Intersecting Interests: Developments in Networks and Flows of Information and Expertise in Architectural History

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Notes

1. Further information about the Action can be found at: http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/isch/IS0904. See also, http://architecturebeyond.eu.huma-num.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2012brochureCOST.pdf.

2. For the journal, see: http://abe.revues.org/.

3. It should be noted for this audience that under the reciprocal arrangements between COST and non-EU member states, a number of scholars from Australia – Stuart King (University of Tasmania), Andrew Leach (Griffith University) and Deborah van der Platt (University of Queensland) – were involved in the Action.

4. Repenser les limites: l'architecture à travers l'espace, le temps et les disciplines (SAH/INHA symposium, Paris, 2005). In particular, the panel “Transnational dynamics: new apprehensions of Modernity and colonies.” See proceedings online at: http://inha.revues.org/418.

5. Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge, 1976); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

6. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

7. Nezar AlSayyad, ed., Forms of Dominance: on the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1992). See also Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (London: Faber, 1989); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

8. An example of shared legacies in relation to India can be seen in Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Urban Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). See also William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern. Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For other recent scholarship engaging with the phenomenon of transnational agency in post-colonial contexts, see, Cold War Transfer: Architecture and Planning from Socialist Countries in the “Third World,” special issue of The Journal of Architecture, eds., Lukasz Stanek and Tom Avermaete 17, no. 3 (2012); Lukasz Stanek, “Mobilities of Architecture in the Global Cold War: From Socialist Poland to Kuwait and Back,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 4, no. 2 (2015): 365–98; Cole Roskam, “Non-Aligned Architecture: China’s Designs on and in Ghana and Guinea, 1955–1992,” Architectural History 58 (2015): 261–91; Haim Yacobi, Israel and Africa: a Genealogy of Moral Geography (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2015). On the issue of mutual heritage in relation to the Mediterranean, see Mercedes Volait, “Patrimoines partagés : un regard décentré et élargi sur l'architecture et la ville des XIX^e et XX^e siècles en Méditerranée,” in Architecture coloniale et patrimoine, l'expérience française, eds., Bernard Toulier and Marc Pabois (Paris: Somogy éditions d'art, 2005), 115–24; Johan Lagae, “From ‘Patrimoine partagé’ to ‘Whose Heritage’? Critical reflections on colonial built heritage in the city of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo,” in Remembering, Forgetting and City Builders, eds., Tovi Fenster and Haim Yacobi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 175–91.

9. For a broader discussion of the issues, see Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Beyond Postcolonialism: New Directions for the History of Nonwestern Architecture,” Frontiers of Architectural Research 3 (2014): 1–9; Johan Lagae and Bernard Toulier, “De l’outre-mer au transnational. Glissements de perspectives dans l’historiographie de l’architecture coloniale et postcoloniale,” Revue de l’Art 186, no. 4 (2014): 45–56.

10. For the emergence of the architectural profession in Egypt, see Mercedes Volait, Architectes et architectures de l’Egypte moderne: genèse et essor d’une expertise technique locale (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2005).

11. “Global experts ‘off radar’,” ed., Johan Lagae, ABE Journal (Architecture Beyond Europe) 4 (2013).

12. Rachel Lee, “Negotiating Modernities: Otto Koenigsberger’s Works and Network in Exile (1933–1951),” Dr.-Ing. Dissertation, Berlin University of Technology, 2014. See ABE Journal (Architecture Beyond Europe) 5 (2014) for summary.

13. For an early example of scholarship shifting the focus to local agency, see Urbanism: Imported or Exported? Native Aspirations and Foreign Plans, eds., Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2003).

14. Anna Nuzzaci, “L’opera dell’Associazione Nazionale per Soccorrere I Missionari Italiani (Anmi) fuori d’Europa dal 1886 al 1941,” ABE Journal (Architecture Beyond Europe) 2 (2012). See also, Ezio Godoli et Anna Nuzzaci, L’Associazione Nazionale per soccorrere i Missionari italiani (ANSMI) e i suoi ingegneri (Firenze: Maschietto, 2009).

15. G. A. Bremner, “The Corporatisation of Global Anglicanism: Architecture, Organisation, and Faith-based Patronage in the Nineteenth-century British Colonial World,” Architecture Beyond Europe (ABE) 2 (2012). For the CMS, see Emily Turner, “The Church Missionary Society and Architecture in the Mission Field: Evangelical Anglican Perspectives on Church Building Abroad, c.1850–1900,” Architectural History 58 (2015): 197–228.

16. For a systematic study of Anglican architecture in a global context, see G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c.1840–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

17. These methodological developments are probably best outlined in Alan Lester, “Imperial circuits and networks: geographies of the British empire,” History Compass 4, no. 1 (2006): 124–41. See also, Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 13–17; Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods, and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 22–63.

18. Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 46–67. For how this hybridised, “Saracenic”-style architecture was worked out in East Africa, see Sarah Longair, Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897–1964 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 72, 37–9, 69–109.

19. Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 4.

20. Louis Nelson, “Architectures of West African Enslavement,” Buildings & Landscapes 21, no. 1 (2014): 88–125; Wendy Roberts, “Company Transfer: the Architectural Dialect at the Edges of Empire,” Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 31, ed. Christoph Schnoor (Auckland, NZ: SAHANZ and Unitec ePress; and gold Coast, Qld: SAHANZ, 2014), 591–600.

21. Sibel Zandi-Sayek, “The Unsung of the Canon: Does a Global Architectural History Need New Landmarks?” ABE Journal (Architecture Beyond Europe) 6 (2014), para. 1.

22. For instance, see Kubler in Santos: An Exhibition of the Religious Folk Art of New Mexico, with an Essay by George Kubler (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1964). See also, George Kubler, “Two Modes of Franciscan Architecture: New Mexico and California,” in Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler, ed., Thomas F. Reese (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 34–8; T. Costa Da Kaufmann, “The Geography of Art: Historiography, Issues, Perspectives,” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, eds., Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008), 167–92.

23. “Abd al-Gawwad,” in Misr al-‘Imâra fil-qarn al-‘ishrin [Egyptian Architecture in the 20th century], ed. Tawfiq Ahmad (Cairo: Maktbat al-Anjilu al-Misriyah, 1989), 40.

24. See biographical entry in Mercedes Volait, Architectes et Architectures de l’Égypte Moderne (1820–1950): Genèse et Essor d’une Expertise Locale (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2005), 418.

25. “Liste alphabétique des membres de l’association des ingénieurs ETP résidents en Egypte,” appended to a letter of the director of ETP to Mr. Habert, head of the ETP representation in Cairo, 5 November 1937, private papers of ESTP, Paris.

26. Mercedes Volait, “Mediating and Domesticating Modernity in Egypt: Uncovering Some Forgotten Pages,” Docomomo Journal, special issue Modern Architecture in the Middle East 35 (2006): 30–35.

27. Mohamed ElShahed, Revolutionary Modernism? Architecture and the Politics of Transition in Egypt 1936–1967. PhD thesis, New York University, 2015, chapter 1 passim.

28. S. Karim, “1939–1949,” al-ʿImâra 9, no. 1–2 (1949): 1–6.

29. Mercedes Volait, L'architecture moderne en Égypte et la revue al-‘Imâra (1939–1959) (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1988). Harvard University’s holdings of the periodical are available online in pager-turner format at http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/17512206.

30. Recommendations in architecture and planning issued by the Arab Engineering Conferences are presented in Y. Muhammad ‘Ayd, “Qararât al-mu^כtamarât al-handasiyya fîl-bilâd al-^carabiyya fî al-handasa al-mi^cmâriyya wa al-takhtît (1945–1969),” al-magalla al-mi^cmâriyya 3, no. 6 (1986): 96–104. The Conferences met irregularly after 1969.

31. For an overview, see George Arbid, ed., Architecture from the Arab World (1914–2014): A Selection (Bahrain: Ministry of Culture, 2014).

32. Personal interview with Pierre Vago, 19 July 1990.

33. For Kuwait, see Roberto Fabbri, Sara Saragoça Soares, and Ricardo Camacho, Modern Architecture Kuwait 1949–1989 (Zurich: Verlag Niggli, 2016).

34. J.-L. Vellut, “Prestige et pauvreté de l’histoire nationale. A propos d’une histoire générale du Congo,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 77 (1999): 480–517. The work reviewed is I. Ndaywel è Nziem, Histoire du Zaïre. De l’héritage ancien à l’âge contemporain (Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot, 1997).

35. In particular, the research on the city of Lubumbashi done at Ghent University. See Sofie Boonen and Johan Lagae, “Scenes from a changing colonial ‘Far West’: Picturing the early urban landscape and colonial society of cosmopolitan Lubumbashi, 1910–1931,” Stichproben: Vienna Journal of African Studies, no. 28 (2015): 11–54.

36. Stephen V. Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City: The Advanced Capitalist World (Chichester: Wiley, 2002), 403. Ward defines “selective borrowing” – in contrast to “synthetic borrowing” – as a process “where no identifiable innovation resulted from the borrowed ideas or practices,” and puts Belgium to the fore as a country which used such an approach for defining its urban planning policy and practices.

37. Edmond Leplae, “Plans et photographies d’habitations pour plantations coloniales,” Bulletin Agricole du Congo belge 2, no. 1 (1911): 1–77.

38. Daniel R. Headrick, Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

39. For an in-depth discussion of this debate, see Johan Lagae, “In search of a ‘comme chez soi’: The ideal colonial house in Congo (1885–1960),” Cahiers africains, nos. 43–44 (2001): 239–82.

40. German members of the Cost Action were completely unaware of Vick’s work and confirmed that no work on him has been done so far.

41. The Scaffolding of Empire: Proceedings of the 4th Camea Symposium, ed. P. Scriver (Adelaide: CAMEA, 2007); Peter Scriver, “Empire-Building and Thinking in the Public Works Department of British India,” in Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, eds., Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (London: Routledge, 2007), 69–92.

42. A notable exception is the work of Jiat-Hwee Chang, “Building a (post)colonial Technoscientific Network: Tropical Architecture, Building Science and the Politics of Decolonization,” in Third World Modernism. Architecture, Development and Identity, ed., Duanfang Lu (London: Routledge, 2011), 211–35.

43. The latter especially published a number of very influential articles on tropical architecture, see in particular the themed issue “Architecture intertropicale,” Techniques et Architecture, nos. 5–6 (1952).

44. For instance, see Rythme for June 1949 and no. 8 1950; La Maison, nos. 6, 7, and 8 (1951). For an in-depth discussion of this topic, see Johan Lagae, “Kongo zoals het is”: Drie architectuurverhalen uit de Belgische kolonisatiegeschiedenis (1920–1960), PhD diss., Ghent University, 2002, vol. 1, 290–317.

45. G. A. Atkinson, “Méthodes et techniques: Construire sous les tropiques,” Rythme, no. 8 (1950): 33–45. This text was published earlier in the RIBA Journal under the title “Design and Construction in the Tropics.”

46. For example, the work of Ana Vaz Milheiro or Ana Tostões.

47. Especially, the work of the French architect Henri-Jean Calsat, who was active in over 57 countries during the era of “les trentes glorieuses,” and was a prominent voice at the 1952 Lisbon conference on “Housing in tropical climates.”