Alphonse
Allais, Stupeur de jeunes recrues en apercevant pour la première
fois ton azur, ô Méditerranée,” 1887, in Album Primo-Avrilesque.
Paris: Ollendorf, 1897
Saturday, February 11, 2017
Theory’s history, 196X – 199X. Challenges in the historiography of architectural knowledge
In recent
international literature addressing the history of 20th century
architectural theory, the year 1968 is indicated as a decisive
moment, giving rise to a ‘new’ architectural theory. From that
moment onwards, emphasis was no longer placed on the aesthetics of
architecture, but on its critical potential. Yet, according to some
scholars, this intensification of theory was short-lived. A presence
of coexisting and even contradictory paradigms derived from very
different epistemic domains (anthropology, philosophy, linguistics,
social sciences, etc.) led to a setback of theory, resulting in an
end-of-theory atmosphere in the 1990s.
It
is not a coincidence that the so called death of architectural theory
concurred with the upsurge of anthologies on architectural theory
that collect and classify referential texts. Instead of burying
theory, these anthologies had an additional effect, namely to
institutionalise it. In other words, they offered both closure to a
past period and also defined the locus of a next period of
theorisation, invoking a ‘historical turn’. At the same time
architectural discourses, and especially architectural
historiography, were engaging with new theoretical fields such as
gender studies or postcolonial studies, giving rise to a continued
production of theoretically informed books and articles.
The
goal of this conference is to discuss the methodological challenges
that come along with this historical gaze towards theory, by focusing
on the concrete processes in which knowledge is involved. By
screening the unspoken rules of engagement that the accounts of
post-war architectural theory have agreed to and distributed, we want
to point at dominant assumptions, biases and absences. While
anthologies inevitably narrate history with rough meshes, we believe
it is time to search for those versions of theory formation that have
slipped through these nets of historiography, in order to question
the nature of theory and the challenges it poses to historians. How
do you do historical research on something as intangible as theory,
or in a broadened sense, the knowledge of architecture?
We
are in other words not only interested in what theorists and
practicing architects were arguing for, but also how, why and where
they did so. Looking at case-studies, the singular and ‘minor’
expressions of theory, the local discourses and the different
formative contexts (e.g. education, publication culture) can be
subjected to careful scrutiny. We particularly welcome case-studies
from the 1960s to the 1990s that deal with one or more topics
formulated in the full CFP:
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