Teaching Architectural History in France: A Shifting Institutional Landscape

Abstract

The Institutional Landscape In the thirty-five years since student revolts in France brought down the monopoly of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and called into question values and disciplinary boundaries in the university system, the teaching of architectural history in France has grown exponentially. In 1968, only a handful of art historians devoted themselves primarily to the study of architecture, and the teaching of architectural history in a studio setting was almost exclusively the work of architects and rarely a place for innovative thinking. Thirty years later, when an informal tradition of Parisian architectural historians dining together annually was formalized as the Association Francaise des Historiens de l'Architecture (AFHA), the first issue of the fledgling society's Bulletin listed some one hundred members. Membership has more than doubled in the four years since that time, despite the association's relatively low level of activity.1 This great explosion in the last three decades, which has created both characteristic sets of methodological concerns and distinct professional subcultures, can be traced to two nearly contemporary, if independent, developments: the foundation of the Inventaire G6neral des Monuments et Richesses Artistiques de la France in 1964, during Andre Malraux's tenure as minister of culture, and the decree of December 6, 1968, which set up the current system of architectural schools as a response to the events of May 1968. The Inventaire created overnight a need for professional architectural historians and had a significant impact on the great expansion of universities in the 1960s, which was every bit as dramatic in France as it was in the United States. The brainchild of Andre Chastel, arguably the most influential and publicly visible French art historian of the postwar period,2 the Inventaire called for nothing less than a thorough survey of the artistic, architectural, urban, and landscape heritage of the country. This enormous task, which is still far from complete, was gradually implemented through a series of offices in the regional administrations of cultural affairs.3 Many of the brightest of an entire generation of art historians, in particular, Chastel's students, found themselves converted to architectural history and cataloguing the architectural heritage of France. As the Inventaire matured, the definition of its objects of study broadened increasingly. Heavily influenced by Italian urban history, several of Chastel's former students, led by Francoise Boudon, pioneered a new approach to studying the interaction between urban fabric and architectural form in their seminal analysis of the Parisian central market quarter. Conducted as Victor Baltard's Halles were slated for demolition, the report focused not only on Baltard's great ironand-glass market halls of the Second Empire, but also on the morphology of party-wall housing that had developed since the late Middle Ages in central Paris. Its archaeological exactitude, applied to the Renaissance and modern periods, as well as its underlying assumptions about typology and urban morphology, set a pattern that challenged the formal models of art history.4 For at least a generation, a significant cross-fertilization took place between the academic teaching of architectural history and the mission of the Inventaire, even as the Inventaire focused attention on the built fabric as an equivalent to the written archives that formed the ethos of French historical research in the wake of the historiographical revolution of the Annales school (the approach to historical research associated with the periodical known as Les Annales, and which concentrated on economic and social patterns over long periods of time as historical determinants, playing down the traditional emphasis on political power). Over time, the increased professionalization of the Inventaire weakened its ties with the university, but in the past few years a new trend has emerged, creating links between the worlds of architectural preservation and academic architectural history. With the ever greater importance accorded cultural heritage (patrimoine) in both the public and private sectors-in tandem with its increasing connection to tourism and economic development-not only have many new jobs been created in what is emerging as a distinct career path, but a series of diploma programs in universities specifically related to issues of heritage administration have been developed. Another phenomenon occurring since the 1980s is the impressive growth of several archival centers for architects' papers. The project received its first and long sustained impulse in the 1970s due almost single-handedly to the