Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps—Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.
Author(s): Aggregate Architectural History Collective
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 360
City: Pittsburgh
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Evidence, Narrative, and Writing Architectural History | Daniel M. Abramson, Zeynep Çelik Alexander, and Michael Osman
Part I. Legends
Chapter 1. The Fires of Saint-Domingue, or, Landscapes of the Haitian Revolution | Peter Minosh
Chapter 2. Known Unknowns: The Documentary History of the Franklin Ghost House | Edward Eigen
Chapter 3. Vacuum Suction Conveyance, Part II | Meredith TenHoor
Part II. Self-Evidence
Chapter 4. Talkative Timbers: A. E. Douglass, the Beam Expeditions, and the Construction of Architectural Evidence | Albert Narath
Chapter 5. Concrete Is One Hundred Years Old: The Carbonation Equation and Narratives of Anthropogenic Change | Lucia Allais and Forrest Meggers
Chapter 6. Medieval and Renaissance Money: On Trial, On Architecture | Lauren Jacobi
Part III. Data
Chapter 7. From Truth to Proof: Friedrich Adler’s Medieval Brick Architecture of the Prussian States | Laila Seewang
Chapter 8. The Banister Fletchers’ Tabulations | Zeynep Çelik Alexander and Michael Osman
Chapter 9. Evidence and Narrative in Digital Art History: Exploratory Methods for Weimar Architecture | Paul B. Jaskot and Ivo van der Graaff
Part IV. Pairings
Chapter 10. Comparative Architecture and Its Discontents | Roy Kozlovsky
Chapter 11. When Baghdad Was Like Warsaw: Comparison in the Cold War | Łukasz Stanek
Chapter 12. Forensic Architecture as Symptom | Andrew Herscher
Chapter 13. Architectural History after Sebald’s Austerlitz: A Squirrel’s Hoard, a Curved Road | Daniel M. Abramson
Part V. Testimony
Chapter 14. Failing Memories and Forgotten Histories: The Dispute over the Venetian Church of San Giobbe | Janna Israel
Chapter 15. Settling Imaginations: Between Dust and Silt | Ijlal Muzaffar
Chapter 16. Dadaab Is a Place on Earth: Land and the Migrant Archive | Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Chapter 17. Learning from Johannesburg: Unpacking Denise Scott Brown’s South African View of Las Vegas | Ayala Levin
Part VI. Retrials
Chapter 18. Architectural Narratives of Habeas Corpus on the High Seas: Charles Frederick Lees versus the Crown | Lisa Haber-Thomson
Chapter 19. “This Whole Maze of Evidence”: Revisiting Professionalism and Property through Hunt v. Parmly | Erik Carver
Chapter 20. “Striking and Imposing Beauty”: On the Evidence of Aesthetic Valuation | Timothy Hyde
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
