The Globality of Architectural History

Author(s): Swati Chattopadhyay

Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians , Vol. 74, No. 4 (December 2015),
pp. 411-415
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural
Historians
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field note
The Globality of Architectural History
swati chattopadhyay
University of California, Santa Barbara
T
his journal was founded seventy-four years ago with
the ambition of launching a “new” architectural history
and expanding the scope of the discipline. While
the readership expanded in the next three decades, the confines
of the field became increasingly narrow in the 1950s
and 1960s. This was the subject of John Maass’s 1969 article
that demonstrated the near absence of “non-Western” and
“vernacular” topics in JSAH.1 This was followed a year later
by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s acerbic criticism of the journal for
promoting disciplinary obsolescence.2 Despite these con-
secutive depth charges that shattered SAH’s carapace of dis-
ciplinary ecumenism, both the society and the journal sailed
seemingly untroubled into the next millennium.
As for inclusion of “non-Western” content, changes were
slow but steady. In the decade following Maass’s critique, two
articles on Japanese architecture, one article on house types
in Teotihuacán, an introduction to African architecture, and
two articles on Burmese town planning were published.
When James O’Gorman took on the editorship with the
March 1974 issue, he professed the journal’s inability to pub-
lish “nontraditional” material unless he received manuscript
submissions on such topics, but affirmed: “As the mirror of
scholarship in architectural history it is ready to reflect the
reassessment of the profession and its methods currently
under way.”3 The situation improved significantly in the
1980s with at least twelve articles that could be categorized
as “non-Western” by scholars who would become stalwarts
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 4 (December 2015),
411–415. ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2015 by the Society
of Architectural Histo­rians.  All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce ­article content through the University of
California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/
journals.php?p=reprints, or via email: jpermissions@ucpress.edu. DOI: 10.1525/
jsah.2015.74.4.411.  the term “global” has appeared seldom in articles published
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in their fields.4 During these intervening years the readership
appeared to be bickering over the ascendancy of Western
European versus American (meaning U.S.) topics in the jour-
nal, so much so that Tod Marder in his concluding editorial
in the March 1990 issue noted with relief that with “global
awareness” this quarrel or “creative tension,” as he put it, has
“subsided.”5 Yet the question of whether JSAH is an Ameri-
can journal with international circulation or an international
journal whose task is to move beyond the confines of North
American academia was not settled in the 1990s.6
Since then the intellectual ambitions of the journal have
been intermittently articulated in editorials and editorial
initiatives that have orchestrated voices from different sub-
fields, from different parts of the world, and from cognate
disciplines such as geography and history.7 The journal now
claims an international presence, and its authors as well as its
readers come from all over the world, perhaps far exceeding
the hopes of its founders. But what have been the parameters
and goals of such expansion? What benefits have such
expanding boundaries bestowed on the writing of architec-
tural history? Given the recent concern with global architec-
tural history elsewhere in the discipline—for example, in
surveys of architectural history—and in other disciplinary
venues, I offer some preliminary observations on the journal’s
legacy in shaping the discipline’s global vision.8
My remarks are prompted by two seemingly paradoxical
occurrences: (1) the frequent references to “global” histories
in job descriptions in architectural history and correspond-
ingly the inclination of current-day architectural historians
to describe their expertise in terms of globality (rubrics such
as “global antiquity” and “global Middle Ages” are increas-
ingly common); and (2) the relative absence of such discussion
in the pages of JSAH, even in the last three decades. Indeed,
411
in JSAH, and the term “globalization” even fewer times.
When they do appear, these references are mostly in field
notes, reviews, and editorials. In other words, they demon-
strate an awareness of the relation between “the local and the
translocal in academic architectural history, which (like other
disciplines) is under pressure from the economy and ideology
of globalization.”9 At the same time there seems to be some
reluctance to engage with the notion of the “global” at the
level of research. When it comes to teaching, no doubt
many scholars feel compelled to provide a “global” perspec-
tive, and for others “global” has become a euphemism for
“non-Western.”10 It may be convenient to surmise that the
global is a stance—a cosmopolitan gesture—precisely
because of economic and ideological pressures; but that
would insinuate profound scholarly insincerity. Rather, the
paradox, I suggest, resides in a methodological problem: only
some fields, such as urban history and colonial architectural
history, and projects, such as surveys of architecture, are seen
as conducive to “global” approaches. It is time we parse the
“globality” of global histories of architecture.
I am not privileging the notion of global history as
opposed to world history, or transnational history. Indeed,
the distinctions among international, transnational, global,
and world histories are not settled—the labels are sometimes
used interchangeably—even among historians who profess
to practice these forms of history.11 These scholars share an
interest in tracking the complex networks of exchange
involving the movements of people, ideas, and capital across
territorial units such as the nation, continent, and subconti-
nent and across oceans.12
In what follows I consider the ways in which the expan-
sion of the subject of research has been linked to a method-
ological problem at two particular moments in the history of
the journal: the inaugural issues and the discussion at the turn
of the millennium.
“A Chain of Connections”
Charged to perform the act of “literary midwifery,” the editors
of the inaugural 1941 issue of the Journal of the American
Society of Architectural Historians begged “the reader to
remember that initial appearances, either human or journal-
istic, seldom indicate the lovelier forms to come.”13 While
ASAH was formed “with the aim of providing a useful forum
and of facilitating enjoyable contacts for all those whose
special interest is the history of architecture,” it quickly
became apparent that despite their genteel preface, this was
no group of dilettantes.14 In the first issue of the journal’s
second year, Carroll Meeks, one of the founders of the asso-
ciation and the journal, wrote of the need for a “new kind of
architectural history.” He had two primary goals: to make
architectural history useful to the Allied war effort and to
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refashion the practice of architectural history so as to address
social changes brought about by the global conflict of World
War II.15 In the following issue, Talbot Hamlin urged a
“broader view of architectural achievement in our future his-
torical writing,” naming parts of the vast field that needed
“cultivation”: baroque, Spanish colonial, South American,
Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, and nineteenth-­
century architecture; and topics that went beyond master-
pieces to illuminate “ordinary architecture.” Emphasizing the
analysis of building types “in terms of human living values,”
he suggested that architectural historians pay attention to “the
community as well as the building.” The latter, he concluded,
would lead to the broader horizon of “community—city
­planning—history.”16 Hamlin’s wish list was predicated on a
future in which architecture and architectural history play
significant roles in offering solutions to the problems of ordi-
nary life, and his prose was animated by a social idealism
rooted in the belief that architecture serves universal values.
In response, John Coolidge summed up Meeks’s “damn-
ing” critique of the practice of contemporary architectural
history and Hamlin’s insistence on expanding subject matter
as two distinct tasks: (1) writing new architectural histories—
that is, tackling new subject areas; and (2) rewriting old archi-
tectural history—that is, bringing new concerns to bear on
extant research. His primary concern was the latter. If “a grand
demonstration of the relation of architecture to social life” was
necessary, then architectural historians would have to devote
themselves to “tracing the specific connections between single
groups of buildings and the intellectual currents surrounding
them.”17 He identified the problem of such research as a
“methodical difficulty”: “We lack a bridge between ideas and
formal organization, the sort of bridge that iconography
provides for the other arts.”18 His solution was to decipher “a
chain of connections” between a building and “the thought
that is contemporary to it.” “Only when a considerable number
of types of connections have been defined by investigations
such as these,” he noted, “will it be possible to give the problem
the comprehensive treatment it must ultimately deserve.”19
He was aware that different buildings (depending on where
these are and what sources are available) might require differ-
ent methods. Such a research agenda, he surmised, would keep
the architectural historian “profitably overworked for at least
a generation to come.” If architectural historians are successful
in this, he speculated, then the “History of Architecture would
be considered the ‘Mother of the Humanities’ much as the Art
of Architecture was once considered the Mother of the Arts.”20
Yet Coolidge worried that ideas stick to buildings lightly.
He prefaced his proposed solution with this hesitant declara-
tion: “We know so little of the way in which buildings are
affected by ideas that it is almost impossible to discern in
a given monument the effect of determinate ideas.”21 His
diffidence was prescient.
“Webs and Flows” construct “enduring bridges between ‘different worlds,’ ” she
concluded by suggesting that we “rethink the web of mean-
The articles in the September 1999 JSAH special issue
ing the project of modernity encompasses, as well as the con-
“Architectural History 1999/2000,” intended to take stock
comitant inequalities.”28 Other contributors to that special
of the field in terms of “selected points of conceptual change
issue did not seem prepared to participate in such bridge
and methodological innovation,” produced some fine reflec-
building: the best works in the preceding decade remained
tions about disciplinary history, canonicity, and interdiscipli-
confined to in-depth city- or site-specific studies of architec-
narity.22 The articles also demonstrated a distinct parceling
ture and urban culture—variants of microhistory.29
of disciplinary responsibility in terms of knowledge of the
The scholarship appearing in the next two decades, both
field. Of the twenty-five articles, barring the essays
in the pages of JSAH and in other venues, has to a great
by Diane Favro and Zeynep Çelik, the term “global” or
extent vindicated Çelik’s hopes of rethinking the web of
­“globalization” appeared in exactly four instances: in Paul
meaning that constitutes experience and built form.30 The
Groth’s article on vernacular architecture in reference to
expansion of content (a global spread) in recent volumes of
Anthony King’s work on the bungalow, in Nancy Stieber’s
JSAH is the cumulative work of several generations of schol-
article on cities in reference to Lewis Mumford’s Culture of
ars who have operated at the edges of the discipline and have
Cities, and as passing references to globalization in Daniel
only recently forced a recognition of the importance of
Bluestone’s piece on historic preservation and Sylvia Lavin’s
global histories among those less inclined to think outside
reflections on theory and history. Labelle Prussin’s article on
cherished comfort zones.
African sacred sites used the term “non-Western” only in the
A decade later, in his 2009 SAH plenary address published
title and not in the body of the article: it rejected the Western
in the December issue of JSAH, Dell Upton too argued
categories used for understanding sacrality in Africa and
against the “reification of culture” in the use of such terms as
asserted an autonomous discourse.
“Islamic,” “Western,” and “non-Western” for describing
Favro noted that isolationist practice within urban history
works of architecture. He asserted not merely that these cate-
is beginning to wear thin as territorial bastions crumble,
gories are constructed but that they are indeed impediments
“sparked in part by calls for diversity, inclusionism, and a
to the understanding of architecture as cultural process.31
global viewpoint.”23 Citing Spiro Kostof’s trio of books on
In so doing he moved beyond previous discussions on
urbanism as good models, Favro wrote: “Concern with the
expanding frameworks of architectural history. Taking Baalbek
broad flow of urban history compels the inclusion of cities
and its manifold historiography as his vantage point, he chal-
from diverse cultures as evident in Kostof’s books. In many
lenged the notion that architecture is bounded in any way,
other urban-history surveys, multicultural gestures, however,
temporally or spatially. In effect he was questioning the
remain inadequate.”24 Çelik opened her essay by noting,
accretive, conglomerative view of global architectural history
“The umbrella term ‘non-Western’ has settled comfortably
as “a compendium of regional histories or a collection of
into the current lexicon of architectural and urban history.”
self-contained stories compiled from monographs.”32 Com-
Then she went on to deconstruct the terms “non-Western”
mitted to the project of writing a world history, he espoused
and “Islamic” (as a subset of the “non-Western”) as these are
a version of human universality that Talbot Hamlin might
applied to urban history.25 She urged urban and architectural
have endorsed: “If the population of Baalbek provided the
historians to conduct contrapuntal reading of urban forms
continuity linking the discontinuities of successive political
between colony and metropole:
and religious regimes in the Bekaa, human universals may
provide the continuities bridging the discontinuities caused
From a methodological point of view colonial cities offer an
unusual potential: as sites of cultural confrontation and
by the contingencies of politics and culture. There are com-
exchange, they call for analyses of the same phenomenon from monalities in world architecture that beg for explanation.”
different perspectives thereby enabling shifting readings of Upton’s solution to the tension between the particular and
urban forms. . . . Furthermore, the increasing awareness of the general was to tell the story of world history, or, as he
urban design policies and principles in the colonies enables called it, “human history,” “as a story of webs and flows.”33
new readings of the metropoles.26 There are two issues in Upton’s essay that I wish to high-
light in conclusion. First, if there is one key lesson in Upton’s
Her main goal was to emphasize “the interconnected nature text it is this: it is not what you write about but how you write
of urban interventions” and that “non-Western” or “Islamic” about it that matters. If microhistory remains a vital meth-
cities do not “stand isolated but are increasingly anchored by odological approach to site-specific studies for architectural
the new scholarship to a global framework triggering ques- historians, that approach too can be retooled. Surely world
tions that challenge the provinciality of former mind-sets. surveys and urban histories are more amenable to a global
The outcome affects all parties.”27 Citing Kostof’s effort to framing, but, as Upton explained, we can indeed write global

T h e G l o b a l i t y o f A r c h i t e c t u r a l H i s t o r y     413

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histories of a site/building: the seeming conflict between
depth and breadth is rendered meaningless once we learn to
ask a new set of questions.
Second, Upton did not use the term “global” or “global-
ization” in his text, perhaps as a way to distance his project
from the politics of globalization. But his appeal to the idea
of the universal deserves attention, given that both poststruc-
turalist and postcolonial discourse have made an entire gen-
eration of architectural historians, myself included, deeply
wary of claims to universalism. Upton’s claim to universalism
is, I suspect, a deeper, underlying commitment to equality—
the sameness in the treatment of the human being as a politi-
cal subject. However, he cautioned about the uncritical
application of the world history model (which considers
large-scale historical processes) to architecture: “A history
restricted to a single category of human endeavor—the built
environment—will necessarily demonstrate more disconti-
nuities and idiosyncrasies than one devoted to the entire
range of human activity.”34 Put another way, ideas and people
travel more easily and differently than buildings do—and
ideas stick lightly to buildings and landscapes.
To think about architecture in terms of flows we then
need to resist the temptation to think about the site as the
local instantiation of a universal. Relaxing the idea of univer-
salism—and with it the figures of the general and the particu-
lar that so often get reified in the banality of the global and
the local—would open up the possibility of bringing micro-
histories into conversation with global histories, as global
microhistories of architecture. I am borrowing the term
“global microhistory” from Tonio Andrade, who saw in it the
potential to infuse human drama into global historical nar-
ratives steeped in statistics. For him microhistory is a form
of good storytelling, involving the “small” voices of history.35
Harnessing such small voices and evidentiary fragments to
think through our global inclinations might serve well as a
prospect of architectural history.
Notes
1. John Maass, “Where Architectural Historians Fear to Tread,” JSAH 28,
no. 1 (Mar. 1969), 3–8.
2. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, “Maass for Measure,” JSAH 29, no. 1 (Mar. 1970),
60–61.
3. James F. O’Gorman, “Editorial,” JSAH 33, no. 1 (Mar. 1974), 3.
4. This included articles by Suzanne Preston Blier, Zeynep Çelik, Partha
Mitter, Gülru Necipo lu-Kafadar, Susan A. Niles, Jean-Pierre Protzen,
Nancy Steinhardt, and William H. Coaldrake.
5. Tod A. Marder, “Note from the Editor,” JSAH 49, no. 1 (Mar. 1990), 5.
Regarding the issue of Western European versus American topics, see, for
example, Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, “Letter from the Editor,” JSAH 46,
no. 1 (Mar. 1987), 4.
6. Nicholas Adams, “Celebrating Tradition and Change,” JSAH 52, no.
2 ( June 1993), 137–38; Nicholas Adams, “International Conversations,”
JSAH 55, no. 2 ( June 1996), 124–25.
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7. For example, Eve Blau, “Representing Architectural History,” JSAH
56, no. 2 ( June 1997), 144–45; Hilary Ballon, “The Changing Scope of
Foreign Topics,” JSAH 57, no. 1 (Mar. 1998), 5, 115; Zeynep Çelik,
“Expanding Frameworks,” JSAH 59, no. 2 ( June 2000), 152–53; ­Zeynep
Çelik, ­“Editor’s Concluding Notes,” JSAH 62, no. 1 (Mar. 2003),
121–24; Nancy Stieber, “Architecture between Disciplines,” JSAH 62,
no. 2 ( June 2003), 176–77.
8. Recent surveys of architectural history include Francis D. K.
Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History
of ­Architecture, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2010); Kathleen
James-Chakraborty, Architecture since 1400 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014). See also the collection of essays in Grey Room,
no. 61 (2015, forthcoming).
9. Eve Blau, “Plenary Address, Society of Architectural Historians Annual
Meeting, Richmond, Virginia, 18 April 2002: A Question of Discipline,”
JSAH 62, no. 1 (Mar. 2003), 125.
10. On the global conversation about the teaching of architectural history,
see the articles in JSAH 61, no. 2 (Sept. 2002); and Çelik, “Editor’s Con-
cluding Notes.”
11. For a discussion among historians, see C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert,
Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed,
“AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical
Review 111, no. 5 (Dec. 2006), 1441–64.
12. The notion of world history is lodged in the world-systems approach
developed in the 1970s, which takes as its starting point the rise of capital-
ism in Europe and its effect on the economic division of the world into
cores and peripheries. Dissatisfaction with the unidirectionality of power
from core to periphery in world-systems theory sparked interest in “flows”
and “circulations” that, by redirecting agency, construct a more compli-
cated nexus of power relations. Such “flows” form the prompts of global
and transnational histories. The term “global history” became popular in
the 1990s in the wake of neoliberal globalization, functioning for the most
part as a critique of globalization. Transnational history assumes migration,
both forced and unforced, as the key concept and is committed to under-
standing how historical processes, in particular, social inequities, are shaped
in the passage from one space to another. It might be argued that unlike
world and global history, transnational history does not incline toward
explaining worldwide phenomena. Differences among these approaches
that might be more important would have to do with the conception of
universality that the approaches espouse and how the related terms are
deployed for political purposes. Regarding the latter, see Daniel Monk and
Andrew Herscher, “The New Universalism: Between Global History and
Voucher Humanitarianism,” Grey Room, no. 61 (2015, forthcoming).
13. “Introducing A.S.A.H.,” Journal of the American Society of Architectural
Historians (JASAH) 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1941), 1.
14. Ibid.
15. Carroll L. V. Meeks, “The New History of Architecture,” JASAH 2,
no. 1 (Jan. 1942), 5.
16. Talbot F. Hamlin, “Some Necessary but Unwritten Architectural
Histories,” JASAH 2, no. 2 (Apr. 1942), 28.
17. John Coolidge, “Preliminary Steps towards ‘the New History of Archi-
tecture,’ ” JASAH 3, no. 3 (July 1943), 10.
18. Ibid., 9. In this context see Eve Blau’s interpretation of Coolidge’s
article in Blau, “Plenary Address.”
19. Coolidge, “Preliminary Steps,” 10.
20. Ibid., 11.
21. Ibid., 8.
22. Eve Blau, “Introduction: Architectural History 1999/2000: A Special
Issue of JSAH,” JSAH 58, no. 3 (Sept. 1999), 280.
23. Diane Favro, “Meaning and Experience: Urban History from Antiq-
uity to the Early Modern Period,” JSAH 58, no. 3 (Sept. 1999), 364.
24. Ibid., 365. Favro pointed out that Peter Hall’s massive Cities in Civiliza-
tion comprising thirty chapters and over one thousand pages had only one
chapter on a “non-Western” city. This “non-Western” city, Tokyo, was
included because it fit, according to Hall, a Western paradigm of growth.
25. Zeynep Çelik, “New Approaches to the ‘Non-Western’ City,” JSAH
58, no. 3 (Sept. 1999), 374.
26. Ibid., 380.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 381.
29. See Nancy Stieber, “Microhistory of the Modern City: Urban Space,
Its Use and Representation,” JSAH 58, no. 3 (Sept. 1999), 382–91.
30. Apart from significant monographs on colonial and ex-colonial cities,
I have in mind books such as Sheila Crane’s Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille
and Modern Architecture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
31. Dell Upton, “Starting from Baalbek: Noah, Solomon, Saladin, and the
Fluidity of Architectural History,” JSAH 68, no. 4 (Dec. 2009), 464–65.
32. Ibid., 465.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord:
Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (Dec. 2010),
573–91.

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