Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros24ReviewsPetra Brouwer, Martin Bressani, a...

Reviews

Petra Brouwer, Martin Bressani, and Christopher Drew Armstrong (eds.), Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023
Anna Pauliina Ripatti
Référence(s) :

Petra Brouwer, Martin Bressani, and Christopher Drew Armstrong (eds.), Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023

Texte intégral

1In the mid-19th century, a new genre of architectural publications appeared and flourished in Europe and the United States. These were handbooks narrating the global history of architecture, small books intended to provide concise and coherent stories about the development of architecture worldwide. Although their scope was supposed to be global, they fostered an enduring Eurocentric canon for the nascent discipline of architectural history. These publications formed a longstanding basis for civic and professional education with their easily readable grand narratives, in which clearly defined styles succeeded one another in an orderly way.

2The remarkable new book Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture presents a multifaceted history of 19th-century global architectural surveys as a transnational European and Northern American phenomenon with a long and persistent legacy. With chapters written by both eminent and emerging scholars, the volume offers numerous novel interpretations of 19th-century publications, from Christian Ludwig Stieglitz’s Geschichte der Baukunst vom frühesten Alterthume bis in die neuern Zeiten (1827) to Auguste Choisy’s Histoire de l’architecture (1899). The scope of the book is highly ambitious. It not only presents these publications and their authors but also places them in their intellectual contexts, unraveling how 19th-century world historical surveys shaped the ways architecture and its history were narrated, presented, and understood. The book explores the very foundations of the discipline, its most critical and topical themes, while scrutinizing the processes and intellectual contexts of canon formation.

3Following an introduction, the volume is divided into four parts. Part 1, entitled “The Genre Invented,” examines the cultural and intellectual contexts of 19th-century architectural history surveys. Its five chapters offer deep dives into the main themes of the book, including knowledge production, imperialism, race, and audience. In their chapters, Petra Brouwer and Mari Hvattum examine the publishing of world histories of architecture, their overall narration, their audiences, and their close connections with contemporary illustrated publishing. The first handbooks were targeted mainly for the “general reader,” and key to their success were innovations in printing images, especially wood engravings, fueling a “revolution of illustrations.”

4The global turn in mid-19th-century architectural publications did not emerge out of the blue. Christopher Drew Armstrong places the new genre into a larger chronological and scholarly context. His chapter shows how the global surveys of the 18th century, most notably Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (1721) with its collection of architectural masterpieces, were succeeded from the middle decades of the 18th century onwards by studies that sought to establish systematic knowledge while underlining the superiority of classicism. The mid-19th-century genre of world historical handbooks can be seen as a reaction against the classically oriented scholarship by Julien-David Leroy, Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand. While sharing the scholarly rigor and comparative methods of their predecessors, 19th-century handbooks, Brouwer argues, “revolutionized architectural aesthetics by replacing the idea of universal, classical beauty with the principle of stylistic development over time.” Appearing at a time of radical change in European architectural ideals from the late 1820s onwards, these world histories of architecture significantly contributed to the new culture of historicism by offering tools to navigate through the multifariousness of architecture in different times and places.

5Part 2, “The Genre Examined,” is dedicated to case studies and is the most extensive part of the book. It consists of 15 chapters, each presenting an expert interpretation of one or two 19th-century architectural histories with a global perspective. It includes in-depth studies on canonical publications, such as Franz Kugler’s multi-volume Geschichte der Baukunst (1856–1873) or the Banister Fletchers’ (father and son) A History of Architecture (1896­). In addition, the chapters on many little-known publications, like Daniel Ramée’s Histoire générale de l’architecture (1843), are highly valuable. Presented in chronological order, they deal not only with the publications, their contents, and authors, but also inform about their impact and reception. Matthew Mullane’s chapter on the Japanese historian Itō Chūta’s critique of James Fergusson’s scholarship is particularly revealing as it demonstrates how the racist and imperialist narrative of 19th-century handbooks was experienced in East Asia. In relation to Fergusson’s deterministic approach, racial stereotypes, inaccurate illustrations, and static worldview, Itō Chūta’s comment, a single “No!” written in the margins of Fergusson’s book, bespeaks great frustration, in addition to resistance against the firm hierarchies and exclusive categories established by Western scholarship.

  • 1 Murray Fraser, “A global history of architecture for an age of globalization,” ABE Journal, 14-15, (...)

6Besides illuminating the genre’s history, the book also discusses the problematics of writing and teaching global histories of architecture today, especially since Spiro Kostof’s A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (1985). Part 3, “The Genre in the Present,” unravels the long legacy of 19th-century handbooks through four insightful personal essays by scholars who have all been involved in writing, editing, or teaching world histories of architecture during the past decades. As Dell Upton writes, global surveys still struggle with the same difficulties as their predecessors due to the broad scope and large scale of an ever-broadening field, resulting in somewhat contingent stories in which the original, the pristine, the exceptional, and the prototypical stand out. Offering diverse views and opinions on how global surveys should be written, the chapters of this section all contribute to a debate that has been ongoing in ABE Journal itself.1

7Equally useful and highly instructive is Part 4 of the book, entitled “The Genre’s Afterlife,” which offers detailed information about the many revised editions of each 19th-century world history of architecture as well as their tables of contents. This considerably helps future research on 19th-century architectural historiography while also providing important material to study: for instance, how the constantly reprinted handbooks evolved and shaped the discipline over the years.

8The book brings to the fore several major themes that are all topical for the discipline, including the role of race in architectural history; imperialism, conquest, mass tourism, epistemology, and the multiple audiences and actors in the still male-dominated field of architectural history. The close connections between architectural history and ethnography are highlighted in several chapters. In Christopher Drew Armstrong’s words, “both fields shared certain assumptions and methods, interweaving with each other in a mutually supporting system that mapped characteristics of buildings and peoples across space and time.” 19th-century scholars used architecture to establish distinct categories of human groups, to imagine their builders’ innate inclinations, and moreover, to assess and rank their alleged capacities and levels of civilization. As Alex Bremner observes in relation to Edward Augustus Freeman, at the time architecture was believed to convey “the character of man” and his “levels of cultural and moral attainment,” with the ranking of cultures, races, and civilizations being the objective of many 19th-century handbooks. Through architecture, many 19th-century scholars maintained, the development of humanity as well as inherent differences between peoples and races could be made visible and understandable.

9Throughout the book, the theme of race appears as a key factor and guiding principle of 19th-century surveys. Martin Bressani’s chapter on the emergence of racial thinking in world histories of architecture focuses especially on the German intellectual tradition and reveals the profound significance of race theories to architectural history writing. These included the Aryan myth, the idea of the Germanic race’s origins in India, and their continued achievements in ancient Greece. Despite the global scope of the surveys, the lineage of white Europeans seems to form the core of these 19th-century handbooks. While underlining antiquity and the European Middle Ages, many of them eulogized Gothic architecture as the ultimate manifestation of the Aryan race.

10Besides race, another important theme discussed in the book’s chapters is how global architectural history surveys advanced imperial rule. Focusing on James Fergusson’s studies on Indian architecture, Preeti Chopra illuminates the ways in which architectural historians contributed to the possession of land and people through monuments. Fergusson and other British colonizers delineated Indian heritage, transformed it into an imperial form of knowledge, and disseminated their influential interpretations to lay audiences and scholars alike. Through scientific narrative which often overlooked local knowledge and expertise, Fergusson and his peers imposed the idea of Western superiority and even ranked the beauty of buildings on a numerical scale.

11Many of the 19th-century world histories of architecture were targeted at a broad, educated public. Significantly, the first handbooks were not meant to educate professionals but to cultivate the taste of lay readers. In addition to presenting past achievements, they often participated in contemporary debates by promoting certain aesthetic choices, influencing readers, steering architects, clients, and decision-makers, and thus guiding the future of architecture. As such, they were meant to have an impact on the development of contemporary architecture. To achieve this endeavor, cultivating the taste of citizens—women included—was one of the main purposes of 19th-century architectural history handbooks. The only female author studied in the book is Louisa Tuthill, who was the first American to write a global history of architecture and whose mission was nothing less than to improve and elevate American taste and culture.

12Small in format and moderately priced, the handbooks could easily be carried and read as travel companions. The growth of tourism coincided with the new genre of world-historical surveys, and many such publications were explicitly aimed at tourists. Nineteenth-century scholars were keen travelers, too. While seeking to observe and document monuments in situ, many of them aspired to establish the history of architecture as a serious scholarly field.

  • 2 Petra Brouwer and Kristina Jõekalda, “Introduction: Architectural identities of European peripheri (...)

13Not surprisingly, the interest in non-European architecture often depended on its alleged influence on Western architecture. Usually, the authors of the 19th-century surveys included only the buildings that they deemed important for their overall narrative of progress, an ability reserved exclusively, in that era, for certain human races. This narrative led to and culminated in cities in specific European countries: mainly Britain, Germany, and France, and sometimes in the United States, and often in the home countries of the historian-authors, who concluded that architectural invention was limited to these few places. The exclusion of European peripheries from global surveys has been explored by Petra Brouwer and Kristina Jõekalda in another publication.2 As Murray Fraser writes, the 19th-century surveys “not only failed to deal with architecture globally; they also failed to become ‘global’ even within the confines of the West, the part of the world they were set up to celebrate.” (p. 512)

14While establishing distinctions between centers and margins, the handbooks of world architectural history significantly contributed to building enduring hierarchies within the discipline. One such hierarchy concerned building materials. As the surveys were based on the ideals of durability and solidity, stone and brick were ranked superior to wood or mud, for instance, and if some wooden buildings were briefly mentioned, they were never described as “beautiful.”

15The book is carefully edited and beautifully produced, with a pleasant and coherent layout. The handbooks studied are made accessible through numerous illustrations. The front and back covers as well as fold-out images elegantly follow 19th-century conventions. High-quality paper, too, amplifies a rewarding reading experience. Although the book in itself is not particularly global in its scope, as it does not claim to remedy the persistent hierarchies within the discipline today, it nonetheless clarifies the making of such hierarchies in the past. The book sums up important new scholarship on architectural historiography, and for that reason alone it is essential reading for all architectural historians.

Haut de page

Notes

1 Murray Fraser, “A global history of architecture for an age of globalization,” ABE Journal, 14-15, 2019,  https://journals.openedition.org/abe/5702; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.5702; Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Response to Murray Fraser, ” ABE Journal, 16, 2019, URL: https://journals.openedition.org/abe/6954; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.6954.

2 Petra Brouwer and Kristina Jõekalda, “Introduction: Architectural identities of European peripheries,” The Journal of Architecture, vol. 25, no. 8, 2020, p. 963-977, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2020.1851542.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Anna Pauliina Ripatti, « Petra Brouwer, Martin Bressani, and Christopher Drew Armstrong (eds.), Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture »ABE Journal [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 12 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16744 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1393f

Haut de page

Auteur

Anna Pauliina Ripatti

Lecturer in Art History, University of Helsinki, Finland ORCID ID: 0000-0003-2120-8524

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search