Time, History and Architecture

Essays on Critical Historiograpy

Gevork Hartoonian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351981392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

Time, History and Architecture presents a series of essays on critical historiography, each addressing a different topic, to elucidate the importance of two influential figures Walter Benjamin and Gottfried Semper for architectural history. In a work exploring themes such as time, autonomy and periodization, author Gevork Hartoonian unpacks the formation of architectural history; the problem of autonomy in criticism and the historiographic narrative. Considering the scope of criticism informing the contemporaneity of architecture, the book explores the concept of nonsimultaneity, and introduces retrospective criticism the agent of critical historiography. An engaging thematic dialogue for academics and upper-level graduate students interested in architectural history and theory, this book aims to deconstruct the certainties of historicism and to raise new questions and interpretations from established critical canons.

1 On history

The following chapter will critically examine themes particular to the early historiographies of modern architecture, starting with the question of the discursive formation of architectural history. My argument here has two central objectives. The first is to demonstrate the ways that architectural history differs from the traditions of art history; even though the discourse of art history has changed during the last three decades, its traditional influence on architectural historiography has not yet diminished. The second is to explore what is particular to the subject matter of architectural history, charting its capacity to problematize the autonomy of text, i.e., the historiographic narrative. This last point is important because the theme of autonomy was celebrated through structuralism and post-structuralism, to mention two discourses influential for contemporary theoretico-historical work. In addition to architecture, written text plays a crucial role for the mental life of the architectural historian. However, essential to the canon formulated by the historians of the early twentieth century was the work of architects, and the urge to contextualize the work in the purview of events, dates, and objective and subjective transformations without which the particularities of “modern architecture” would have evaporated either in the author’s over-emphasis on a chosen methodology,¹ or else the history of modern architecture, i.e., the time when the modernity of architecture was established, would have been presented primarily as a mirror image of a general historiography which is in itself still difficult to establish.²

The following pages draw mostly from “critical theory,” understood through a close reading of Walter Benjamin’s work. This theoretical paradigm is neither an arbitrary choice, nor is it the result of exhaustive research into the nature of various schools of historiography. In the context of historiographies of architecture written since the 1950s, I wish to highlight two major implications of the word critical. At a general level, critical designates the revisionism implied in the work of postwar historians whose premise is based on questioning the canon established by Nikolaus Pevsner, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Sigfried Giedion.³ In the second place, the term draws its discursive legitimacy from the work of contemporary historians such as Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri whose argument, in one way or another, are influenced by the discourse of the Frankfurt School in general,⁴ and the work of Walter Benjamin in particular.

Historicism

I would like to begin with the claim that any discussion concerning the idea of history in modernity is paradoxical by definition. Essential to modernity is “time”: the time of the present and its rapport with past. Starting from the now of the present, one is then able to think of past and/or future, but always in conference with dichotomies of modernity experienced in any particular moment of the “now of the present,” the time-now.⁵ This process of reproduction, if you wish, does not take place at once and in one moment of history. This reproduction, this act of writing the history’s past, does not take place in a void either; it rather unfolds in its own past. What is involved in this implied doubling (re-production) is, in the first place, that the now of the present is imbued with the past, meaning that the present is neither the continuum of the past nor separated from it. In the second place, the now of the present concerns an understanding of the past that is centred in modernity and the time needed to register modernity’s advancement in the purview of subjects and subject matters that are associable with a particular moment of modernity. The moment, according to Heidrun Friese, demands a “questioning of all too common notions of time, of past, present and future; it demands that we think about uniqueness and repetition, identity and difference, suddenness and duration, rupture and continuity.”⁶ Such is the paradoxical nature of history in modernity, wherein the past of a phenomenon is recognizable when the subject comes to the very recognition of its own presence as an autonomous entity. Therefore, particular dates and points of departure, those qualifying the modernity of architecture, are important. As we will see in the next chapter, this chain of events, the sum total of which is called progress, can be construed chronologically (natural time) and/or historically (historical time). It suffices to say here that knowing the past chronologically differs from knowing it historically, if only to affirm the differences between historicism and historicity, and the dialectics between totality and event as discussed in the introduction to this volume.

The historicity of the present, and of history as such, is thus multi-dimensional; to follow Ernst Bloch, it is a “polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity, with enough unmastered and as yet by no means revealed and resolved corners.”⁷ Even the forward-looking direction implied in the idea of progress is not devoid of the historicity of elements that belonged to the pre-modern era, when anthropomorphism was central for any auratic experience. Implied not only in the cyclical recurrence of nature, but also in any act of making, is a sense of forward looking that might be associated with the frontality of the posture of human body. That the ancients would celebrate the beginning and the end of the process of construction is a good old story. It was to mark the fact that through the realization of building, the time of construction is extinguished and architecture enters into a different regime of temporality. What has changed in the course of modernity and by the loss of aura, to recall Walter Benjamin, is the following: the engine of collectivity that necessitated rituals to be performed in the expectation of the completion of a building was delegated to agencies whose logic of formation and transformation had the least to do with the collective. This unfolding, coupled with a deterministic approach to technology, was taken for granted in some circles of modernists to the point that most architects of the time equated the modernity of architecture with the formal and aesthetic implications of technique. This historical development should have taken place as it did. What should not have happened, in retrospect, was the synchronicity between the major historians of modern movement architecture and the architects’ attempt to envision a holistic unity between architecture, technology, and whatever the project of modernity meant to both groups. In addition to establishing a synchronized and homogeneous understanding of temporality, the drive to solidify the process of modernization was problematic on another front. Learning from their colleagues in art history, architectural historians chose to address the past through the rubric of style, a subject taken up in Chapter 3 of this volume. Therefore, the “past” remained a crucial subject in the problematic formulation of the concept of closure, i.e. period style. And yet, that the historical urge to reinvent “style” that should have worked in tandem with a linear vision of history was also unavoidable.

As I have discussed extensively elsewhere,⁸ the idea of past and the ways that the historicity of artistic styles was formulated by art historians were central to the work of architectural historians trained in Europe. In fact, what differentiates Pevsner from Giedion, for example, is how each conceptualized the past. We are reminded of a neutral presentation of the idea of past in Pevsner’s account of modern architecture, where a chain of developments, mostly motivated by technology and abstract painting, culminates in the work of Walter Gropius, circa 1914. Giedion, by contrast, put forward an image of the past projected in the forward-looking gaze of the historian that accidently matched with the vision of Le Corbusier. The notion of the past becomes more interesting when the discussion turns to a country like America that was peripheral to the main causes of modernity, particularly given the fact that since the postwar years the country has deliberately and vehemently transformed modernization into the engine of capitalism. Aspects of the latter transformation are discussed in other chapters of this volume. As far as the historiography of early modern architecture is concerned, suffice it to say a few words about Hitchcock’s project. Of particular interest is his attempt to compromise the Jeffersonian vision of America with the actuality of modernity taking place in Europe. In the absence of the idea of historical styles permeating the architecture of European countries, Hitchcock invented a past that did not exist in the first place. Thus, the significance of Hitchcock’s idea of “New Tradition,” the basic elements of which he detected in the late work of Richardson. Interestingly enough, this line of thinking invigorated the debate running between Lewis Mumford and others who were also interested in formulating the idea of modernity in America.⁹

One implication of these observations is the need to reassess the dialectics between centre and periphery in the light of the globalization of capital and information, indexing the architecture of each region in reference to the point in time when a country or a region steps into the processes of modernization. In this regard, the difference between contemporary Japanese and Chinese architecture speaks for itself. Another one, relates to the ways that architectural history is taught in architecture programmes, which must be transformed according to a non-synchronized understanding of the historical time.

What also should be reconsidered is the strategies that enabled the above three historians to select and highlight architects and buildings from the past that conformed to their historiographic project (ideology?). Congenial to most historian’s interpretation of the past is also the tendency for historicism, the belief that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the zeitgeist and the work produced in a given time and place. Alan Colquhoun enumerates three possible connotations for the word historicism, and traces the subject’s history back to the discourses permeating Europe in the eighteenth century.¹⁰ In line with Maurice Mandelbaum, Colquhoun suggested that the word historicism could be used for three different purposes: “the first is a theory of history, the second, an attitude, the third, an artistic practice.” Colquhoun recalls Hegel’s formulation of two platforms critical for the development of modern architecture. First, we are reminded of the German philosopher’s advocacy for the opacity of art, and the question concerning architecture’s autonomy by which the building’s rapport with any symbolism external to its own processes of production was minimized if not curtailed. Hegel’s second contribution has to do with the autonomy of a history that is charged with a future-oriented teleological vision that in the last analysis was dead end in the first place. Reflecting on Leo Strauss’s critique of historicism, Paul Norton suggests that for Hegel “History is not merely a record of human events; it is a rational and reasonable process.”¹¹ What makes the early modernists’ vision of history attractive is, in the first place, the fact that architects were able, for the first time, to perceive their work detached from both classical wisdom and the theory of mimesis. This unfolding was significant for the emergence of a historical consciousness, subjectivity, whose vision was analogous to the eye of a backwar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction: Time and history: an introductory outline
• 1 On history
• 2 On time
• 3 On style
• 4 On baroque
• 5 On Mies
• 6 On autonomy
• 7 On brutalism
• 8 On architecture and capitalism
• 9 It’s time
• Index