EAHN 2024 - RT02 Architectural Histories after the Global Turn
We call for papers that can help draft a bigger picture of the state of the discipline today with its ‘other connections’ and that may anticipate next steps, tracing both differences and alternative confluences.
Paul Walker and Macarena de la Vega de León, University of Melbourne
The writing of architectural history shifted with the turn of the twenty-first century. Theoretical and methodological reassessments and the impact of postcolonial theories on architectural scholarship challenged the previously accepted canon and made the development of global histories of architecture both urgent and problematic. These calls for a reconsideration of the writing and teaching of architectural history generated edited volumes and authored books with global aspirations. In addition, online resources appeared that sought to break free from the canon and its categories. By 2015, there was already a re-assessment of the contributions to the global architectural history discourse which engaged with two debates: on the one hand, the methodological and disciplinary (meta)debate regarding the writing of architectural histories, and, on the other, the debate on the appropriate content of architectural education at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level. A series of events and sessions at major international conferences of scholarly societies have continued to reframe global architectural history – as well as its teaching – and to rethink world histories since then.
Some of the latest additions to the field are the new editions of two canonical works: Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (2019), now an anthology edited by Murray Fraser, and Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture. A Critical History (2020). While the former still prioritises European and American architectures, its combination of large geographies and cultures – written for the most part by scholars with deep regional expertise – explores transnational exchanges. The latter includes an entire new part devoted to world architecture and divided into four large geographical regions with chapters on individual countries, but this is predominantly descriptive; the theoretical core of Modern Architecture remains as written in 1980. Edited collections of essays continue to be productive as demonstrated by The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture (2018), Race and Modern Architecture (2020), Writing Architectural History. Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (2021), and Rethinking Global Modernism: Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial (2022). Symposia continue to be just as productive, as demonstrated by ‘Australasia and the Global Turn in Architectural History,’ organised at the University of Melbourne in April 2022, initiating intergenerational, transnational, and cross-cultural dialogues to be continued within Australasia and beyond.
It is precisely beyond Australasia that we want to turn in this roundtable. We aim to engage with the aftermath of over twenty years of formulating, reassessing, reformulating, and implementing the global, with its limitations and challenges. Through problematic temporal and geographical divides, the global continues to fail in matters of equity, diversity, dislocation, and inclusion. As Mark Jarzombek put it back in 2017, we continue to see the absences in the global; a promise that it is yet to be fulfilled… if ever. We call for papers that can help draft a bigger picture of the state of the discipline today with its ‘other connections’ and that may anticipate next steps, tracing both differences and alternative confluences.
