When I was a student of architectural history, the survey books I read were entrenched in the Western foundations of the architectural canon: Be it Nicholas Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), or Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History (Thames & Hudson, 1980), these histories—continuously being revised—explored Modernism with its roots planted in Europe, and the main figures being Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, just to name a few. And while these books communicate a grand narrative, it’s refreshing to see a new generation of architectural historians opening up that canon and challenging, reconsidering, and expanding how we think about architecture and its history.
Take Architectural historian Barnabas Calder’s book Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency (Pelican, 2021), which tells the history of architecture as one of energy use, and how it traditionally was shaped by available energy, maximizing or minimizing its requirements in as natural a way as possible. He points out that architecture has a colossal role to play in the climate crisis; after all, construction and running buildings accounts for almost 40% of human greenhouse gas emissions. He takes us on a world tour of iconic buildings of the past 15,000 years, in locations from Ancient Rome to China’s booming megacities; throughout he reveals how every building—from the Parthenon to a typical Georgian house—was influenced by the energy available to its architects, and why this matters. If we are going to reduce our consumption, then the old ways need to be explored again. He argues that we need to create beautiful but also intelligent architecture, and to retrofit—not demolish—the buildings we already have.
Charles L. Davis II, the associate professor of architectural history and criticism at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, is another architectural historian disrupting the field of architectural history. As a designer, architectural historian, and cultural critic, his research focuses on racial identity and race thinking related to architectural history and contemporary culture. In his book, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), he provides a revisionist history that recovers the ways that architectural organicism provided a rationalist model of design to consciously relate the perceived racial and architectural “characters” of a nation to the people they served. By examining the ethnographic histories of figures important to architecture including Wright, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, and William Lescaze, Davis revises the Western canon to account for the role of racial ideas.
In his essay “Black Spaces Matter” for the Aggregate architectural history website, Davis reconsiders the writings of the poet June Jordan, who in 1965 collaborated with Buckminster Fuller on an architectural redesign of Harlem. He argues that her work operates on the same level as utopian architectural schemes and that contributions by non-white producers like Jordan are often overlooked. Davis’ current book project, tentatively entitled Black By Design: An Interdisciplinary History of Making in Modern America, recovers the overlooked contributions of Black artists and architects in shaping the built environment from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Lives Matter. As a work that advocates for missing voices within the canon, it is one I look forward to reading when it comes out.
This article appeared in the April 2022 issue of ARCHITECT.
