MARK COUSINS: I’m Mark Cousins and I teach. Being a teacher is kind of despised by everybody, specially students. I am going to condense the argument, which can sound as a historical argument, but might be as well treated as a logical argument: a series of axioms which have several consequences. I will make two related propositions: that architecture started in the nineteenth century, and there is nothing architectural outside the scope of that discourse and practice. It spreads, until it becomes a system that terminates in modernity. I am forced to use the term modernity, which I do not particularly like, but it solves the issue ok talking about one nation, the East, the West, rich poor etc. In that sense, architecture is a modern practice, not derived from a culture, because of this we have the problems with history which we have been talking about. They are not historical problems about architecture, but problems which are generated by a new practice called architecture in the nineteenth century, which needs to project the concept, the name, the category of architecture across time and across space. Now, very confusingly, we have texts called, for instance, the history of housing, which very mechanically start by saying that since the beginning of time, human being needed shelter and therefore architecture. That is very baffling, as a lot of people do not have shelter. There was a very funny piece by Mark Twain that revisits the issue of Adam’s house in paradise, by having Adam wake up in a kind of American National park and he is fine until he receives the proposal of cutting trees and having a dwelling. The whole piece is about his lament for this situation. Architecture is a nineteenth century invention. Some might have read Michel Foucault’s study, ‘The Birth of the Clinic’: his concern is that when we say medicine, we mean modern medicine, and it is a system a practical and conceptual arrangement in which something like this appears: that the figure of a doctor emerges. The place, is the hospital, because it becomes the place of the treatment of patients, but more than that it becomes the archive of medical knowledge, it becomes the site of the trainment of doctors. It will be soon linked to higher education. Part of the trainment is done under the roof of the University. The doctor himself is therefore linked to a series of professional relationships, regulated by a professional body, part of it consists in delegitimizing competitors. It will be recognized that medicine is such a nineteenth century invention. It cannot be reduced to an essence, it’s an articulation, it’s an ensemble, that is medicine in Modernity. Of course there are certain regions and cultures which have their own knowledge of the body, and of healing methods, but they are not, as to say, part of modern medicine. Modern medicine has a logic that includes certain things and excludes others. I propose to apply the same analysis to architecture. Architecture in the nineteenth century involves the following elements: the push to establish architecture as a profession, a new type of status within the capitalist system, it is consistent with it, but self-consciously not reducible simply to the sale of goods and services. It develops forms of training, which soon become linked to the University, so it becomes a professional matter inasmuch an educational matter. It demands more books about architects, journals. The same could be applied to law and the lawyer. Foucault in ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’ says something really interesting about the rise of modern practices and discourses: although they’re established in this specific way, they immediately seek to acquire a greater cultural legitimacy and prestige by adorning themselves with an ancient history. So, the rise of architectural history in the nineteenth century is not testimony so much to the scholarly inquire into the architecture of the past, but to decorate architecture with the legitimacy of it. There are intellectual rights over the use of the word architecture. Everything is now architecture. The problem of architectural history it is not the history of the world’s buildings, but its struggle is a search for legitimacy. In terms of creating a profession for themselves, architects fail to have the monopoly that doctors or lawyers have. It could hardly be over design in general, it could hardly be over the building, so there is a black hole. What architects have managed to establish is: we are the only ones who can open an architecture office. It brings more obligations that rights. This could be extended to that argument in anthropology or post-colonial cultural studies; the countries where architecture arises tend to be also colonizing countries. That architecture is treated as a sort of colonialist architecture, which seeks to repress other architectures. When arguing that other architectures can’t be called architectures is not to derogate the status, or to claim that they have less value, but simply saying they’re not architecture. Like China, that has ancient imperial building traditions, a wide spread of vernacular building traditions, but began having ‘architecture’ when started sending people to study to the University of Pennsylvania, at the beginning of the twentieth century, where they received a Beaux Arts education: that’s what they brought back to China and that is Chinese architecture in that century. As an example, he explains his discussion with a professor of Mumbai on the syllabus of a completely standard course on the history of architecture. In addition to the classical evolution from Greek and Roman to Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance etc, he proposed to add two chapters at the end: Muslim and Hindu architecture, which are not taught in England. The demand, was to have more Hindu architecture. So, one scratches one’s head and says, yeah, but what is it? The books on Hindu architecture are done by British colonialists who tried to forge an image, a pattern and an account on Hindu architecture, based on the idea that all architectures were versions of the classical orders. So they had the hindu orders. Instead of treating this as an anachronistic colonialist fantasy, it was actually becoming the blueprint for nationalism. In that sense, I regard the term Hindu architecture as anachronistic, and coming from a will to insist in two things: that architecture is eternal, and infinitely variable. Singular and diverse. A lot of what I think of as architectural history it should not be conceived as that, but as the history of building traditions, across cultures. But we do not have to try to find a practice which is universal and utterly distinct. I would accuse those people who want ever more broad definitions of world architecture to be guilty of some sort of anachronism. That is the reason why so many fights on architecture schools take the form of a fight on the term architecture itself. The task in the mid-nineteenth century was to generate for the profession a mode of legitimacy which they called historical. Any school who wants to be validated needs to teach architecture history. But if you were looking for the reason why do you want this, you would be lacking of any coherent argument. They would mention humanistic examples, the good examples, to “use in the future”. Lets look at the resources they had in the mid 19th century for converting 18th century discourses on the history of building into the history of architecture. No one said in the first century BC, looking at a building what do you think of it architecturally? They had (in the 19th c.) a certain type of writing which is quite new, in someone like Burckhardt who produced in his book on the Italian Renaissance, a sort of poor man’s hegelianism. There, he wanted to unify the Renaissance as a distinct cultural form, a type: it emerged it died. But, above all, a unity. Then, in the task of describing a regime of heterogenous elements like building, painting, sculpture… you will end up stressing that they all share a certain style. Thus, Burckhardt invents for the modern period the notion of a distinct historical entity, characterized as style. This was developed by Wolflin, in terms of developing a notion of the Renaissance and then of the Baroque, establishing a kind of typification of regimes of style. What we mean by style, is understood as the five things that according to Wolflin characterize Renaissance as opposed to the Baroque. That comes to define a lot of general history of architecture, and it is still the basis of our misleading teaching of architecture as a succession of stylistic regimes. It is fair to say that this way of teaching also has its criticisms and that architectural history, as well as general art history has removed from the debates over the status of history and historical knowledge. Starting from the gradual dissolution of an overall concept of history as being a specific type of object with a form of knowledge that appeared in France in the 60s. There is a radical critique which has never been answered, by Lewis Strauss, who the commonly accepted task that everyone has to be historian, and history is ‘what matters’, and called this ‘historicity’. That is to say, that the representation of the past and the significance of that past to what we do now is a feature of some societies and not others. Western societies are ones which pays strong value on historicity. Secondly, the category of history itself could be summarized in three utterly dogmatic statements. We moved from a situation with Hegel when history is a process with a subject. The radical modification in the 1960s came from the marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who said that history is a process without a subject. Then, it was radicalized by Michel Foucault, who said “history is not a process”. This succession reveals that history does not exist as an agent, and does not exist coherently as a concept. Finally, there are two things that are opposed to each other: history on the one hand and the past on the other. Each of you has a history but each of you has a past. Your history is living in your cv, but when someone is looking at their cv, it is common to say: it’s not so bad (optimistically), but it has nothing to do with me. It represents nothing. There is something else we have which is not historically represented: it is what psychoanalysis might call your past. The past is not governed by the same economy, it does not have the same kind of being as a history. The past is not about events that have some external register, it cannot relate to this sort of independent truth-table. If you talk about your past honestly (I’m not saying anybody does that, only maybe in psychoanalysis) all you are doing is talking about a set of problems. If you had no problems, you wouldn't have a past. There would be nothing to reflect on, because we can only reflect on what it is an obstacle. My proposition is that the idea of the past is not an alternative to a history which would include everything; it is defined by being a problem. The pointlessness to students of a lot of survey history is that it is just like reading out loud the cv of architecture. If we began to explore the idea of architecture’s past, this past would be different, it would be the past which gives it problems. From this vantage point, the first problem addressed is the form of the matter in hand. So, it is possible to say that the collective investigation of the past is a practice of identifying what architecture’s problems are, which then are gradually systematically uncovered, by finding each iteration of this problem. Maybe part of the problem is being a profession at all. Therefore you could easily nominate ten problems that exist in the AA, like the fact that we have never discussed the effects of the introduction of the digital in the school. Following this things through, the kernel of the problem can be reached and then exposed. Perhaps we can reinvent a student interest in what we would place in the place of architectural history which will perform that task of increasing sensitivity to the discourse and practice of architecture without having to continue in the same rather repetitive and sterile fashion.
Questions follow. During the questions, Mark points out that the only criticism of Rogers, Foster and so on to the Prince of Wales in their discussions is the norms and regulations. He considers this to be an extraordinarily weak, self-interested objection. Berlusconi was the one who first realized that the way to victory is simply to make the population stupid. In teaching, if someone wants to offer something like a new kind of survey, they should be able to test it, I think that it is going to be remarkably like the old one.
The focus of the symposium is on the teaching of architectural history within architectural trainings. It is frequently admitted that architectural students do not find their history programmes useful or interesting. Why is this? The conference will address this question and consider how problems within architectural history might be productively changed by a different approach to the architectural past.
The AA has sought to reformulate its syllabus of how the issue of the past is dealt with in architectural terms. The symposium will consider ways in which the issue of the architectural past can be fashioned into a productive element in the training of an architect.
Schedule:
Friday 21 May
10.30 Brett Steele (Director of AA), Welcome
10.45 Mark Cousins (AA), Introduction
11.00 Reinhold Martin (Columbia University), Professional Histories
12.00 Brian Hatton (AA and John Moores University), Wandering in the Museum
2.00 Adrian Forty (Bartlett School, UCL) Dissecting the Cadaver
3.00 Irene Sunwoo (Princeton University), The Static Age
3.45 Panel discussion on Archives and Publishing, Tom Weaver (AA Files), Edward Bottoms (AA Library) and Irene Sunwoo
4.30 Tea
5.00 Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths) Forensic Architecture: only the criminal can solve the crime
Saturday 22 May
10.30 Mark Campbell (AA)
11.30 Jeff Kipnis (Ohio State University), Honour Thy Bungling Epigone
12.30 Lunch
2.00 Mark Cousins (AA), Architecture and its Unconscious
3.00 Panel discussion, Mollie Claypool (AA), Ryan Dillon (AA) and AA students.