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Michael Falser (ed.), Picturesque Modernities: Architectural Studies in Global Regionalism (1890-1950)

= Modernités pittoresques: études architecturales en régionalisme mondial (1890-1950), Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2023 (Art et societé)
Ricardo Costa Agarez
Référence(s) :

Michael Falser (ed.), Modernités pittoresques: études architecturales en régionalisme mondial (1890-1950) = Picturesque Modernities: Architectural Studies in Global Regionalism (1890-1950), Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2023 (Art et societé)

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  • 1 Michael Falser (ed.), Modernités pittoresques: études architecturales en régionalisme mondial (189 (...)

1“The present conference proceedings can proudly present the first collection of case studies to have explored architectural regionalism on a truly global scale. These ten studies bring the entangled regionalist strategies of nation-states and empire-states under a comparative lens, and this through the half-a-century that we consider the first peak of what is conceived today as globalisation (between the 1870s-90s and 1930s-50s). As a conceptual contribution to the emerging discipline of Global Architectural History, this volume is also meant to formulate a robust response to Critical Regionalism, arguably and overstretched, simplified, and essentialised denomination and, de facto a post-war, postcolonial and postmodern approach. […] the editor of these proceedings shoulders the responsibility for a new denomination within the global trajectory of architectural regionalism: Curated Regionalism, as one of the many variations of worldwide circulating architectural modernities (in the plural).”1

2In the final paragraphs of his 26-long-page introduction to Picturesque Modernities, Michael Falser finally makes clear the key points to be considered when setting out to read this hefty, 418-page volume: this is a conference proceedings publication, stemming from a research project initially launched in 2014 at Heidelberg University and specifically drawing on the contributions presented at a conference with a similar title held in Paris in 2016; the editor’s stated purpose with this publication is to dispute Critical Regionalism as a less-than-helpful category for historical enquiry, and to offer an alternative concept—Curated Regionalism. Such a concept emerges, Falser posits, from the investigations that support the chapters in the book, collectively aimed at complexifying our understanding of regionalism in architecture at a global scale by weaving into the account previously untapped connections between centres and peripheries, imperial metropolises and colonial territories (within the same and between disparate empires), common and diverse traits of regionalist approaches, multi-scalar agents and agendas behind regionalism in specific contexts and the importance of drivers such as commerce and propaganda in popularising regionalist trends.

  • 2 Keith Eggener, “Placing Resistance. A Critique of Critical Regionalism,” Journal of Architectural (...)
  • 3 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peak (...)
  • 4 Ákos Moravánszky, Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central Europea (...)

3Falser’s critique of Critical Regionalism—which features prominently in his bilingual introduction (the editor’s closing chapter being the only other fully bilingual contribution; the remaining presented in either English or French)—is not new: criticism has been almost as widespread as the acceptance and persistence of this construct, proposed since the early 1980s by Kenneth Frampton, Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, in mainstream architectural culture. Its limitations and narrowing effects have been noted by many, and its contextualisation as a post-modern phenomenon—pointedly argued by Falser—was made clear already by Keith Eggener in a landmark 2002 essay.2 Falser employs more recent re-elaborations of the construct, namely by Lefaivre and Tzonis,3 to focus his critique and leitmotif for this volume: while Critical Regionalism often posits regionalism as opposed to globalisation—indeed, as a tool of resistance to the abstract-ising, de-humanising, decontextualising forces of capitalist globalisation—, this book eschews such opposition and sees the many routes followed by regionalism between the late nineteenth century and World War II as being part and parcel of a globalised world. Furthermore, while Critical Regionalism insists on the concept’s potential for political emancipation, of peripheral sites vis-à-vis central institutions, Picturesque Modernities points to myriad instances of regionalism devoid of such univocal potential, evincing instead the much more nuanced, greyscale picture outlined by the socio-political negotiations pursued by different levels of metropolitan, colonial, regional and local authorities and non-official entities. Following the lead of Ann Laura Stoler and others, the book positions architectural regionalism in colonial and metropolitan settings under the same analytical grid and draws out the emerging connecting lines: international exhibitions and conferences, central and peripheral sites, buildings devised to last 6 months or 60 years—following Falser’s dense introduction, in whose sweeping literature review one omission seems to stand out (Ákos Moravánszky’s Competing Visions),4 this collection offers a diverse overview of cases from around the world intersecting disparate spheres of influence and cultural background.

  • 5 Michael Falser (ed.), Modernités pittoresques, p. 109 (my translation).

4Consistently with its two main lines of enquiry, Picturesque Modernities is structured into two parts. Section I “Regionalisms Between Metropole and Colony” opens with Claude Laroche’s text, “Existe-t-il une architectonique régionaliste ‘trans-régionale’? Les traits communs des diverses expressions néo-provinciales en France durant le premier XXe siècle”. Usefully, the author defines regionalism in France as a reaction to the “uniformization of architectures” in the national territory over the nineteenth century and to the increased awareness of the lack of adequacy between the architecture produced and the land where it sits. The regionalist movement thereby proposed new expressions derived from the site, following arguments such as material, formal and colour symbiosis—an ontologically harmonious assemblage—which implied a strong differentiation between lands (terroirs). Yet Laroche proposes an examination of the common traits between them, favouring “the architectural oxymoron that might be a ‘universal regionalism’.” He highlights the importance of “minor” architecture in this pursuit: “Although without the aura of manifesto works which are most commonly highlighted in the history of architecture, these buildings are no less revealing of a real savoir-faire, a solid skill deployed by excellent practitioners, and they acquire therefore an essential role in the architectural tableau of the country.”5

  • 6 Ibid., p. 114 (my translation).

5Caroline Herbelin’s and Charlotte Jeledi-Mus’s contribution, “De l’Afrique du Nord à l’Indochine: Régionalisme architecturale dans les colonies françaises, fin du XXe siècle-1931”, looks at the history of regionalist architecture in turn-of-the-century Indochina and the Maghreb. This approach was initially encouraged by colonial authorities (as being in line with France’s “native policy” in both regions) yet it evolved in different directions: to better understand these directions, the authors ask us to suspend the notion of a straightforward metropolitan political instrumentalization and suggest pursuing their analysis “from the ground up”, through the agency of local actors: “an approach from below focused on the elaboration of these architectures on the ground, on their local reception and on their creators’ discourse without preconceiving of their political signification.”6 They dispute the notion that regionalisms in those contexts were mere extensions of the interwar regionalist movement in France and propose reading any connections as part of an effect of “colonial homothety”—while some diffusion did occur, factors internal to each region, regardless of political intentions, help explain the creation of local styles and a lack of homogeneity between metropole and colonial territories, made evident in the comparative study of two disparate regions.

6Wolfgang Voigt’s “Regionalism at Home and in Borderland Alsace: German Heimatschutz Architecture in the Late Bismarck Empire, 1900-1918,” connects the Heimatschutz movement—proposed by Ernst Rudorff in 1897 and Paul Schultze-Naumburg in 1901-1907, and concerned with site preservation, historical monument protection and integrating new constructions with existing contexts—with regionalist approaches to architecture. Noting how many regionalist proposals were in effect early promoters of modernist values through their insistence on essentialism, the reduction of superfluous ornament and a general simplification of forms, the author draws on the example of Alsace and its capital Strasbourg to complexify the centre-periphery balance: in this case, one “periphery” referred simultaneously to two different centres—the Berlin-based Reich and Paris-controlled France. In Alsace, disparate regionalisms went beyond supporting local Heimatschutz concerns to adopt a contrary force and express aversion to German centralist integration attempts, thereby adopting clear political aims.

  • 7 Ibid., p. 166.

7In “Writing and Building the History of East African Architecture in the German Colonial Empire,” Itohan Osayimwese confronts the arguments of nineteenth-century architect and “armchair ethnographer” Hermann Frobenius—in his attempt to contribute to a world history of art with a theoretical construct of Arab-slanted, autochthonous innovations in western and eastern African architecture—with the German colonial administrators’ and designers’ newly-created language of architecture for German East Africa, also based on what they deemed as the superior traits of Arab buildings such as flat-roofed, rectilinear types. This gives the author an opportunity to discuss in depth the ramifications and complexities of the “world art history movement,” shaped by the structural contradictions of influential fields such as ethnography and of developing theories such as evolution, diffusion, geography and migration—most notably, Osayimwese states, “a tension between universalist and particularist approaches. Scholars have reread these nineteenth-century initiatives as pioneering attempts at what we now conceptualise as global art history. I contend that Hermann Frobenius’ work stands as one of few architectural manifestations of this impulse, and one that may serve as a model for current efforts.”7

8Section I concludes with Herman van Bergeijk’s text “‘The Centre Cannot Hold’: Dutch Architectural Culture and the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s.” This essay explores the impact and consequences of a specific contact point in early-twentieth century modern architectural culture in the Dutch sphere of global influence: the travels by H.P. Berlage to the Dutch East Indies in 1923, in which the architect engaged in debates on the conflict between purportedly necessary and unavoidable modernisation and the threat of westernisation for the survival of “local” cultures. Concurrently, Berlage was also being influenced by this experience to revise his modernist stance on the much-debated issue of the use of ornament: through his impression of locally relevant features such as façade texture and the relationship between structure and cladding, Berlage grew closer to contributing to the expressionism of the so-called Amsterdam School and distanced himself from more purist takes on modern architecture. This would constitute a case where regionalism had a direct if unsuspected influence on one of the foremost lines of early development for modernism in architecture.

  • 8 As discussed in my own work on regionalism and modernism in Algarve, Portugal. See Ricardo Costa A (...)

9The book’s Section II, entitled “Regionalism at the Margins—Fluid Typologies”, starts with Boris Chukhovich’s “L’‘Orient vivant’ et l’‘Orient mort’: Les croisées du modernisme et des ‘régionalismes nationaux’ en Asie centrale soviétique dans les années 1920 et 1930.” In this contribution, the author tackles one essential topic when discussing regionalisms at a global scale: the significant disparities of meaning in seemingly universal terms, regionalism being one such word. Chuchovich attempts to clarify how the sense of terms used to convey what was “regional” in the USSR’s cultural and aesthetic vocabularies differed significantly from that in the West. An entirely different picture emerges, he posits: regionalist architecture in Soviet Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, rather than an attempt at adapting to local climatic and cultural conditions, was aimed at transforming the traditional mindsets and ways of life of peoples, ultimately originating a new society, centrally defined (by Moscow) and subordinated to its will; the author identifies a glaring gap between the purportedly regional character of Central Asian architecture and its central origin, a product of Soviet policies aimed at nurturing a diverse socialist world constituted of clearly identified national (regional) built environments. In this “unity in diversity” proposition we can find echoes of similar devices employed in many totalitarian regimes through the tool of regionalism, e.g. in Portugal and Spain in the 1930s and 1940s.8

10Caecilia Pieri contributed the chapter entitled “Baghdad: British-Colonial Strategies and Local Specificities (1920-1936) between Culturalism, Hybridity and Reinvention.” Here, Baghdad’s British-Iraqi architectural production during the mandate comes through as a relevant case of hybridisation of local, regional and international references. Power representation, administrative reorganisation and social control concerns under British rule were transported to the redesign of urban space in ways that differ from Indian and African segregated cities and configure a specific derivation of widely circulated urbanism models. On the other hand, the neo-vernacular architectural identity pursuit in the city evinced the transnational circulation of skills and craftsmanship resulting in a marked eclecticism that removed this production from any association with global modernism tendencies such as they emerged in French and Italian colonies. In mandate-period Baghdad, regionalism acquired the characteristic slant of hybridism.

11Andreas Putz’s text, “The Survey of the Homeland and the Production of Regionalist Modernism: Switzerland and the USA 1930-1950”, explores two very relevant albeit distanced-apart cases where the attention to vernacular architecture as a worthy heritage— often seen as the source of regionalist movements around the world—in the first half of the twentieth century had its origins in socio-economical concerns. In the Engadin region of Switzerland and New Mexico, USA, the turn to the qualities of traditional construction techniques and materials, of the rationalism of layouts and spatial configurations in “spontaneous” buildings and of informal living, stemmed from two official initiatives that ran in parallel in both countries: nationwide surveys of vernacular architecture that, in response to the Great Depression in the early 1930s, created a centralised record of building types and traditional solutions that allowed for dissemination and modernisation. Vernacular building traditions were integrated with rational architectural thought and made available to modern interpretations that went beyond superficial, formal mimesis. These two cases were, in fact, part of a widely disseminated approach that emerged around the globe: from the 1930s survey of Architettura Rurale in Italy (Pagano and Daniel) to the Inquerito (survey) of Portuguese ‘regional’ architecture in the 1950s, similar initiatives brought local building custom into contact with metropolitan learned designers, with consequential impact on developing a ‘Third Way’ to approaching modern architecture in the post-war decades.

12“International Exhibitions as Global Test Fields: Heritage and Regionalism at the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego and the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville, 1915-1929” is the title of Eric Storm’s foray into the realm of world fairs and international exhibitions—locus par excellence of displays of architectural regionalism in the early twentieth century. Through two meaningful examples in the United States and Spain—linked, not coincidentally, by a common Spanish imperial legacy, real and imaginary—the author devises a typology of regionalist pavilions, construed along two essential axes: a so-called “cultural heritage” classification that distinguishes a European or Western legacy from the indigenous or exotic inspiration; and a distinction between formal and informal (vernacular) architectural inspiration sources. Seeking to broaden our understanding of the popularisation of regionalism in international exhibition venues, among both their promoters and their audiences, Storm disputes the strict centre-periphery binary of intervening actors and brings in the influence of one little-discussed side of the equation: commercial appeal, consumption and popular demand, which, although difficult to research in detail, offer promising leads to a more in-depth historical examination of regionalism.

13Michael Falser’s text “Negotiating Architectural Regionalism in Eurasian Contact Zones: France and Indochina at the Universal and Colonial Exhibitions of Paris 1931 and 1937” concludes Section II. Falser returns to the prevalence of regionalism in commemorative international exhibitions—“ephemeral test and exchange platforms”—and investigates the conditions of particular “global contact zones” where the so-called “Non-European Other and the European Self were synchronously negotiated”. Investigating two specific international fora—the universal and colonial exhibitions held in Paris in 1931 and 1937—, the author reads such negotiation as it developed in conferences (which he calls a “theoretical contact zone”) and in ephemeral pavilion structures (a “physical and architectural contact zone”).

  • 9 Michael Falser (ed.), Modernités pittoresques, p. 382.

14Lastly, Michael Falser also authors the closing (bilingual) essay in the volume, “Global Regionalism and the Travelling Stage Sets of Picturesque Modernities: Provisional Conclusions towards a Global History of Architecture.” This text aims to be the corollary of the hypothesis proposed in the introduction, drawing on a vast, occasionally dense array of literature references, from Roland Robertson to Arjun Appadurai, stemming from disparate fields of thought. Here, the author posits that “the invention of the region… cannot automatically be viewed as a formulation of anti-centralist resistance from the peripheries of state, from the margins of culture, or ‘from below’ (as grassroots of civil/citizen’s movements are often labelled). Instead, the regionalist approach tends to be ‘promoted from above’… is carefully designed and, even, standardised as to-be-consumed regional products in the realms of institutionalised ‘cultural capital formations’ of and for the state.” Against this background, Falser proposes a “new distinction: Curated Regionalism … [which] emerged as a stabilising and pacifying tool used by centralist regimes against centrifugal forces at critical junctures during European nation-building as much as to deal with later colonial tensions in overseas colonies.”9

  • 10 Ibid., p. 339.

15Regionalism, he posits, is a “three-dimensional figure of thought” introduced in order “to re-conceptualise this particular ‘global moment’ [1890-1950] from a ‘stage of modernity’ … into a scenario of multiple, alternative and picturesque modernities. Regionalism, in this sense, travelled across the accelerating world in our specific time slot as (only) one side of a constantly revolving ‘stage set’ whose other side—simultaneously—had already been rented out to cosmopolitan opinion makers to ‘frame and picture’ their claim to global validity in the language of a progressively standardised ‘International Modern Movement’.” Falser ends, as he started, hoping that “by mapping out the trajectory of the many surprising constellations of global regionalism, this book succeeded in further developing a truly intertwined, global history of architecture.”10

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Notes

1 Michael Falser (ed.), Modernités pittoresques: études architecturales en régionalisme mondial (1890-1950)=Picturesque Modernities: Architectural Studies in Global Regionalism (1890-1950), Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2023 (Art et société), p. 77-78.

2 Keith Eggener, “Placing Resistance. A Critique of Critical Regionalism,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 55, no. 4, 2002, p. 228-237. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/104648802753657932.

3 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World, Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2012.

4 Ákos Moravánszky, Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867-1918, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

5 Michael Falser (ed.), Modernités pittoresques, p. 109 (my translation).

6 Ibid., p. 114 (my translation).

7 Ibid., p. 166.

8 As discussed in my own work on regionalism and modernism in Algarve, Portugal. See Ricardo Costa Agarez, Algarve Building Modernism, Regionalism and Architecture in the South of Portugal, 1925-1965, London ; New Yorkn NY: Routledge, 2016 (Ashgate Studies in Architecture).

9 Michael Falser (ed.), Modernités pittoresques, p. 382.

10 Ibid., p. 339.

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Ricardo Costa Agarez, « Michael Falser (ed.), Picturesque Modernities: Architectural Studies in Global Regionalism (1890-1950) »ABE Journal [En ligne], 23 | 2024, mis en ligne le 19 septembre 2024, consulté le 10 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16055 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12ebs

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Ricardo Costa Agarez

Senior Researcher, ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal Orcid ID: 0000-0002-1170-6661

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