Accreditation Requirements and the Global History of Architecture

Abstract

Much has changed in our discipline in the last quarter century. In 1995, when the Society of Architectural Historians last held its annual conference in Seattle, a much higher proportion of its members had been trained and subsequently taught in art history departments than is the case today, when more have backgrounds in architecture and teach in schools of architecture. Another obvious shift can be seen in the locations of the architecture we study. Of the 183 papers originally scheduled to be presented at the SAH 2020 conference in Seattle, roughly a quarter focused on the architecture of the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and even Antarctica. That count does not include any of the papers that addressed the architecture of ethnic minorities both in Europe and in the English-speaking world, or that focused on the teaching of architectural history. Of the 111 papers listed in the program for the SAH 1995 conference, only 10 ranged beyond Europe and the English-speaking world, although, compared with contributions to the 2020 conference, a higher percentage of the European papers in 1995 examined the architecture of Eastern Europe.1 There are multiple reasons for this major shift, but one was certainly already in evidence at the SAH 1995 conference, where the National Architectural Accrediting Board's recently introduced changes in requirements prompted much discussion.In 1995 the SAH Education Committee roundtable, chaired by Richard Cleary and Judith Hull, both then teaching at Carnegie Mellon, was described in the program as “initiat[ing] an effort to gather the perspectives of SAH members regarding the teaching of architectural history in schools of architecture. It will begin with a presentation of the NAAB review process that will suggest how SAH can contribute. In the discussion that follows, SAH members will be invited to consider the value of developing guidelines for schools of architecture to use in evaluating the architectural history components of their own professional degree programs.”2 The requirements resulting from this process included that students “be aware of/understand the diversity of architectural traditions and their histories throughout the world.”3This was the first time that schools of architecture in the United States and Canada had received a mandate to promote such inclusivity. The change was controversial. Even some SAH members at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of the canon resented the directive to restructure courses they had taught for decades. As an outspoken proponent of the change, I was subsequently invited to represent that position within SAH at a workshop held in November 1995 at the Heinz Architectural Center in Pittsburgh, an event also attended by representatives from the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the NAAB, and the National Council of Architectural Accrediting Boards (NCARB).4 The issue surfaced again the following year, when the 1996 SAH conference in St. Louis included a presentation of the Education Committee's recommendations to the NAAB on the teaching of architectural history in schools of architecture. That year the roundtable focused on teaching the survey of architectural history. Curiously, the only geographic area to receive special attention in the conference program's session description was Eastern Europe, although “the search for a good introductory text” was also mentioned.5Despite these efforts to reform the curriculum, many schools of architecture evaded implementing the required changes. Yet other factors certainly contributed as well to the enlargement of the canon presented to architecture students. Concern for diversity was already an issue at the University of California, Berkeley, as early as 1960, when student pressure induced Charles Moore to offer a course on the history of Asian architecture. Student influence also helped to prompt the hiring of Norma Evenson in 1963 (although Evenson later won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award for her extremely influential book on Paris, she received the position at Berkeley based on her expertise regarding recent city planning in India, an area of concentration that she eventually extended to Brazil).6 In 1993 Stephen Tobriner met the challenge of expanding coverage of sub-Saharan Africa in the pre-1400 half of the Berkeley survey after students provided him with the names of sites, such as Meroë and Aksum, to place alongside Great Zimbabwe, already an established part of the Berkeley canon. Twenty-five years ago, many of those advocating for the global survey belonged to a generation influenced by the civil rights movement and advances in postcolonial discourse, such as Edward Said's 1978 publication of Orientalism.7 Furthermore, many of the art history departments where most scholars participating in these discussions had trained had long traditions of teaching the history of premodern architecture in both Latin America and Asia. By the 1980s the study of African and colonial architecture (with Suzanne Preston Blier and Renata Holod as respective pioneers in these fields) also began to enter their curricula.8Nonetheless, until the discussion of the NAAB requirements in the mid-1990s, historians of architecture based in American schools of architecture tended to focus more on expanding the discussion of European architectural and cultural theories than on deepening their knowledge of architecture from what is now termed the global South. Those who argued for the importance of the history of architecture in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were often perceived by their colleagues in architecture schools as coming from the periphery of the discipline. The sociologist Johannes Angermüller has argued that the rise of what is now called postmodern theory in American academia beginning in the mid-1970s, which had a significant impact on schools of architecture, also represented an effort to curtail the threats posed by affirmative action and feminism to the career possibilities of young white male academics.9 Certainly, in the 1990s the emphasis on theory in American architecture schools often served this purpose. Moreover, the 1995 NAAB guidelines appeared at a time when the effort to define architecture as an intellectual activity in order to enhance its academic status as a discipline also worked to push discussions of the vernacular out of many architecture schools. The contemporary establishment of new venues for the study of vernacular architecture, such as the Vernacular Architecture Forum in 1980 and the International Association for the Study of Traditional Settlements in 1988, further diminished the attention paid to these topics within SAH. The NAAB's 1995 push for an expanded canon thus represented a significant challenge to what was being taught in most American schools of architecture at the time.Although the NAAB-mandated changes empowered scholars who supported geographic inclusivity, the issue remained—and still remains today—a live wire at SAH meetings. At the 1998 SAH conference, responding to requests made at a graduate student breakfast the year before, graduate students involved in teaching the introductory survey held the education roundtable as a closed session.10 Five years later, in 2003, Paula Lupkin and Zeynep Kezar chaired a session titled “Towards a World History of Architecture,” which was followed the next year by a roundtable they organized on the state of the architectural history survey. All four of that event's speakers—Dell Upton, Carol Krinsky, Christy Anderson, and Michael Lewis—taught in art history departments at the time. The roundtable featured sample course syllabi by Hilary Ballon, David Breiner, Richard Cleary, Alice Jarrard, Paula Lupkin, Anne Marshall, Lauren O'Connell, and myself.11 While all of these courses adhered to the new NAAB requirements, most faculty taught them in departments of art history rather than in architecture schools. In 2000, Zeynep Çelik became editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and, not coincidentally, almost every issue of JSAH published since that time has included at least one article on the architecture of the global South. Eight of the eighteen SAH Founders’ Awards for the best article by a junior scholar granted between 2000 and 2019 went to this subset of work, with six of these awarded in the past nine years. Further important evidence for the changing understanding of the discipline in our professional society is that in eight of the past fifteen years, and six of the past twenty-one, SAH has granted the Spiro Kostof Book Award and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, respectively, to books on Latin American and Asian architecture.A new generation of textbooks represents another outgrowth of the changes initiated by the NAAB. In 1995 the best relatively new books on the market included Spiro Kostof's Architecture: Settings and Rituals, first published in 1985, and Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman's Architecture from Prehistory to Post-modernism: The Western Tradition, first published in 1986.12 Kostof's book made the most significant effort to develop an inclusive approach, unless you count some editions of Banister Fletcher's handbook-like tome, although Fletcher never met with widespread success in the United States.13 Nonetheless, all of these publications clearly fell far short of the NAAB requirements.In 2003 McGraw Hill published the first comprehensive alternative to these texts, Marian Moffett, Michael Fazio, and Lawrence Wodehouse's Buildings across Time.14 Other publications soon followed: by the time McGraw Hill's representatives contacted me to encourage me to switch to this new offering, I had already been asked to review manuscript drafts of two more wide-ranging competitors. A Global History of Architecture, written by Francis D. K. Ching, Mark M. Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, with the assistance of a team of MIT and University of Washington graduate students, crossed the line in 2006.15 As its title suggests, A Global History of Architecture provided a far more comprehensive survey than Buildings across Time, which did not originally include any architecture from sub-Saharan Africa. Richard Ingersoll's update of Kostof, titled World Architecture: A Cross-Cultural History (following a less comprehensive earlier revision by Greg Castillo), appeared in 2012.16 Of course, simply covering the most celebrated monuments from around the world was not enough: all of these books largely ignored the roles of women in designing, commissioning, constructing, and using the buildings that they chronicled, and too many of the secular examples included were limited to the architectural patronage of what we now describe as “the 1 percent.” Such omissions began to be addressed in the survey that I published in 2014, Architecture since 1400, with examples ranging from Virginia slave cabins to South African townships as well as discussion of kitchens and settlement houses.17Political developments, and especially the aftermath of 9/11, also played a role in pushing historians of architecture who teach in NAAB-accredited programs in these new directions. Academics opposed to the invasion of Iraq by the United States and appalled by the damage the war caused to buildings and museums across the region turned with renewed interest to the study of Islamic, colonial, and postcolonial art and architecture.18 Increased familiarity with this material among those who are not specialists has also changed our understanding of the Western canon. Today experts on Gothic cathedrals often teach the Great Mosque of Córdoba, just as historians of the Italian Renaissance are well acquainted with the achievements of Sinan.19Global architectural surveys remain a challenge to teach, especially for those who have not studied at the universities where comprehensive training in the architecture of the global South has been on offer for decades. Few architecture schools have the resources to offer advanced classes in the history of the architecture of many regions around the world. Nonetheless, the commitment made by architectural historians to teach global surveys testifies to our scholarly community's dedication to the education of global citizens, and this dedication in turn has helped to transform our discipline.We have come far enough that we no longer depend on the NAAB to prod us into supporting the cross-cultural understanding that sustains free and open societies. Architectural historians based in countries beyond the NAAB's orbit now have also become leaders in this regard.20 But that does not mean that anyone will gain from a watering down of the requirement to teach the global history of architecture. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, architecture schools saw an influx of historians with doctorates, a shift that did much to encourage an architectural research culture whose scope has more recently expanded to include a focus on sustainability.21 Undoubtedly, climate change poses a more significant challenge for the future of our students than does the cultivation of an ability to appreciate the architecture of the past. But learning how to reduce carbon footprints also depends at least in part on knowledge of and attention to that architecture.Twenty-five years ago, SAH represented a smaller, more ethnically homogeneous, and less well-traveled community of architectural historians than it does today. In the study of architectural history, students absorbed a canon that confirmed more often than challenged the dominant white masculinity of the architectural profession. The issues we face today, from the problem of holding annual conferences in the face of a pandemic to the threat of global extinction, are somewhat different. While we will continue to partner with the NAAB to ensure that we meet necessary accreditation requirements, ultimately it is up to us to explain the ways in which a better understanding of the history of the built environment enhances human experience.