Writing Architecture: A Practical Guide to Clear Communication about the Built Environment by Carter Wiseman

Author:Carter Wiseman [Wiseman, Carter]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595341501
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

SCHOLARSHIP

Persuaders are allowed to rely heavily on opinion in their writing on architecture, and the best critics back up their opinions, but scholars face the added obligation of making dispassionate judgments intended to endure. An important role of the architectural scholar is to investigate areas that have been overlooked or misinterpreted.

ROCKEFELLER CENTER

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

RAYMOND HOOD AND OTHERS

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SCHOLARSHIP

Creating Meaning over Time

PERSUADERS ARE ALLOWED to rely heavily on opinion in their writing on architecture, and the best critics back up their opinions, but scholars face the added obligation of making dispassionate judgments intended to endure. The fundamental principles of structure and argumentation discussed in earlier chapters still apply. Scholars, however, must try to anticipate the hazards of the oedipal cycle and rise above the passions and fashions of the moment, locating architecture in a larger cultural context. While the roster of distinguished architectural scholars reaches back to at least 1800, the writers included here have had special impact on Americans’ understanding of buildings and their makers. All are distinguished historians, but each represents a different approach to writing about the architecture of the past and interpreting it for the present and beyond.

We assume that scholars seek truth. That is why so many university logotypes include an image of an ancient oil lamp, the device that symbolizes the light of knowledge dispelling the darkness of ignorance. But one scholar’s truth may be another’s distortion. This is rarely the result of deliberate misrepresentation, but it may reflect the background and training of the person doing the research. So in writing—and reading—scholarship on architecture, one must be aware of historiography, or the cultural and generational context in which a historian works. No matter how hard scholarly writers strive for objectivity, they are inevitably influenced by who they are and where they have been—personally, professionally, and intellectually.

There are no better examples of the malleability of scholarly truth than Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. Hitchcock was an architectural historian who taught for many years at Smith College and wrote the landmark 1958 volume Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Johnson, a wealthy and well-educated young man, at age twenty-six became the first curator of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (He later earned a degree at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.) Introduced to each other by Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first director, Hitchcock and Johnson traveled through Europe in 1930 and 1931, visiting the latest modern architecture. They returned determined to introduce their fellow Americans to developments abroad, and in 1932 they collaborated on an exhibition at MoMA designed to do that. Entitled The International Style: Architecture since 1922, it was accompanied by a book written by Hitchcock and Johnson with an abbreviated title, The International Style.

The book contained photographs and plans of the new work in Europe, as well as a few American examples, and laid out in its text what the authors saw as the main characteristics of the changing architectural times: “There is, first, a new conception of architecture as volume rather than as mass.

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