Advanced Topics in History and Theory of Architecture

Abstract

Corrective historiographies for architectural research

Objective

Acquiring insight into advanced research methods available to PhD-researchers in the fields of the history and theory of art and architecture.

Content

In an era of postcolonial theory and reflection, architectural historiography is faced with a series of new challenges and ambitions, concerning its subjects and its methods. This course will reflect upon three of them: the death of the author, center and meta-theory. A first point investigates how recent scholarship seems to dissociate from histories of single and all-decisive authors, to make way for perspectives that render buildings and neighborhoods as a matter of negotiation between multiple agencies. Second, this course will dwell upon the Euro-American bias of our histories, as well as its implicit center-periphery model, and look at recent attempts to tell more cross-cultural historiographies of architecture. Third, the course will discuss the strong meta-theoretical bias of postcolonial historiography (using theories of power, alterity, gender) and question if this has not resulted in disqualification of the material and formal presence of architecture in our history writing. This threefold change in architectural historiography seems to coincide with a shift in the contemporary discourses on the changing role of the architect, the cooperative character of architectural practice and the renewed interest in the craft. The course will question the productiveness of these resonances between historiography and design practice.

Resources