painting or literature. Architecture’s non-figurative nature may not appear as easy to read as the iconography of a painting or the narrative of a novel. But buildings do mean things and this meaning is inflected through audience and time. At its creation, occupation, or even violent destruction, architecture can embody all sorts of specific identifiable meanings, for definable even antagonistic groups. Frustrated with the purely formal approach to art while a student in Strasbourg, Aby Warburg decided instead to turn to the content of paintings, specifically two paintings by Botticelli: The Birth of Venus and Primavera. Rather than lose himself in the study of composition, Warburg walked from seminar library to seminar library to find the relevant texts that would help him understand Botticelli’s iconography; to decode the symbols and stories present on the canvas and to discover what they meant to the artist in his own time. This study of meaning in art would become the main method of research of the library which still today bears his name, and through Erwin Panofsky, Helen Rosenau and Rudolf Wittkower, Warburg’s concern for meaning was extended from painting into architecture. Each participant in this Fachsemester will be asked to do Aby Warburg’s work; to find the textual sources necessary to locate meaning in architecture. Their research will work towards a honed essay which will carefully synthesise all their material, and which will be delivered as a lecture at the end of the course. In the first half of the course participants will be provided with presentations focused on meaning in architecture in various different historical periods combined with methodological ideas for how one can approach such work. Proposals are open but might include: decoding the iconography of a particular building, historically and ideologically placing the ideas of a particular architect, studying a performance and its architectural setting, explaining the significance of a building during a specific political event, or reconstructing how the ideas of a particular group or class shaped a particular building or architectural type. The sole stipulation is that the topic period should date from before 1850.

Resources