![]() ![]() To put it differently, when considered in its long-term evolution, architectural history appears as a composite discipline that is constantly questioning its historicist epistemology (that is, the regimes of temporality concerning architectural objects and principles) through different causality issues. ![]() The tendency towards a ‘flattening’ of discourse - that is, reducing its historicity in the Hegelian sense, the idea of history as a mode of being in its happening ( Marcuse 1987) - may affect all history writing in general, but in the case of architectural history it manifested earlier and more strongly, given the discipline’s particular attention to the successive geographical expansions of its subject matter. My goal is to look at what might seem a degenerative disease of writing architectural history, namely the flattening of its discourse, a process engaged almost from the beginning of the discipline. Since then, the notion of post-history ( Flusser 2013) has become current, especially for suggesting a frame for the multiple crises (political, social, ecological) disrupting our world today.ĭuring the past few years, I have often wondered, how can history be written in the era of post-history? To analyze the possible challenges that such a seemingly paradoxical question might point to, this article proposes an introspective cut through the history of architecture as a discipline, thus offering a possible genealogy of the mutations it recently underwent. He revisited the topic three years later in a book that became both famous and controversial: The End of History and the Last Man ( Fukuyama 1992). An indirect goal of looking at this flattening of history from an architectural history perspective is tackling the meaning of writing history today.Ī few months before the Berlin Wall collapsed, an article published by Francis Fukuyama in an American journal of international affairs questioned the end of history ( Fukuyama 1989). Several threads wove the historiographical narratives in the succeeding works of architectural history unraveling these begins with an analysis of the foundations of architectural historicity, questioning the role and place of conceptual models, such as the ‘primitive hut’, and schemes like the ‘tree of architecture’, moving to a gradual dismantling of its temporality through the shaping of a modernist historiography and, eventually, through the emergence of marginal historiographic territories. During its evolution, the historiographic discourse grew complexified through a twofold understanding of space, both in terms of doctrinal conceptualization (space being presented as the very essence of architecture) and in terms of a geographical expansion. ![]() The focus on space changed the dynamics of the narrative from a vertical construction to an increasingly horizontal perception of architectural production through the ages. This process was triggered by gradually emphasizing space over time, as becomes clear in examining this longue durée, from the ‘barbarian’ architectures of Quatremère de Quincy and Seroux d’Agincourt to the ‘non-historical styles’ of Banister Fletcher, and from turning peripheries into productive territories of architectural resistance in the theories on critical regionalism to shaping a global history of architecture. From its very beginning, architectural historiography tended to ‘flatten’ historicity in favor of a ‘spatialized’ discourse. ![]()
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