Travels in the History of Architectures

Abstract

At times I have wanted to write a history with none of the expected examples in it, containing in fact nothing recognizable at all, but feared this might lead to something like a garden I remember from childhood, whose maker allowed into it only plants that everyone else regarded as weeds. This would bear the true mark of the autodidact (a title I have little right to, but claim anyway) or the outsider who aspires to overturn every single convention, just for the sake of the commotion it makes. Like many others I have felt the excitement of Derrida’s destabilizing attacks on basic intellectual certainties, but soon realized that I couldn’t live day in and day out in the world he conjures up, and was then shocked to find this risky heresy catching on and becoming an orthodoxy. There’s an earlier destabilizing mode that won my allegiance the minute I heard of it: New Criticism. I won’t try to give its history but just to sketch its consequences for someone trying to write one. Essentially New Criticism denied that history was important. In fact, this movement regarded history or ‘background’ of any kind as pure obstruction that got between the observer and the thing itself. ‘The thing itself’ was a poem to begin with, and New Criticism offered a new way of encountering poetry. You had to forget everything you knew or had heard about the work in question. To help you in this exercise the poem’s title and the name of the author were often left off so that you had just the words themselves, which you regarded as something like inarticulate pebbles that rattled together in an order that didn’t yet have a name. Of course this deliberate strangening was an artificial procedure, but based on the valid idea that it is the poem (or painting or building) that matters, so that you should make the most direct contact with it that you can, first as a physical object appealing to the senses, and only later as an intellectual construct that depends on cultural conventions and takes its place in a long line of such things. The method was presented as stringent