Pub Date : 2022-04-08DOI: 10.3390/histories2020009
Sarah Albiez-Wieck, Raquel Gil Montero
Seventeenth-century travel accounts written by ordinary people are a rarity. In this article, we analyze the unusual travel report by Gregorio de Robles, a Castilian peasant (labrador) who travelled several European empires in Western Europe and America at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The approach we offer is that of a global microhistory. The aim of this article is mainly methodological: we try to delineate the methodological steps we had to undertake to trace Robles in the sources. Looking for an early modern peasant traveler is comparable to searching for a needle in a haystack, but we argue that this endeavor is worthwhile because Robles offers a unique perspective on how ordinary people traveled in early modern times and on imperial frontier zones. We show that his convivial ties and the places he mentions were key elements in the methodology.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-08DOI: 10.3390/histories2020008
B. Bowden
One of the reasons for our interest in the past, or history, is our concern for the future, including the future of our planet and its many and varied inhabitants. It has been suggested that “historians are particularly suited” to exploring and teaching about the future. This suggestion recalls earlier ideas of philosophical approaches to the study of history that sought to find patterns or purpose in history. These approaches are associated with ideas of progress and teleological accounts of history more generally. The underlying philosophical approach to history is a broader search for meaning.
{"title":"History as Philosophy: The Search for Meaning","authors":"B. Bowden","doi":"10.3390/histories2020008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/histories2020008","url":null,"abstract":"One of the reasons for our interest in the past, or history, is our concern for the future, including the future of our planet and its many and varied inhabitants. It has been suggested that “historians are particularly suited” to exploring and teaching about the future. This suggestion recalls earlier ideas of philosophical approaches to the study of history that sought to find patterns or purpose in history. These approaches are associated with ideas of progress and teleological accounts of history more generally. The underlying philosophical approach to history is a broader search for meaning.","PeriodicalId":41517,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Histories","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91234936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Drawing from comparable experiences of trauma, play, and tectonic improvisation as camoufleurs during the First World War, architects Ralph Walker and Aymar Embury II would later work through logics of protective concealment in domestic design projects ranging from carpet prototypes for the Metropolitan Museum in New York to bridge infrastructures for Robert Moses—pursuing forms that provided a sense of security in their woven equivocation and offered portability through their scalability and potential for standardized ubiquity. As with the operations of artillery and personnel camouflage where makeshift flat-tops of fabric and foliage provided spaces of relief within a brutal theater of reciprocal violence, the “masterly confusion” of much interwar architectural work long deemed “modernistic,” middlebrow, or not fully modern was often animated by strained therapeutic desires to mask or avoid the aesthetic and physiological shocks of modernity while also furthering the entrenchment of modern forms of mobilization at more systemic levels. This paper traces how formal ambivalence born out of necessity on the battlefield would come to migrate across surfaces and mutate into surfaces back home, advancing the fluid forms of capital and corporatism via subtle tectonic and material means.
{"title":"Masterly Confusion: Ported Protection in the American Interwar","authors":"J. Fowler","doi":"10.16995/ah.8288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.8288","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing from comparable experiences of trauma, play, and tectonic improvisation as camoufleurs during the First World War, architects Ralph Walker and Aymar Embury II would later work through logics of protective concealment in domestic design projects ranging from carpet prototypes for the Metropolitan Museum in New York to bridge infrastructures for Robert Moses—pursuing forms that provided a sense of security in their woven equivocation and offered portability through their scalability and potential for standardized ubiquity. As with the operations of artillery and personnel camouflage where makeshift flat-tops of fabric and foliage provided spaces of relief within a brutal theater of reciprocal violence, the “masterly confusion” of much interwar architectural work long deemed “modernistic,” middlebrow, or not fully modern was often animated by strained therapeutic desires to mask or avoid the aesthetic and physiological shocks of modernity while also furthering the entrenchment of modern forms of mobilization at more systemic levels. This paper traces how formal ambivalence born out of necessity on the battlefield would come to migrate across surfaces and mutate into surfaces back home, advancing the fluid forms of capital and corporatism via subtle tectonic and material means.","PeriodicalId":41517,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45020719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jennifer Ferng, P. Christensen, Sarah Rovang, C. Zimmerman, K. Hanson, S. Hosseini
Winter reviews 2022
2022年冬季回顾
{"title":"Winter reviews 2022","authors":"Jennifer Ferng, P. Christensen, Sarah Rovang, C. Zimmerman, K. Hanson, S. Hosseini","doi":"10.16995/ah.8755","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.8755","url":null,"abstract":"Winter reviews 2022","PeriodicalId":41517,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Histories","volume":"87 S1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41259479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jennifer Ferng, P. Christensen, R. Hoekstra, L. Gilabert-Sansalvador, Allie Terry-Fritsch, J. Paskins
Digital reviews 2022
2022年数字评论
{"title":"Digital reviews 2022","authors":"Jennifer Ferng, P. Christensen, R. Hoekstra, L. Gilabert-Sansalvador, Allie Terry-Fritsch, J. Paskins","doi":"10.16995/ah.8756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.8756","url":null,"abstract":"Digital reviews 2022","PeriodicalId":41517,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45564862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The paper explores how architectural historiography, during the several stages of its building, managed to flatten historicity through the spatialization of its discourse. It does so by following this process in the longue durée, from taking in account ‘barbarian’ architectures (Quatremère, Seroux d’Agincourt) and distinguishing ‘non-historical styles’ (Banister Fletcher), to turning peripheries into productive territories of architectural resistance (the theories on critical regionalism) or to shaping a global histories of architecture. I argue that this process was triggered by gradually emphasizing space over time. The focus on space changed the dynamics of the narrative from a vertical construction to an increasingly horizontal perception of the architectural production through the ages. During its evolution, the historiographic discourse got 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 geographical expansion. The paper follows several threads which concurred to weave the historiographical narratives in the succeeding works of architectural history. It starts by analyzing the foundations of the architectural historicity, questioning the role and place of conceptual models (such as the ‘primitive hut’) and schemes (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. Though indirectly, by looking at the flattening of history from an architectural history perspective, I am interested to tackle what means writing history today.
{"title":"Space Versus Time: Flattening History. An Architectural History Perspective","authors":"C. Popescu","doi":"10.16995/ah.8283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.8283","url":null,"abstract":"The paper explores how architectural historiography, during the several stages of its building, managed to flatten historicity through the spatialization of its discourse. It does so by following this process in the longue durée, from taking in account ‘barbarian’ architectures (Quatremère, Seroux d’Agincourt) and distinguishing ‘non-historical styles’ (Banister Fletcher), to turning peripheries into productive territories of architectural resistance (the theories on critical regionalism) or to shaping a global histories of architecture. I argue that this process was triggered by gradually emphasizing space over time. The focus on space changed the dynamics of the narrative from a vertical construction to an increasingly horizontal perception of the architectural production through the ages. During its evolution, the historiographic discourse got 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 geographical expansion. The paper follows several threads which concurred to weave the historiographical narratives in the succeeding works of architectural history. It starts by analyzing the foundations of the architectural historicity, questioning the role and place of conceptual models (such as the ‘primitive hut’) and schemes (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. Though indirectly, by looking at the flattening of history from an architectural history perspective, I am interested to tackle what means writing history today.","PeriodicalId":41517,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46120799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1926, women’s rights activist Marie-Elisabeth Lüders (1878-1966) gave a speech at the annual meeting of the German Institute for Norms (DIN) right after a talk by architect Walter Gropius' (1883-1969) on "norming and housing shortage." Claiming the improvement of household regimes as essential to conquer the pressing post-WWI housing shortage and impending economic catastrophe, Lüders saw the mission at hand to be one of an "urgent collaboration" between "producers, traders, housewives and architects, one just like the DIN strives toward." Her task list named the standardization of pots and pans alongside that of architectural elements such as doors, windows and stairs, rendering the improvement of the household (hence, of female labor) a decidedly architectural challenge—even necessity. As member of the "Reichsforschungsgesellschaft" (a research comittee for cost-efficient building) alongside Gropius, Lüders steered what became known as the modernist "Siedlung" into existence: not as architect, but as managerial expert. This article aims to extend the techno-scientific (and male) histories of both standardization and the New Architecture with a reframing of what constituted "architectural elements" from the viewpoint of the very "housewives" who shaped modern architecture from the pot-lid outward.
{"title":"\"Housewives and Architects\": Marie-Elisabeth Lüders’ Management of the New Architecture From Pot-Lid to Siedlung","authors":"Anna-Maria T. Meister","doi":"10.16995/ah.8286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.8286","url":null,"abstract":"In 1926, women’s rights activist Marie-Elisabeth Lüders (1878-1966) gave a speech at the annual meeting of the German Institute for Norms (DIN) right after a talk by architect Walter Gropius' (1883-1969) on \"norming and housing shortage.\" Claiming the improvement of household regimes as essential to conquer the pressing post-WWI housing shortage and impending economic catastrophe, Lüders saw the mission at hand to be one of an \"urgent collaboration\" between \"producers, traders, housewives and architects, one just like the DIN strives toward.\" Her task list named the standardization of pots and pans alongside that of architectural elements such as doors, windows and stairs, rendering the improvement of the household (hence, of female labor) a decidedly architectural challenge—even necessity. As member of the \"Reichsforschungsgesellschaft\" (a research comittee for cost-efficient building) alongside Gropius, Lüders steered what became known as the modernist \"Siedlung\" into existence: not as architect, but as managerial expert. This article aims to extend the techno-scientific (and male) histories of both standardization and the New Architecture with a reframing of what constituted \"architectural elements\" from the viewpoint of the very \"housewives\" who shaped modern architecture from the pot-lid outward.\u0000","PeriodicalId":41517,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47803030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article blurs established boundaries between the radical and the regressive in modern architecture by uncovering how the histories efficiency, climate, and ultimately health converged with military history, reframing avant-garde projects such as Moisei Ginzburg's celebrated Narkomfin building in Moscow. To do so, it explores early-twentieth-century developments in military construction theory, in particular, in the design of military barracks, the area of special importance in the years between the Russo-Japanese War and the beginning of the First World War. Forgotten today, the work of imperial military architect Viktor Sokolsky (1869-1913), whose calculations on the efficiency of construction continued to be studied in the aftermath of the revolution of 1917, exerted a seminal influence upon the modernists' thinking. Mining the genealogy of such Ginzburg’s projects as the Narkomfin and the Green City, the article points to their roots in two typologies well-developed in imperial military architecture: the barrack and the field hospital. It argues that the emergence of modern, mass, warfare led to an elaboration of the principles of modernist, mass architecture with its ethos of hygiene, efficiency, and economy.
{"title":"Modernism and Mobilization: From Viktor Sokolsky’s Economic Principle to Interwar Architectural Planning","authors":"Alla Vronskaya","doi":"10.16995/ah.8287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.8287","url":null,"abstract":"This article blurs established boundaries between the radical and the regressive in modern architecture by uncovering how the histories efficiency, climate, and ultimately health converged with military history, reframing avant-garde projects such as Moisei Ginzburg's celebrated Narkomfin building in Moscow. To do so, it explores early-twentieth-century developments in military construction theory, in particular, in the design of military barracks, the area of special importance in the years between the Russo-Japanese War and the beginning of the First World War. Forgotten today, the work of imperial military architect Viktor Sokolsky (1869-1913), whose calculations on the efficiency of construction continued to be studied in the aftermath of the revolution of 1917, exerted a seminal influence upon the modernists' thinking. Mining the genealogy of such Ginzburg’s projects as the Narkomfin and the Green City, the article points to their roots in two typologies well-developed in imperial military architecture: the barrack and the field hospital. It argues that the emergence of modern, mass, warfare led to an elaboration of the principles of modernist, mass architecture with its ethos of hygiene, efficiency, and economy.","PeriodicalId":41517,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44618436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.3390/histories2010007
Elizabeth Drayson
For 2000 years, the history of Granada has been the story of its peoples—native Iberian, Roman, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and gypsy—who bequeathed a multi-cultural heritage to the city, forged by momentous racial, religious and political conflicts. That heritage is central to Spain’s vexed quest for its own identity, and pre-eminent in that quest is the encounter between Islam and Christianity that took place there. Based on historical sources including oral and written testimonies, early historiography and contemporary historical views, this article considers the answers to two key questions, with specific reference to the Nasrid dynasty of Granada: (i) how did the Nasrids contribute to the culture of Andalusia and the late medieval Mediterranean, and (ii) was religious difference an obstacle to cultural dialogue in Granada in the late Middle Ages? The contention is that Granada’s importance as a meeting place between Islam and Christianity hinges on its apparent transition from Muslim state to Christian enclave, an event crucial to our understanding of the history of the Iberian Peninsula, and also of Europe.
{"title":"Nasrid Granada: The Case for Spain’s Cross-Cultural Identity","authors":"Elizabeth Drayson","doi":"10.3390/histories2010007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/histories2010007","url":null,"abstract":"For 2000 years, the history of Granada has been the story of its peoples—native Iberian, Roman, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and gypsy—who bequeathed a multi-cultural heritage to the city, forged by momentous racial, religious and political conflicts. That heritage is central to Spain’s vexed quest for its own identity, and pre-eminent in that quest is the encounter between Islam and Christianity that took place there. Based on historical sources including oral and written testimonies, early historiography and contemporary historical views, this article considers the answers to two key questions, with specific reference to the Nasrid dynasty of Granada: (i) how did the Nasrids contribute to the culture of Andalusia and the late medieval Mediterranean, and (ii) was religious difference an obstacle to cultural dialogue in Granada in the late Middle Ages? The contention is that Granada’s importance as a meeting place between Islam and Christianity hinges on its apparent transition from Muslim state to Christian enclave, an event crucial to our understanding of the history of the Iberian Peninsula, and also of Europe.","PeriodicalId":41517,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Histories","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83457833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-02DOI: 10.3390/histories2010006
N. Horesh
To date, much of the scholarly literature on anti-foreign boycotts in prewar China focused on cigarettes. However, foreign banks were also targeted, particularly regarding their most visible infringement of Chinese sovereignty: banknotes. Piecing together note circulation data on the smaller European and American banks operating in Shanghai is a work in progress. In this research note, I present provisional data about three of the most important second-tier foreign banks in Shanghai: the Netherlands Trading Society, the German Deutsch-Asiatische Bank and the International Banking Corporation. Tentative conclusions can already be drawn. These banks by and large lost traction in the 1930s insofar as banknote circulation volumes were concerned. On the other hand, the political vacuum that befell the Chinese market following the downfall of the Qing was the single biggest boon of the banks under review. The redemption freeze on Chinese bank notes of 1916 seems to have had a partial effect in terms of regaining Chinese trust in Chinese banknotes at the expense of foreign ones. Unlike British banks, Netherlands Trading Society circulation figures never recovered in the early 1920s. Needless to say, much more work can be carried out in that regard as the pertinent archives are situated right around the world.
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