by Jon Lackman | 17 February 2007 | Architecture, Conferences, News, Theory
The line at Starbucks seemed longer than ever this morning, but apparently it did not include very many lovers of architecture dragging and drugging themselves out of bed this Saturday morning to make it to this session, “Detecting Architecture: Questions of Evidence in Architectural History.” There are twenty attendees here at best. Or perhaps it’s just that architectural historians don’t come to CAA? In any case, it seems too bad that so few people are here, considering that this is one of the most innovative and intriguing sessions at the conference. Making use of a new option for CAA session organization (the “open forms” format), the organizers here did not put out a call for papers, but rather invited three handpicked scholars, each of whom was assigned a different text not usually considered by architectural historians, and asked to respond to it. The texts are by Carlo Ginzburg, Joan W. Scott, and Fredric Jameson.
Co-chair Barbara Penner notes by way of introduction that there is a growing interest in how buildings are consumed (alongside the traditional interest in how they’re produced) and in new types of evidence – be it from, literature, film, experiential narratives, or elsewhere – not previously held to be of interest. Architectural theorists, people from philosophy or literary theory, are infiltrating. The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians recently devoted one issue to the question of what architectural history can learn from other disciplines (geography, history of science, cultural history), another issue is what other disciplines owe or should owe to architectural history. What the journal failed to consider is the very validity of its categories. Is “architectural history” something we can or should define, a discipline? Is there something essentially “architectural” that must be understood on its own terms? This session suggests it’s possible and even desirable to have architectural history that doesn’t assume its object of study is architecture. It proposes a new method, a study of “architecture’s background effect.” How is architecture “detected”? How do we come to perceive something architecturally? The architectural object is not simply there waiting for the architectural historian to find it. The transparent world of Holmes has become the opaque one of Auster. Of course, the world of Holmes was never actually transparent, it only seemed so during Holmes masterly narratives.
For Mitchell Schwarzer, “fiction is the essential source for the study of contemporary architecture.” (He couldn’t make it to CAA, but his paper is presented by one of his colleagues.) Fredric Jameson found Chandler’s figures caught up in illicit and tawdry get-rich-quick schemes doomed to tragedy and failure, the writer’s style appropriate to his characters and settings, the built environment of L.A., cultural colossus and wilderness marked by fragmentary, rickety and sham constructions hidden by deceptively solid and gay facades. “About the only part of a Los Angeles house you can’t put your foot through is the front door.” Related to the insubstantiality of people. Chandler compares houses to vines, as if a good sneeze would knock them down among the box lunches on the beach. Choice of detective story genre reveals schizoid nature of American society, working back, taking people apart. Architectural historians examine great buildings – searching archives for evidence of the architects’ intention, patrons, and surrounding culture. What about those vernacular constructions for which we have little information relevant to such questions? Can we understand these buildings through society’s aspirations, through the dreams of the people who lived in those communities, through books like Chandler’s? “Fiction is the essential source for the study of contemporary architecture … although of course no single fiction explains the meaning of a building.”
Lilian Chee’s approach is the most unusual. She is interested in “intimate encounters.” She relates her experience of wanting to look under a table on an architectural site visit as well as Joan Scott’s description of Samuel Delany’s experience in a 1960s bathhouse. Why? Historian and object are inextricably intertwined, she argues. Scott asserted that experience is discursive, i.e. produced in relation to dominant discourses. The historian is both an experiencing subject and an impartial inquirer, a fluid subject constantly shifting between identities. The historian’s role as an experiencing subject must be considered and historicized, written into architectural history – what Benjamin calls the “lived experience.” Architectural history cannot just be about describing intention and (cultural) significance. Evidence is that which is recognized by a possible narrative. Possible narratives determine potential evidence. For whom does architecture exist? Who are the architectural subjects that matter? Gossip, children’s stories, poetry – can these matter? Chee takes such things as essential … because they have determined her response to the architecture she considers. She is aware that her situation is specific, but sees no other option, and seems to take comfort in the fact that many other viewers of the architecture that she studies have similarly subjective experiences of it. Subjectivity in architecture is the condition that we must attempt to understand, if only by approach and approximation. At the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, she studied the billiard room and the garden of the hotel, two beloved parts of the hotel that are rarely studied by architectural historians because they were not designed by the building’s renowned builder. Maugham is said to have composed certain of his fictions in the garden; the billiard hall is said to have witnessed all sorts of strange events, including the killing of a famous tiger. She reads these as important to all kinds of feminist and neo-colonialist questions that vex her. But is this architectural history or the re-telling of “mere” anecdotes? “The anecdote has intrinsic political value … since these anecdotes are allowed to circulate without institutional control.” Finally – in the most surprisingly scholarly move seen at the conference so far – she explains that she fabricated a new archive for the hotel, one that tells another kind of story about its history. If only she had said more about it!
Laura J. Miller notes that material detritus is usually considered insignificant by architectural historians. Yet the modern domestic interior is inseparable from its incidental and ephemeral elements. The crime scene has similarly been ignored by them. Crime scene investigation involves the examination of details, “trifles,” as Holmes called them. What Holmes understood – and historians such as Morelli did not – is that details may be telling, or not. How can we make sure to take in the important details? How do crime scene investigators? The boundaries of the crime scene are determined and secured. Sketches, photographs and (today) videos are taken, according to a predetermined methodology. Survey of the scene takes place by following regimented geometric patterns, in order to correct for searcher’s subjective biases in vision. The investigator may inspect each square-foot one by one, like traveling each square of a chess board, row by row. Can we scholars achieve a similar leveling of hierarchies when we search architecture for clues, by adopting a new type of search pattern?
