Autonomy’s Ghost and General Education

Simon Sadler

doi:10.5334/ah.au

Abstract

Arriving in the US a decade ago as a UK-trained architectural historian, I became more aware than I had been at home of what seemed like a disciplinary split between architectural historians trained as architects—thinking, perhaps, as architects—and architectural historians, thinking first and foremost as historians, for whom architecture was not an avocation. Jorge Otero-Pailos’s explanation of this cultural divide, which he describes in his Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern from 2010, was revelatory to me. The phenomenological turn in architecture led to nothing less than a redirection of architectural history as a profession, in which architects practicing as historians—’architect-historians’, as Otero-Pailos calls them—were found ‘staking out a new position … within the academy as the custodians of architecture’s peculiarly ambiguous mode of intellectuality’, which is the ‘unity of theory and practice’ (Otero-Pailos 2010: xiii). Two modes of architectural historical study now co-existed, particularly, it would seem, in the US, uneasily demarcating architect-historians, trained principally as architects, from architectural historians principally steeped in art historical methodology.

Highlights

‘Architect-history’ might be related to the ascent of ‘criticality’ in architecture
It happens that an example of such critical-architect-history appeared, again in 2010, in another outstanding addition to the literature around postmodernism: Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again, by Otero-Pailos’s Columbia University colleague Reinhold Martin
The tacit importance of architectural autonomy is underscored by Martin’s relentless criticism of any breach of the art of architecture, a criticism bordering on a bad faith toward so many historical figures who imagined themselves doing good through the populist deployment of architecture—listing figures who would in any universe other than architect-history be most surprised to find themselves keeping one another’s company, such as Denise Scott Brown and Richard Buckminster Fuller, jointly accused of selling out design to the domestication of science (Martin 2010: 36–7)

Summary

Introduction

‘Architect-history’ might be related to the ascent of ‘criticality’ in architecture. It happens that an example of such critical-architect-history appeared, again in 2010, in another outstanding addition to the literature around postmodernism: Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again, by Otero-Pailos’s Columbia University colleague Reinhold Martin.

Results

Conclusion