One course I manage online, History of Ideas in Architecture (Arch 300, Athabasca University), begins with an orientation page about the topic of writing within the field of architectural history, entitled “Approaches to Writing on Architectural History.”

Why is this important?

It reviews different approaches to writing about and studying architectural history. The line of progress approach implies that architecture gets better as civilizations become more sophisticated.

This approach is one that students usually adhere to in their writing assignments, but it’s an old-fashioned one, described as a “retrospective view of building design and technological development leading through time to arrive at contemporary design in the Western world.” The editors of the primary course textbook, Francis Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, refer to this approach as “the colonial view of architectural history.” The textbook, A Global History of Art (John Wiley & Sons), takes a different approach. 

This textbook, which is used in both Architecture 200 and 300 at Athabasca University, attempts to avoid the typical idea of studying the chronology of one civilization after another by employing “time cuts”: the chronology presented is not that of civilizations but simply that of the world. The authors acknowledge that they cannot summarize local histories; instead, their “mission is bound to the discipline of architecture, which requires us to see connections, tensions, and associations that transcend so-called local perspectives (xi).” Because their intent is to present histories that are affected by architecture as a discipline rather than as simply products of individual cultures, the narrative of this textbook “is only one of many possible narratives.”

A supplement to the main text is Hanno-Walter Kruft’s A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present, presenting original texts, handily available on the Internet Archive.

The Colonial Approach

I wanted to understand why students so often get caught in the colonial approach mentioned in that course orientation page. I think it has to do with the weight of Western history that surrounds students from a young age. 

As capitalism developed in the West, accompanied by the rise of an educated class, architecture became one of the many professions that evolved its own professional standards, one of which was education; in fact, this is one of the topics covered in Arch 300. We learn in this course that looking back at the history of art had long been a favourite past time of the educated classes, and with it, looking at architecture. While the development of art could be discerned in part through written sources, the history of architecture was less clear. But for both, Western historians first looked to Greece and Rome for the origins of civilization, and thus the histories of architecture that came to be codified were centred upon European origins. British historians, as part of the British colonial effort, travelled to Greece, Rome, and Egypt on the classic Grand Tour, the core of any budding architect’s education.

For people inheriting the Eurocentric lineage of colonialist enterprises, those early histories were thought to be “universal”: one history for all. Architectural historians still struggle to see things differently. Until only recently, architecture in Europe’s colonies was only as significant as it compared to the monumental work of Egypt or Greece. Exacerbating this Eurocentric way of thinking about architecture now is the need to teach introductions to architecture’s history within limited timeframes, through the survey course and its survey text. What to choose, and how? 

Recent histories of architecture attempt to change the deeply entrenched view that architecture has its origins within a single civilization and that those origins can be traced back by studying stylistic developments, or evolutions. One such attempt is our textbook, A Global History of Art, which students often love to hate. 

A Multiplicity of Narratives

In June, it was my turn to travel to Greece, to attend the conference of the European Architectural History Network, or EAHN (which tends to regret the “European” in its name), from June 19 to 23, 2024. The conference grappled with this idea of multiple narratives for history in its title, “Redefining the Canon.”

The EAHN’s goal “is the promotion of international exchange and collaboration.” It is less an organization than a network—”an international forum for multiple histories of architecture” that has grown rapidly since its first conference in 2010. Its conferences celebrate this network, which has become a way of looking at research into the history of architecture as a collaboration among people, institutions, and nations. The idea of many narratives is reflected in the title of the organization’s open-access journal, Architectural Histories.

This conference was held in Athens, the birthplace of the western architectural canon.

Right from the beginning, with the checking-in of conference participants, the theme of “redefining the canon” was evident. In the conference bag each attendee was handed was an unusual piece of “swag” (among others more typical (or more unwanted—the white paper hat, no doubt a nod to the intense sun and heat of Greece in June, was immediately abandoned by every single attendee, so that the main reception area seemed suddenly populated by a field of mushrooms). 

The unusual item was a book—a sort of “field guide” to Athens, but an Athens that no tourist would ever accidentally happen upon or understand without this guide, no matter how many undergraduate courses in architectural history they had taken.

Entitled Field Notes: Athens in Flux, the publication is pocket-sized, ready to take along as a conference attendee explores the city.

One essay is on the Stoa of Athens in the Agora, a popular topic in Western courses about Greek architecture and archaeology, here discussed in its 20th- and 21st-century context: the object of conservation efforts, but in what form, and for what reason? Since it was first excavated in the 19th century, foreign hands and perspectives have affected every aspect of its future, from the first head of excavations, a Canadian, to funding by John D. Rockefeller: the West has treated Greece’s material history as common property. But with the economic issues plaguing Greece in recent times, this interventionism is seen as contributing to the political and economic problems.

In a similar approach of challenging the norm of historical approaches, many conference sessions explored a wide range of traditional ideas that scholars are breaking open.

For example, the work of women architects must be researched using sources unlike those used in traditional research, since records are scarce, and women typically have retained connections to the home and are concerned with the experience of other women. Archival material is therefore key, but often not the archives of architects; rather, the collections of messy notes taken during the preparation of projects, for example, that don’t enter the final records, and interviews and conversations with users of architecture. 

Challenging the Course Textbook: The Genre of Writing about Architectural History

For me in my role as an academic expert at Athabasca University, for Architecture 300, History of Ideas II (and for many years also the AE for Architecture 200, History of Ideas II), the most interesting and useful conference session was the one created around the recent publication of a groundbreaking book, Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture, edited by Petra Brouwer, Martin Bressani, and Christopher Drew Armstrong (The MIT Press, 2024).

In the session in which the book was presented, the excitement for the topic was palpable.

With essays written by many different scholars from around the world, many of whom were at the conference, the book presents an exciting paradigm shift in the architectural history textbook. At almost 600 pages, it is a thorough exploration of how we came to this point of having a canon that urgently needs to be rethought; it examines the genre of writing about architectural history. 

I have noted below the main parts of the book, with titles of a few essays, to give an idea of the potential for further discussion.

1. How the genre was invented

3. What the genre looks like today

As teaching and studying history becomes more complex, with scholars from around the world providing new insights into the tired Western perspectives on history, critical thinking skills are more important than ever. Those in the field must be more attentive to difference. Even our methods of research must change. Here are just some of the topics scholars must tackle; the EAHN is at the vanguard of the discussion:

• Writing in English is a problem for many, and has been for years, but what if your sources are in an archive written in a language few people today understand? Who translates into a language you can understand? 
• How to pay for that help? 
• If English is not your first language, how do you cite those sources if you must publish in English? 
• How do you engage in the complexities of historical documents in a different language, if you can’t translate them into your own language? 
• And what about maps and directions: whose world is Eastern and Western?

Watch the EAHN’s open-access journal, Architectural Histories, for related publications.

This post and the travel that led to it was supported by the CUPE Research Fund, Athabasca University, Canada.