Architecture Since 1400

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Architecture Since 1400 Erik Ghenoiu

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Pratt Institute, New York, USA Published online: 08 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Erik Ghenoiu (2014): Architecture Since 1400, The Journal of Architecture, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2014.944753 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2014.944753

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The Journal of Architecture

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Book, exhibition and film reviews

Architecture Since 1400 By Kathleen James-Chakraborty Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2014 ISBN 978-0-8166-7397-1 Pb, pp. xx and 516, ills 287, $49.95/£37.50

There is a ritual among professors who teach the modern history survey in schools of architecture: we ask each other which survey text we use, and then promptly apologise for our own selection. There is no good answer: every option either marks you as subscribing to an historic movement now grown distasteful, as having too much or too little interest in form, or as trying too hard to be even-handed to the point of losing touch with what constitutes the field of architecture at all. We all feel the need to justify our compromise. When I began teaching I assigned Tafuri and Dal Co’s Modern Architecture (Harry Abrams, 1980), already an old book by then, because it made it clear to students how design decisions had real social and political impacts on a grand stage, and because the book’s Marxism gave me something to argue with. But the seriousness of its tone could be intimidating for some students, and eventually it became clear to me that they simply could no longer find copies of it at a reasonable price. After taking the pains to read and reject every more recent alternative text, almost by default I switched to Kenneth Frampton’s venerable history (Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 1980; London, Thames and Hudson, 2007), a book just as old as # 2014 Erik Ghenoiu

the Tafuri and Dal Co volume. Unlike many of his successors, Frampton at least makes architecture feel like something one does and can participate in, rather than just something one might study from a dispassionate distance. Moreover, the students might actually read the Frampton, since it is short, easy to carry, widely available and inexpensive. And so, in the wake of several decades in which we have made vast strides in the way we tell history in and outside of architecture, I am left using a book that first appeared in 1980—a choice for which I feel compelled to apologise to my peers. I am precisely the target audience for a new survey of architectural history. Thus, Kathleen James-Chakraborty’s Architecture Since 1400 arrives at an opportune time, a fresh and well-considered contribution in a field of unsatisfying competitors. James-Chakraborty has taken pains to weave the major revisions of history of the last few decades into her narrative: social class, gender, colonialism and post-colonialism, and nonwestern architecture all make extensive appearances, along with the economic and urban history that had started to appear in those earlier surveys. That said, she uses these perspectives to build from an older historical narrative and canon much more directly than have many other recent surveys. This is most visible in the book’s historical scope: the timeline starts with Brunelleschi (though he appears only after chapters on China and Mesoamerica of the same period). Surveys that attempt to rewrite the Eurocentric version of architecture’s history have mostly begun in prehistory, while those that attempt revision within the European story itself tend to begin either 1360-2365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2014.944753

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around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as do the Frampton and Tafuri and Dal Co, or as late as the turn of the twentieth century.1 James-Chakraborty’s choice to begin her treatment in 1400 is useful for teaching architects, as this marks a customary divide in the curriculum for the architectural history survey at many professional schools, either a starting point or a transition from one way of telling architecture’s story to another. James-Chakraborty acknowledges that the book owes a debt to her time team-teaching such a course at the University of California-Berkeley. The book addresses the needs of a professional audience in other ways, such as analysing the model of practice first established by Brunelleschi, discussing the importance of Palladio’s books and not just his buildings, and describing the advent of the modern corporate architecture firm. Perhaps the best chapters of the book are the ones addressing not new or revisionist material, but some of the most standard lessons for architects. The chapter on Paris in the nineteenth century, for example, is crisp and deft, thorough but surprisingly succinct. Architecture since 1400 does have its flaws, however, the first of which is that it never really explains what it means by the term architecture. Architecture may be taken to mean buildings and places in themselves, either without regard to authorship, as in the study of vernacular architecture (for instance, the work of Dell Upton, a fellow member of the teaching team for the course at Berkeley), or only those within an accepted canon of authorship and excellence, the attitude generally taken in art history. The field of architecture itself often takes the term not to mean buildings at all, but the prac-

tices, discourses and even culture within which buildings or places are produced or imagined, usually regarded as an ongoing, collective process. Perhaps in keeping with its inclusive and multifaceted approach, Architecture since 1400 seems to wander freely among these definitions, seldom alerting the reader when a shift in focus has taken place from one analytical mode to another. This is most problematic in the sections focusing on vernacular architecture and non-colonial nonwestern architecture, which include eight of the thirty chapters in the book and parts of several others. If by architecture we mean the discourse and practice, something that we are training people to do and to be a part of, then there is reason to recognise a fundamental divide between buildings that were generated within this practice—a practice with its own Western, elitist history—and buildings that were not. For an architect, the history of the built environment and the history of architecture are simply different things. The elaboration of specific and explicit relationships between the two has been enormously fruitful for both scholarship and practice, as can be seen, for example, in Kathleen JamesChakraborty’s own previous writing.2 In the introduction to the book, the inclusion of non-western architecture as an integral part of the story is justified thus: ‘There is no reason, moreover, to believe that western Europe, joined later by the United States, has consistently been in the forefront of developing or popularizing new styles or construction technologies. (...) Thus, the chapters that follow balance targeted discussions of environments around the world, not privileging one continent or another as the locus of modernity or modernism, the aesthetic

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The Journal of Architecture

expression of modernity, at any particular time.’ (p. xviii). Although modernism and modernity appear many times in the book, the text never posits a concrete definition of either of them. This is a surprising omission, as James-Chakraborty has previously made significant contributions to these concepts, locating them in specific places and times.3 The urge for a more critical and socially-sensitive way of telling the history of architecture leads to a few passages that are among the weakest points in the book, verging on anachronistic moral judgement. In discussing the ‘fusion of architectural and social order’ in Brunelleschi’s façade for the Hospital of the Innocents, James-Chakraborty writes ‘Then, as now, unwanted pregnancy was a major social issue, especially among servant women, who often could not refuse the advances of members of the households in which they worked lest they lose their jobs. The architectural order of Brunelleschi’s façade helped create a sense of rationalism and stability that echoed the mission of the institution it housed, reweaving the elite’s sense of communal norms, which had been flouted by the actual behavior of men of all backgrounds acting in concert with mostly lower-class women.’ (p. 38). The relationship she draws between the architecture and the social condition is tenuous, and ignores all other relationships and social structures that impacted the architecture. Similarly, James-Chakraborty is hard on English colonialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (‘The English, unwilling or unable to understand how the Irish or the indigenous Americans inhabited the land, felt justified in appropriating it.’ p. 191.), but credits the ethnic and religious tolerance of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Rajputs for the

richness of their architecture. This leads to one of the stranger position statements in the book: There are many circumstances that localize architectural ideas—materials, climate, and social patterns among them. At its best, however, architecture has always drawn upon the entire world at its command. Its coherence depends on the artistry with which disparate sources are fused into a harmonious whole, one that enriches the aesthetic experience of the society that creates it and of those who come afterward. These amalgamations do not have to result in banal sameness; at their best they inspire a rich synthesis of diverse motifs and techniques. The Taj Mahal sets a particularly impressive standard for the accommodation of difference within unity. [pp. 123–124] Let us forget for a moment that the Taj Mahal was built for Shah Jahan, one of the Mughal emperors least tolerant of religions other than Islam. Even if it was not, the standard expressed here, that the quality of architecture can be equated directly with current perceptions of what constitutes social good, clearly does not apply to the majority of architectural works presented in the book. The quality of places such as Pugin’s interiors for the houses of Parliament, the Katsura Villa and Gropius’ Bauhaus is not reducible to the moral positions that they all undoubtedly represented, nor to the moral attributes that any subsequent period might wish to perceive in them. These occasions of slipping toward moral judgement and loose definition of terms are the only major flaws in what is otherwise a mature, complex and useful book. For every misstep like those quoted above, the book contains several passages that condense a great deal of hard-won historical

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understanding into a few telling lines. For example, in summing up the implications of Neoclassicism and the Gothic Revival, James-Chakraborty writes: Today we are prone to romanticize the public sphere, which appears to be yielding to the pressures of an increasingly commercialized and decentralized cityscape. In its own time, however, it also had limitations, most notably the restricted access that women of all classes and men from the lower-middle and working class had to it. The public for these buildings remained narrowly defined, and the architecture addressed itself only to those well enough educated to understand the meanings embedded in it. [p. 252] This is all quite true, and easy to forget when we look back on the moment in question. It reminds us how our own historical viewpoint might mislead us about past situations that took shape under a very different social order. Passages like this show how the digested lessons of the last few decades of critical historical retelling can give us a sharper, deeper and possibly more responsible understanding of what architecture has been. They do this better by interrogating a more established historical narrative than by simply replacing it. Architecture since 1400 is priced at $49.95 in the United States and £37.50 in the UK (paperback), which is a little above average among comparable texts, but far from the unconscionably high price of a book like Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman’s Architecture: From Prehistory to Postmodernity (1986; Abrams, 2003), the latest edition of the most conservative major history of architecture. The book has a well-chosen set of illustrations, but they are black and white, a disappointment when

competitors like the Oxford History of Art series offer colour at a significantly lower price. Though a paperback, it is printed in sewn signatures, good for the heavy use it is liable to receive. Architecture since 1400 is admirably concise and economically laid out for the considerable amount of content it encompasses, with 498 pages of text and images out of a total of 536 pages. Erik Ghenoiu Pratt Institute New York USA (Author’s e-mail address: [email protected])

Notes and references 1. Surveys beginning in prehistory include Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (New York, 1985); Mark Jarzombek, Vikramaditya Prakash, Francis D. K. Ching, A Global History of Architecture (Hoboken, NJ, Wiley, 2010). A survey beginning with the Industrial Revolution is: Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890 (Oxford, New York, et al., 2000). Surveys beginning at the turn of the twentieth century include the volume following Bergdoll’s in the Oxford History of Art, Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (Oxford, New York, et al., 2002) and William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (London and New York, Phaidon, 1996). 2. See, for instance, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism: New directions for the history of nonwestern architecture’, Frontiers of Architectural Research, 3 (2014), pp. 1–9. 3. See Kathleen James-Chakraborty, German Architecture for a Mass Audience (London and New York, Routledge, 2000).

Architecture Since 1400

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