• 1 “Does ABE Journal need a rethink? ‘Early modern’ and ‘modern’ in the study of imperial/colonial ar (...)

1In Alex Bremner’s recent debate essay “Does ABE Journal need a rethink?”,1 he develops a plea to rethink the journal’s scope by introducing contributions on “early modern” topics to its pages. I will develop my argument about this request from two standpoints. Speaking as an architectural historian whose work has focused on central Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I am rather sympathetic to Bremner’s call. However, as a member of the ABE editorial board, I feel that at this stage, it might be more reasonable to continue the current editorial policy, limiting contributions to the time frame of the “modern.”

• 2 For an example of how to create stimulating connections between “early modern,” “modern,” and even (...)
• 3 For an in-depth study of this topic, see Dirk Syndram, Ägypten-Faszinationen: Untersuchungen zum Ä (...)

2Let me begin by stating unequivocally that architectural historians working on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can surely benefit from having a sound understanding of the history and theory of the “early modern” period and, more specifically, what this history might offer in methodological terms. As someone who was trained at Ghent University in the longue durée school of architectural history, and who is currently working in an academic environment which still holds a strong belief in the importance of this understanding, I concur with Bremner’s point that the downsizing of architectural history, especially that of the “early modern” period in the curriculum of architectural schools, is regrettable. Having worked and conversed on a regular basis with colleagues well-versed in the historiography of the architecture of both the “modern” and “early modern” eras has made me acutely aware of the lessons that scholarship on Renaissance or Baroque might offer those, like me, whose field is the twentieth century. For it is the scholarship on the earlier periods that construed concepts such as patronage, the reception and mediation of buildings in print culture, or even the transregional/translocal flows of expertise and architectural models, long before scholars working on architecture in the nineteenth—and twentieth—century started to do so in explicit ways.2 Similarly, the findings I made in 1991, when writing my master’s thesis on the eighteenth-century debate on the origins of architecture and, in particular, the peculiar focus on Egypt in these discussions, are in no small part the reason why I finally ended up focusing, albeit via a somewhat convoluted trajectory, on twentieth-century architecture in central Africa.3

• 4 G.A. Bremner (ed.), Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Pre (...)

3Bremner’s point, of course, is less concerned with the need to be knowledgeable about earlier periods in architectural history when writing on nineteenth—and twentieth—century topics. Rather it is a call to be aware of the benefits that scholars working on colonial/imperial architecture can gain from historiographical debates dealing with earlier periods. His arguments about continuities, rather than ruptures, and his plea for a diachronic approach, are compelling, and it is useful to read his essay in conjunction with the introduction he wrote for the edited volume Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, published in 2016.4 Beyond the plea to extend the temporal scope, Bremner addresses in the latter a number of other issues, two of which I wish to draw upon below to clarify my own position: the need for a more “transnational” approach, and the importance of the “study of buildings” as a core concern for architectural historians.

• 5 Adame Ba Konaré (ed.), Petit précis de remise à niveau sur l’histoire africaine à l’usage du prési (...)

4But let me first explain why, from a scholarly point of view, I endorse Bremner’s plea. Like Bremner, I would invite anyone writing on nineteenth—and twentieth—century architecture in colonial Africa to be acquainted with the literature on what is often defined, using a problematic term, as the “precolonial era.” Of course, African history did not begin with the European conquest, as a group of Africanist scholars reminded former French president Nicolas Sarkozy after his notorious 2007 speech at Cheikh Anto Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. They countered Sarkozy’s blunt statement that “the African tragedy is that the African people have not had enough of a hand in history”5 by publishing an insightful book provocatively entitled Petit précis de remise à niveau sur l'histoire africaine à l'usage du président Sarkozy (The Basics of African History, for the Edification of President Sarkozy). Containing articles on the long history of the African continent, as well as essays discussing how the African present and the past are related in complex ways, and how history can help envision the continent’s future, this concise survey holds a relevance that goes beyond a mere effort of educating the French president. It is indeed useful for a broader, even scholarly audience.

• 6 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Histoire des villes d’Afrique noire. Des origines à la colonisation, (...)
• 7 See Eric Moss, “The Grid Plan in the History of Senegalese Urban Design,” in Carlos Nunes Silva (e (...)
• 8 Geert Castryck, Silke Strickrodt and Katja Werthmann (eds.), Sources and methods for African histo (...)

5An understanding of the longue durée of African history is particularly important when writing on cities. While there exists a significant literature on colonial urbanism in Africa, scholars like Catherine Coquery Vidrovitch, Odile Goerg, and Bill Freund have stated for many years that we should not forget that Africa has a long history of urbanization.6 Recently, others have started to argue that the grid, commonly considered the template par excellence of the colonial city’s organization, might well have a much longer history on the African continent than is usually thought.7 The work on early urbanization in Africa has also opened up some important methodological issues, from the use of archeological research to drawing on innovative linguistic inquiries. Following Bremner, I would argue that we can learn from history proper: architectural historians working on Africa might do well to consult the collection of essays entitled Sources and Methods for African History and Culture, compiled in 2016 by a number of German-based scholars who are well-embedded internationally.8 Providing insight into how today’s historians working on Africa deal with and make sense of the potential inaccuracies of oral sources and memory studies, as well as of archival documents, popular press, maps, and photographs, the book also invites a reflection on how the particular expertise of architectural historians in dealing with space, materiality, urban form, and a variety of visual sources might be beneficial to the larger methodological debate on Africa’s history. It is here that I see an important role for ABE Journal, and align myself with Bremner, who also wishes for a readership beyond the milieu of architectural historians.

• 9 Alain Sinou, Comptoirs et villes coloniales du Sénégal. Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, Paris: Karthala (...)
• 10 Brigitte Kowalski Oshineye, “Migrations, Identities and Transculturation in the Coastal Cities of (...)

6A large part of what Bremner is arguing, regarding the longue durée of trade connections within the British imperial realm, resonates well with what one observes when investigating francophone and lusophone contexts in Africa. Since the 1980s, there has been substantial work by, among others, French historians on the spatial and physical manifestations of European-African trade relationships. Alain Sinou’s work on the comptoirs, or trading posts, along the West African coast is a case in point, as is Kristin Mann’s book on the genealogy of Lagos as a slave city.9 The work of Brigitte Kowalski Oshineye has been eye-opening for me in demonstrating how the Atlantic slave trade impacted on the built environment in West Africa by studying, through genealogical inquiries, travel narratives, and historical essays, the “patterns of international and interregional migration and of settlement” that underlie the design of Afro-Brazilian buildings, not only in the coastal regions but also in its hinterland.10

• 11 Frederick Cooper, “Networks, moral discourse, and history,” in Thomas Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir an (...)
• 12 Jean-Luc Vellut has done groundbreaking work in writing Congo’s history from a transnational and t (...)
• 13 Stanislas Lufungula Lewono, “Patel Ismail Youssuf. Un bâtisseur de Coquilhatville (Mbandaka) 1934‒(...)

7This brings me to a first point where my take on research not only aligns with Bremner’s, but also starts to shift. I agree that we need to take a “transnational,” or “transcolonial/ transimperial” turn when studying colonial architecture and urbanism. This holds particularly true for Africa, a continent that should be examined, as the prominent African scholar Frederick Cooper has argued, by looking at “long-distance connections over long periods of time with more precision.”11 However, doing so requires crossing the boundaries of the particular colonial and imperial contexts in which our topics of study are most often situated. This was perhaps the most important lesson I learned from Jean-Luc Vellut, one of the most pre-eminent scholars of Belgian colonial history. When I was carrying out my Ph.D. research in the late 1990s, Vellut gently but rather unsettlingly commented on my dissertation that any architectural and urban history of colonial Congo would be incomplete if it did not consider the agency of Portuguese, Greek, Italian or even “Asiatic” communities, alongside that of Africans, in what was supposedly a territory in Africa under Belgian rule.12 Indeed, how can one tell the story of the making and shaping of the city of Mbandaka, DR Congo, without referring to the role of the Indian trader Patel Ismail Youssuf who, after his arrival in the Congolese city of Mbandaka in 1934, became a prominent member of its urban society and is today locally remembered as the “bâtisseur de Mbandaka”?13 In my opinion, a primary task that can be fulfilled by ABE Journal lies in bringing together scholars researching nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture in a variety of geographical/colonial contexts, and thereby enabling us to see historical connections that we have previously missed, due to our confinement within specific national/colonial/imperial spheres. Admittedly, that for me was also the main trigger to team up with Mercedes Volait and launch the cost-Action project “European Architecture beyond Europe” in 2010. During the four years of scholarly exchange, our endeavor remained, as far as I’m concerned, frustratingly inconclusive. And while I have the utmost respect for the Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire volume, which Bremner edited, it is not exactly this kind of scholarly output that I had in mind when we started the cost network, as it still to a large extent remains confined by the boundaries of one national colonial/imperial sphere. Presenting scholarship that allows us to dismantle a still strong, if often implicit, nationalist approach in the historiography of colonial architecture is what I see as one of the major goals of ABE Journal.

• 14 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, P (...)
• 15 A seminal reference in this respect remains Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait (eds.), Urbanism—Imported (...)

9What if we then shift our attention to other, more so-called “modern” typologies? Of course, Bremner is aware that it was the nineteenth century that brought us a whole range of new public institutions that, while perhaps originating in the West, very rapidly found their way across the globe: the museum, the (public) library, the railway station, the opera house, the department store, the exhibition hall, and so on. In his recent “Braudelian” account of the nineteenth century entitled The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, the German historian Jürgen Osterhammel, himself a specialist on China, reminds us of the crucial impact such public institutions had on the “transformation” of our world as it became “global.”14 The point seems obvious, as several other scholars have argued before him, and the phenomenon is, by now, also long acknowledged by architectural historians. But it is likely that the ways in which we have mapped and charted the emergence of such “modern” typologies have been too simplistic. They have been viewed mainly as products of an export logic from the center to the colonies, even if a few scholars have tried to discuss them, inversely, as the result of an import logic.15 Do we really already have a sound understanding of the sometimes complex transnational or even translocal connections that underlie the design and the construction processes of such public buildings?

• 16 Mark M. Jarzombek, Vikramaditya Prakash and Francis D.K. Ching, A Global History of Architecture, (...)
• 17 Comparativ. A Journal of Global History and Comparative Studies, vol. 25, no. 4, 2015, themed issu (...)

10I would argue that we do not. In order to gain a better understanding of how, as Osterhammel puts it, the world “transformed” in the nineteenth century because of a profound reorganization of space through new means of mobility (powerful steamships and long-haul rail), and standardization of time, it still makes sense to study such public buildings and the various levels of authorship and agency embedded in them. In this respect, the work that Mercedes Volait has done on nineteenth—and twentieth—century architecture in Egypt, or Ezio Godoli’s tireless effort to document the production of Italian architects and builders in the Mediterranean over the last two centuries, remains pioneering, as it shows the limitations of the colonial/imperial framework for architectural history research in these geographical contexts. For instance, is the term “French Egyptian,” coined by Jarzombek, Prakash and Ching in their 2007 survey Global History of Architecture, truly the only appropriate one for the late nineteenth-century project of the Egyptian museum in Cairo, the result of an international competition? Perhaps it fails to consider the diverse milieu contributing to heritage discussions in Egypt at the time, including not only French and Egyptians, but also British, Italians, Germans and Austro-Hungarians.16 Admittedly, the label “transnational’ might not do the job for this particular case. But acknowledging the more complex patterns of migration and exchange that were facilitated precisely during this period of the “transformation” of the world, and how these created new “portals of globalization” (in particular in port and railway cities),17 which, in turn, informed the construction of particular architectural and urban landscapes, both mundane and iconic, by actors from a variety of backgrounds and origins, remains an important task for architectural historians. As I believe that ABE Journal has a crucial role to play in this respect, this is also why I plea for a more synchronic, rather than diachronic scope, in order to focus on defining the specificities of the architectural and urban landscapes of this “transformed” world and what made them “new.”

• 18 Antoine Picon, “Some Concluding Remarks,” 1st International Conference eahn, Guimarães, 2010. URL: (...)
• 19 The brilliant keynote lecture delivered by the late, pre-eminent Portuguese scholar Paulo Varela G (...)
• 20 The work of scholars such as Adrian Forty, Cyrille Simonnet, Réjean Legault, and Roberto Gargiani (...)
• 21 One can think here in particular of the work of Jiat-Hwee Chang, Sascha Roesler, Andrew Cruse, Dan (...)
• 22 So far, conferences in the field of construction history have been mainly centered on “western-bas (...)

11This brings me to the last issue in Bremner’s two texts, namely his call to focus on the “study of buildings.” Of course, I endorse the call to give ample attention to in-depth analyses of buildings (and urban landscapes, for that matter), and to be wary of drifting off into discussions on the “politics of design,” if we, as architectural historians, want to contribute to larger debates on (colonial) history. Here, I align with what Antoine Picon already called for in 2010, in his concluding remarks on the first eahn conference in Guimarães (Portugal), namely “to suspend the traditional hierarchy that placed design—artistically-oriented design—at the top, and the means of realization at the bottom of what mattered. We have to challenge the distinction between object and process.”18 I’m sure Alex Bremner would agree and certainly, Picon’s call does not oppose a plea to include the longue durée.19 But limiting the temporal focus of ABE Journal does make sense from the perspective of the “study of buildings,” because the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a radical shift in the production of buildings, with the advent of new materials such as steel and concrete, and the gradual introduction of a scientific management of the building site. We are, for instance, only at the beginning of gaining an understanding of “global concrete” and its “geopolitics.”20 Similarly, it was in the late nineteenth century that the notion of “thermal comfort” started to develop in a profound new way, informing throughout the twentieth century different architectural answers to build in a climate-responsive way across the globe. Fascinating scholarship on this topic has started to emerge in recent years,21 but a quick survey of the existing literature within the domains of both architectural and construction history makes it abundantly clear that much still needs to be done, in particular to unveil some of transnational connections and transfers of knowledge and expertise, or how building labor was organized.22