History and Theory of Architecture IX: Prehistory in Architecture. The Past Today

Abstract

Is our Age of Algorithms the new Stone Age? The lecture course discusses such parallelization in architectural theory and practice from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Objective

The course conveys tools for the critical assessment of references to history in their theoretical and practical application in architecture.

Content

The "invention" of the term "prehistory" and its corollaries such as "primal history" in the early nineteenth century shaped an image of science that architecture still reflects today. Architectural historicism was confronted with new depths of time, modernism was inspired by new concepts of origin. The "return to origins", whether as a means of reflecting on historical truth or primal creativity, gave rise to a panoply of architectural manifestations and theoretical approaches. Architectural prehistory is often associated with a "prearchitectonic" world that articulated itself for instance in caves. However, when literary scholar Ann Bergren or philosopher Elizabeth Grosz speak of "prearchitectural" conditions, they are referring to a kind of mythical time in the sense of an eternal truth rather than to a long gone historical period. These positions seem to run parallel to the presence of archaisms in modern and contemporary architecture. Topics of the lecture course include Gottfried Semper's reflections on "antediluvian" societies and "prearchitectonic" cultural techniques; Walter Benjamin's "primal history of the nineteenth century"; nineteenth-century Egyptomania and twentieth-century reappraisals of Mayan architecture; the new Swiss sense of deep time that was awakened by the mid-nineteenth-century discovery of lacustrine dwellings on Switzerland's lakeshores and echoed in Le Corbusier's self-fashioning as a noble savage; Sigfried Giedion's encounters with the eternal present in the caves of Lascaux and Georges Bataille's pondering on today's loss of an environment which resembles the catastrophes that once buried prehistoric life.

Resources