Review: Architecture since 1400, by Kathleen James-Chakraborty and A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture, 1960–2010, by Elie G. Haddad and David Rifkind, eds.

Abstract

Kathleen James-Chakraborty Architecture since 1400 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 512 pp., 310 b/w illus. $49.95 (paper), ISBN 9780816673971 Elie G. Haddad and David Rifkind, eds. A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture, 1960–2010 Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2014, 536 pp., 299 b/w illus. $74.95 (paper), ISBN 9781409439813 Until quite recently, studying architectural history essentially meant learning the history of European urbanism and its extensions, from the eighteenth century onward, into North America. The architectural traditions of other parts of the world were left up to others—either to regional historians in the case of modernism or to area studies scholars in the case of “vernacular” structures built prior to industrialization. This geographic division of labor has changed dramatically in recent decades for a number of reasons, notably a growing awareness of, and opportunity to study in, far-flung parts of the world, along with a recognition of the profession's transatlantic biases and the pedagogical disadvantages that those limitations place on those teaching in classrooms populated by students whose careers will take them far beyond Europe and North America. In response, scholarly initiatives have emerged with the aim of writing a truly global architectural historical curriculum. Yet efforts to “globalize” the discipline have not been uncontroversial. Some detractors have detected a lack of rigor in the scholarship on “transnational flows”; others see a watering down of a robust existing canon, while still others critique an indisputable trendiness in researching the architecture of parts of the world that are currently of strategic political and economic importance, such as China and the Muslim world. These critics also perceive a thinly disguised historiographic agenda that seeks to understand the current round of globalization as the inevitable consequence of previous periods of cross-cultural encounter and exchange. So far, the results of these “globalizing” efforts have been mixed. While scholarship on non-Western architectural traditions is undoubtedly much better represented at architectural history conferences today than it was twenty years ago, several challenges remain. One is the reductive division into “Western” and “non-Western” topics, a binary taxonomy that defies both history and geography. Another problem is …