20
CONTENT AND CRAFT
What do we do when we do the history of architecture?
David Theodore
In Built upon Love, Alberto Pérez-Gómez begins his chapter on the brothers Jean-Louis and Charles-François Viel with a reference to the work of another historian. He discusses Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, who in 1966 marshaled evidence to argue that the brothers, active in post-revolutionary Paris, were indeed two distinct persons. For Pérez-Gómez, Pérouse de Montclos’s attribution was helpful, but his analysis was not, for it seemed “to miss the profound implications of the multiple layers of his [Charles-François’s] critique.”1 This is a curious but telling opening; it metes out praise for archival, documentary fact-finding research, while simultaneously denigrating it as secondary: what matters is whether the historian makes the right judgment, and the right interpretation. Pérez-Gómez’s own chapter brings no new evidence to bear on this historical incident; he sets out instead to offer a textual re-reading, searching in the past for a meaningful understanding of the present. Here, then, rhetorically, is a brilliant opening flourish that invites –perhaps compels – us to read what follows as a model for doing history. In miniature, it is a brief manifesto of what we should do when we do the history of architecture; namely, it is not enough to get the facts and the story right, we must also receptively grasp the problems raised by the text and which the text addresses.
This essay describes, compares, and elucidates what Pérez-Gómez does when he does history at two moments: in his first book, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983), and in the chapter on les frères Viel in Built upon Love (2006). I wish to comment briefly on how he uses documentary evidence, evaluates sources, enters into debates with other scholars and secondary scholarship, and constructs historical arguments. Rather than focus on his content and conclusions – his passionate exhortation to use history to orient ethical practices today – the essay seeks to understand his craft: how does his immersion in hermeneutics, history of science, and phenomenology constitute how he works as an historian?2
The question of Pérez-Gómez and historiography appears quite starkly today against the background of the recent transformation in the kinds of historical research undertaken in architecture schools. Contemporary architectural historians, liberated from the constraints of style-based art history, now aspire to the standards and procedures of research undertaken elsewhere in the academy.3 As an architecture-school-based holder of a doctorate, Pérez-Gómez was an influential exemplar in the development of this trend. He was part of an earlier second wave of university-trained historians who sought a history of architecture distinct from art history in terms of method, heuristics, and philosophical sophistication. And yet his approach to doing history, rooted in his education at the University of Essex, goes against many of the conventions and standards of professional history as practiced in the university today. He makes a crucial contribution, on the level of craftsmanship, to showing how one might practice an alternative or oppositional model of historical writing, one free from the technocratic and formalist trajectories characteristic of the specialist historian.
One way to introduce the issue of method and technique in architectural history is to look at this “history of history.” We can start by recounting the story about how “architectural” history emerged as an academic department after World War II, taking on institutional forms distinct from both professional programs and art history departments. The celebrated program at the University of Essex, led by Dalibor Vesely and Joseph Rykwert, was but one graduate architecture program focused on history and theory as the proper subjects of advanced degrees.4 While Essex was famously nomadic and peripatetic (sometimes by choice), early programs in the United States had stronger institutional homes in architecture schools. Historians in programs at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, as well as slightly later ones at UC Berkeley and MIT, experimented with how history might be written.5
Architectural historians were not alone in the desire to create new histories and new academic departments. Historians of science and of medicine, too, also split off from their close associations with professional training and began to incorporate concepts and goals from social and intellectual history. Relying on arguments and strategies from anthropology, sociology, and philosophy, historians across the university aligned their work with the interpretive social sciences, and away from questions of connoisseurship and fact-finding. They worked assiduously to specialize and professionalize, changing the ways they assessed evidence and positioned themselves within the academy. Cultural and social historians especially sought to better understand the ways that people, whether ordinary citizens, philosophers, or architects, made sense of the world in distant historical periods.6
While there are problems specific to the writing of professional architectural history (e.g. the structure of the peer-review publication system or the opposition between avant-garde and social history), it is the character of Pérez-Gómez’s craft within the broader view of the professionalization of history that concerns me here.7 To that end, I want to discuss three key features of Pérez-Gómez’s historiography he promotes that go against the conventions of specialist historical research. First, his interpretive practices are bounded by an understanding of meaning given by twentieth-century phenomenology. Second, he understands history as marked by metaphysical changes more strongly than economic, political, or social changes. Third, he reads the long tradition of writing architectural theory, especially since the rediscovery of Vitruvius in the Renaissance, as internally coherent. Each of these three parts provides, in circular fashion, the grounding for the other. For the sake of clarity I will discuss each part individually, pointing out only the obvious ways in which they connect to each other, but bear in mind that both conceptually and as a matter of prose style they are deeply intertwined.8
For Pérez-Gómez, phenomenology is not just a theoretical framework chosen from among rivals; consequently, he does not, as part of writing history, include any argument for adopting this way of thinking. He simply opens Crisis with a declarative, apodictic paragraph about perception, experience, and meaning.9 Rigorously following phenomenological thinkers, he argues near the book’s end, allows historians to disengage from technocratic, instrumental, formalist, and dualist thinking.10 Indeed, Pérez-Gómez’s historical propositions will make sense only if the reader develops a sophisticated understanding of a wide range of phenomenological thinkers. Two distinctive characteristics of Pérez-Gómez’s work follow. First, there never arises an issue in the historical documents Pérez-Gómez examines that puts phenomenology to the test; history always reveals the truth of embodied meaning.11 Second, there is never cause to engage with other theories of meaning either to repudiate or rehabilitate them.12 But note also that Pérez-Gómez himself will not be the guide to understanding phenomenology. Pérez-Gómez’s approach obliges the interested reader to actively read Crisis alongside the thinkers he recapitulates but does not elucidate.13 This engagement with theory, strikingly distinct from other scholarly practices, is one of the most significant ways Pérez-Gómez’s working methods, and not just content, should be understood in opposition to the conventions of professional history.
A second feature of Pérez-Gómez’s craft is his insistence on ordering historical time into epochs. These epochs are mostly described by metaphysical distinctions, not social, cultural, political, or material changes. He derives them from historians of science, specifically, from Georges Gusdorf and Alexandre Koyré, adopting the forceful notion of a Galilean revolution.14 In Pérez-Gómez’s categories, a first fundamental change occurred in the seventeenth century with the scientific revolution and René Descartes’s influential emphasis on the difference between res extensa and res cogitans; a second occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century with J.-N.-L. Durand’s combinatorialism and Gaspard de Monge’s descriptive geometry.15 Note that Pérez-Gómez’s periodization does not arise out of his close scrutiny of texts, but rather guides and precedes his reading.16 In Love, too, he explicitly and implicitly argues for the ongoing validity of a vocabulary of scientific crisis and epistemological revolution. By contrast, we can look at what happened in the history of science around the time Crisis was published. Historians of science had begun to question the schema of continuity and gaps, and, more profoundly, the coherence of “science.” The idea of a Galilean scientific revolution, especially a metaphysical one, was shedding its cogency.17 By 1998, the idea was thought of as a “zombie,” a lifeless construct that nevertheless manages to live on outside of professional history, revived for administrative or publicity functions, but no longer an active theme engaged by working historians.18
A third structural feature of Pérez-Gómez’s writing is his notion of hermeneutic continuity, or, the overlapping of cultural horizons throughout the history of architecture in the West. Despite using a framework of metaphysical epochs, Pérez-Gómez rejects the idea of incommensurable historical gaps or breaks. When reading a text, its meaning can be recovered (through hermeneutics).19 In particular, Pérez-Gómez sees the development of French architectural theory from roughly 1500 to 1900 as “normative for European culture during this period.”20 The underlying philosophical homogeneity of contemporary Europe is the model for a similar notion of the underlying continuity of the western architectural tradition.
Next, I want to discuss Pérez-Gómez’s attitude to four key characteristics of contemporary professional historiography: secondary scholarship, archival documentation, the scholarly apparatus, and image analysis. Each of these is sometimes strikingly absent from Pérez-Gómez’s work. Yet the presence or absence of these characteristics of professional history is a crucial issue. Pérez-Gómez writes history in opposition to instrumental and formalist methods. It would be disastrous, therefore, if his own historical work was symptomatic of these ways of thinking. The external question concerns whether Pérez-Gómez’s kind of history can achieve its goal of opening up a symbolic world that is richer than the world opened up by other kinds of history; the implicit critique is that the professionalization of historiography has as an ideal an empiricist notion of historical truth.
The treatment of Pérouse de Montclos referred to earlier illustrates an important characteristic of Pérez-Gómez’s model that goes against current academic practices, namely, the lack of direct discussion of the work of other historians. In his history of footnotes, Anthony Grafton writes, “Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations in which scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part.”21 Of the sixty-nine footnotes in the chapter on les frères Viel in Built upon Love, there are only six that refer to publications later than 1966.22 The Frenchman is essentially the only historian mentioned. Pérez-Gómez’s practice of disengagement stands starkly against the directive in professional history to position one’s argument in reference to the body of contemporary scholarship.
Secondly, although Pérez-Gómez argues for the importance of epistemological contexts he has an unconventional attitude to original research in archival materials. One powerful attribute of Crisis is his comprehensive and thorough reading of architectural treatises, published and unpublished. Yet he does not return to the archives in order to deepen his sense of his protagonists’ worldview. Archival material, including wills, diaries, letters, newspapers, government reports and so on, the evidential paper trail so prominent in academic history, is absent from his practice. Instead, both chapters on the Viels follow the tenet, outlined in the introduction to Crisis, that the texts themselves be allowed to speak. So for instance in reference to Charles-François he writes: “Unlike most of his contemporaries, he understood that architecture could not be reduced to specialized knowledge.”23 But he provides no documentary evidence to allow the reader to gauge his insightfulness in characterizing Viel’s “contemporaries” with this short epithet.
In her own discipline, the history of science, Lorraine Daston has nicknamed the current practice of positioning historical writing amongst archival materials and other scholarly writing as a move towards “better footnotes.” Historians today seek a sustained engagement with the protocol and contents of the scholarly apparatus that surrounds a historian’s central narrative. “The improved craftsmanship of the footnotes alone would signal a steep rise in disciplinary standards,” she writes, “footnotes being to historians what joints are to carpenters, that is, the place where the trained eye looks first to test the quality of workmanship.”24 A third characteristic of Pérez-Gómez’s craft is that he bucks this trend. But in this respect he is also following a tradition among architectural historians, conserving an older way of working as much as resisting a new one. The works of his predecessors such as Peter Collins, Reyner Banham, and Sigfried Giedeon are all decidedly not up to the standard of documentation required in the humanities today. And Pérez-Gómez’s contemporaries, historians such as Manfredo Tafuri and Frederick Karl, publishing around the same time as Crisis, likewise make few references to other architectural historians.25
Finally, a fourth characteristic that distinguishes Pérez-Gómez’s model from contemporary scholarly ideals is the lack of attention given to visual sources. His histories eschew detailed analyses of buildings or drawings, arguably the characteristic skill of the professional architectural historian. Pérez-Gómez’s chapter on the Viels, for instance, has no illustrations. In fact, there are none anywhere in the book. His disdain for iconography also goes against the wave of visual culture studies that now examine images as a way of deepening and sometimes changing our understanding of scientific and artistic activity.26 For Pérez-Gómez, the work of an architectural historian is tied to hermeneutical problems of architectural texts.27 His analysis, then, is of words and texts, which aligns with his assertion that architecture’s predicament demands language to “verbalize a position.”28 The theoretical reasoning behind this approach is subtle, and it appears more blunt than it is only because in his writing (though not in his lectures) Pérez-Gómez adheres so rigorously to the practice.29 This reluctance to use iconography nicely aligns with his theoretical concerns with image-making and the hegemony of vision, and simultaneously forces readers to become aware of precisely what he does instead of doing what architectural historians characteristically do.30
Given these seven characteristics of Pérez-Gómez’s historiography (three promoted and four contested), we can begin to evaluate the possibilities for historical work opened up by his example. One significant ambition almost lost to professional history but very much alive in Pérez-Gómez’s writing concerns scope. For professional historians today, particular stories cannot exemplify whole epochs. As Daston puts it, “Gone are the case studies in support of one or another grand philosophical or sociological generalization about the nature of science.”31 But such generalizations are precisely what Pérez-Gómez has kept. He argues that architecture can be “locally significant and universally eloquent,” and so can historical writing.32 While professional historians have turned to micro-histories, avoiding any evidence of sweeping generalizations, in Love Pérez-Gómez writes about all of history from the early Greeks to the present. Micro-history has also led to an explosion of detailed knowledge, which poses a challenge to Pérez-Gómez’s historical ambitions. For it would be quite impossible to put into one book – especially a short one – the breadth of history undertaken in Love and simultaneously to attend to the constant revisions in the historical scholarship on which he relies.33 Concomitantly, it is not enough to read what he says; we must understand how he writes it. Examining Pérez-Gómez’s history-writing craft allows us to better grasp what we ourselves might do when we do the history of architecture.
Notes
1 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 167. Pérez-Gómez cites Pérouse de Montclos in the same fashion in Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 369 (note 20).
2 Just to be clear: the present essay is not concerned with evaluating Pérez-Gómez’s conclusion that Charles-François is “the first critic of the rationalist doctrines upon which modern architecture was to be generally based” (Crisis, 323). For other interpretations, see e.g. Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor et al. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 157–58. Pérez-Gómez also writes about Charles-François Viel in the essay Architecture and Ethics beyond Globalization (Hamburg: Hochschule für bildende Künste, 2003). His evolving thinking could perhaps be traced in three articles he published before Crisis: “Charles-François Viel and the Instrumentalizing of Architectural Theory,” Dichotomy (Detroit: University of Detroit 1980); “Charles-François Viel, primer representante de la reacción anti-racionalista,” Arquitecturas-Bis 22 (Barcelona, Spain 1978); and “Charles-François Viel: primer arquitecto anti-racionalista del siglo XIX,” Cuadernos de Ciencia y Cultura 1, COFAA (Mexico City: National Polytechnic Institute Press 1977).
3 See Anthony Grafton, “History’s Postmodern Fates,” Daedalus 135, no. 2 (2006): 54–69.
4 On the formation of the history and theory program at Essex, see Helen Thomas, “Invention in the Shadow of History: Joseph Rykwert at the University of Essex,” Journal of Architectural Education 58, no. 2 (2004): 39–45. Note that Vesely had no formal position at Essex (ibid., 41). And for the background from which the program emerged, see also George Baird, “Introduction: ‘A Promise as Well as a Memory’: Toward an Intellectual Biography of Joseph Rykwert,” in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, ed. George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001), 2–25.
5 About fifteen years ago, Mark Jarzombek wrote a series of articles analyzing the state of architectural history in the wake of its professionalization and institutionalization within schools of architecture: see “The Disciplinary Dislocations of (Architectural) History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3 (1999): 488–93; “Prolegomena to a Critical Historiography,” Journal of Architectural Education 52, no. 4 (1999): 197–206; and “The Saturations of Self: Stern’s (and Scully’s) Role in (Stern’s) History,” Assemblage 23 (1997): 6–21. Yet bear in mind Jarzombek’s well-known objection to phenomenology in architectural history based on his claim that adherence to phenomenological tenets can cause scholars to fall into simplistic aesthetic inspiration; see his The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9.
6 Two key examples that appeared around the time of Crisis are Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Carlos Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Joan and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). While both of these works are concerned with recovering the worldview of illiterate folk, the same technique is common to the search for the oblique or obscure in other kinds of history; see Dominick LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” History and Theory 19, no. 3 (1980): 245–76.
7 On the history of history in the twentieth century university, see Thomas Bender, Philip Katz, and Colin Palmer, The Education of Historians for the Twenty First Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
8 That is, I am aware of the violence involved in decorticating Pérez-Gómez’s story, perpetuating an analytic method that the story itself is meant to oppose. But my authority here is his introduction to Crisis, and especially the closing sentence: “Being aware of the dangers involved in identifying order in history, I have nevertheless done so convinced that this is a fundamental dimension of historical research” (Crisis 13).
9 Pérez-Gómez, Crisis, 3.
10 Ibid., 324–25.
11 K. Michael Hays makes this objection in his brief introduction to an excerpt from Crisis in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 462–64. Similar (but far less cogent) objections can be found in Christopher Hight, Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics (London: Routledge, 2008); and Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
12 Pérez-Gómez’s strategy here is to focus on the architectural texts themselves, rather than debating theoretical concepts, and thus avoiding Peter Carl’s lament that “architecture hardly has a discourse of its own”; Peter Carl, “On Palladio and Le Corbusier,” Architectural Research Quarterly 13 (2009): 89. Cf. Fredric Jameson’s use of other historians’ work as a means of clarifying and presenting his own, e.g. in his 1982 lecture published as “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Architecture, Criticism, Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman, Deborah Berke, and Mary McLeod (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 51–93. Intellectual historians, in particular, are finding it fruitful to study phenomenological thinkers in their interactions with theorists of other stripes; see e.g. Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
13 For instance, Crisis contains no works of Heidegger in the bibliography. Footnote 5, p. 328, refers readers to Belgian phenomenologist Alphonse de Waelhens’s widely read introductory text La philosophie de Martin Heidegger (Louvain: Editions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie) (also not included in the bibliography), a book that first appeared in 1942 (i.e. before the publication of the “late” Heidegger’s essays addressed more directly at architectural matters).
14 See Pérez-Gómez, Crisis, footnotes 19–20, 329–30. In Built upon Love, Pérez-Gómez cites Koyré’s posthumous book Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution (London: Chapman and Hall, 1968), a collection of his highly influential essays published in French between 1935 and 1938. As well, Pérez-Gómez approvingly cites books by historian Paolo Rossi (Rossi was a student but not a pupil of Koyré); see Pérez-Gómez, Crisis note 20, 332.
15 Pérez-Gómez, Crisis, 10–12.
16 It is helpful to compare this process with other strategies that relate close reading with historical meaning, for instance, those used by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Their history of objectivity in scientific image atlases leads to a periodization substantially independent of pre-established schemas.
17 See David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), which was based on a 1981 symposium held in Los Angeles.
18 Mario Biagioli, “The Scientific Revolution is Undead,” Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 141–48.
19 In Crisis he cites Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1960 book Truth and Method, which appeared in English translation in 1975 (trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall [London: Sheed and Ward, 1975]). Architecture is perhaps a good candidate for what Charles Taylor, writing of Gadamer, calls a “human science”; see “Gadamer on the Human Sciences,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 126–42.
20 Pérez-Gómez, Crisis, 13.
21 Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (London: Faber and Faber, 1997); on the history of footnotes, see also Anthony Grafton, “The Footnote from De Thou to Ranke,” History and Theory 33, no. 4 (1994): 53–76; Robert J. Connors, “The Rhetoric of Citation Systems, Part I: The Development of Annotation Structures from the Renaissance to 1900,” Rhetoric Review 17, no. 1 (1998): 6–48; and Robert J. Connors, “The Rhetoric of Citation Systems, Part II: Competing Epistemic Values in Citation,” Rhetoric Review 17, no. 2 (1999): 219–45.
22 Three footnotes refer to Crisis, one to a work on music criticism, one to Gianni Vattimo’s notion of “weak” theory, and one to an article by Ramla Ben Aissa [sic], “Erudite Laughter: The Persiflage of Viel de Saint-Maux,” noted as forthcoming in Chora, the book series on philosophy and architecture of which Pérez-Gómez is an editor; it appeared in Chora: Intervals in the History of Philosophy, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), vol. 5, 51–80.
23 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love, 183.
24 Lorraine Daston, “Science Studies and the History of Science,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009), 809.
25 Jarzombek, although making a very different argument from mine, notes the same phenomenon in histories of some of Pérez-Gómez’s contemporaries: “For example, in their eminently analytical Modern Architecture, Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco dal Co do not mention a historian, nor does Frederick Karl in Modern and Modernism, or Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity”; see “Prolegomena,” 201.
26 For a quick introduction to the vast literature on visual sources in the humanities, see Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials (New York: Routledge, 2012); and James Elkins, ed., Visual Practices Across the University (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007).
27 Helen Powell contrasts Rykwert’s “intellectual and textual” approach with Colin Rowe’s “visual and formalist” techniques; see “Invention in the Shadow of History,” 42. On the issue of the relationships between text and world, a vexed topic at the time Crisis appeared, see Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
28 Pérez-Gómez, Crisis, 201.
29 Pérez-Gómez’s approach to images in his writing differs from his approach in teaching and in public lectures. He discusses his “dialogical” attitude, grounded in the priority of speech, in Marc J. Neveu and Saundra Weddle, “Interview with Alberto Pérez-Gómez,” Journal of Architectural Education 64, no. 2 (2011): 76–81.
30 For a sustained historical examination of these issues, see Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
31 Daston, “Science Studies,” 809.
32 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love, 205.
33 For instance, Descartes today is not always the Cartesian dualist seen in Crisis, nor do his metaphysics (or Galileo’s) play an untempered causal role in accounts of the emergence of modern science. On the “new” Descartes, see e.g. Matthew Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), and for other forces active in early modern science, see e.g. J. A. Bennett, “Practical Geometry and Operative Knowledge,” Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 195–222.