From our Readins
BY COURSE TOPIC, an evolving collection of excerpts
David Del Testa, Global History: Cultural Encounters from Antiquity to the Present, 2004
"Cross-cultural exchange or cross-cultural interaction indicates those instances when people of different cultural backgrounds interact and attempt to communicate with one another, either intentionally or accidentally. Such exchanges or interactions sometimes produce a new culture, which can be called hybrid, or syncretic, to reflect its diverse origins and mixture of influences." (xi)
relevance of Marxist history, Annales School, post-colonial scholarship (xiv)
Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cltural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times, 1993.
"it seeks to identify and understand the patterns of cross-cultural conversion, conflict, and compromise that came about when peoples of diffrent civilizations and cultural traditions interacted with each other over long periods of time. It makes a special effort to understand the phenomenon of cross-cultural conversion--an extremely complicated process involving the communication of beliefs and negotiation of values across cultural boundary lines, but a process that had the potential to bring about a thorough transformation of an entire society." (preface)
'expansive cultural traditions rarely attracted large numbers of foreign adherents without the aid of a syncretic process. Syncretism represented an avenue leading to cultural compromise: it provided opportunities for established beliefs, values, and customs to find a place within the framework of a different cultural tradition, and by doing so, it enabled expansive trditions to win popular support in foreign lands. Thus, cross-cultural conversion and the spread of religious and cultural traditions over long distances depended heavily on processes of syncretism that established lines of communication and mediated differences between interacting traditions." (preface)
"The analysis of cross-cultural conversion in its larger social context turns up three patterns that recurred frequuenly during the pre-modern times: conversion through voluntary asociation: conversion induced by political, social, or economic pressure, and conversion by assimilation." (9)
The three modes of conversion obviously reflected their broader political, social, and economic contexts, and in particular, they had a great deal to do with the relative strengths of the parties involved in cross-cultural encounters." (13)
"the conversion of an entire society to a foreign cultural tradition entailed a thoroughgoing process of syncretism. Foreign traditions always arrived in pieces--wrenched from the political, social, and economic context in which they had originally developed--and converts always selected certain elements that they adopted, adapted, emphasized, or otherwise appropriated for their own purposes. In communicating and explaining an alien cultural tradition, they fractured its original elements, restated them in new terms, endowed them with different meaning, and assembled them in a new way that made sense and significance from their own cultural point of view." (16).
"Alongside conversion and syncretism, resistance stood among the most prominent responses of pre-modern peoples to foreign cultural challenges and opportunities." (19)
Mohammed Al-Asad, "Encounters: A Preliminary Anatomy," Gesta XLIII/2, 2004
"The term 'enounters' refers to exchanges that often are unexpected, unplanned, and brief, as well as hostile and adversarial." (177)
"Whenever an artistic exchange between two different cultural entities takes place, the importing culture tends to "filter" the visual patterns, forms, techniques, and genres being brought in from the exporting culture, and to submit the its artistic, aesthetic, ideological, cultural, and even economic structures.
Such filtering, whether deliberate or unconscious, allows certain elements in but keeps other ones out, and it also involves a significant 'processing' component that modifies and even restructures what is allowed in. The nature and intensity of this filtering depends on a number of interrelated factors, including the receptiveness of the importing culture to outside artistic traditions, its levels of cultural and political self-confidence, and the development and maturity of its own artistic traditions." (179)
Art Review, "Venice and the Islamic World" exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Umberto Eco, "How an Exposition Exposes Itself," c. 1967, in Leach, Rethinking Architecture
(Nick's Picks)
"In an exposition, architecture and design explode their dual communicative nature, sacrificing denotation to very widespread connotation. If we look at the buildings in an exposition as structures to live in or pass through, they are out of scale, but they make sense if we look a them as media of communication and suggestion." (204)
Kenneth Yeang, "Tropical Urban Regionalism," 1987 in Jencks and Kropf, Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture
(David's Picks)
What is needed is an holistic concept that can permit the building enclosure itself to be perceived systematically without a prior fixation to a particular aesthetic, so as to enable a regionalist inventory of forms particular to a place and time to emerge."
Tadao Ando, "Beyond Horizons in Architecture," 1991, in Theories and Manifestoes
(Christina's Picks)
"The most promising path open to contemporary architecture is that of a development through and beyond modernism. This means replacing the mechanical, lethargic, and mediocre methods to which modernism has succumbed with the kind of abstract, meditative vitality that marked its beginnings, and creating something thought-provoking that will carry our age forward into the twenty-first century." (256)
"The starting point of an architectural problem--whether place, nature, lifestyle, or history--is expressed within this development into the abstract. Only an effort of this nature will produce a rich and variable architecture." (257) (also David)
"The elements of nature--water, wind, light, and sky--bring architecture derived from ideological thought down to the ground level of reality and awaken man-made life within it." (257)
"When water, wind, light, rain, and other elements of nature are abstracted within architecture, the architecture becomes a place where people and nature confront each other under a sustained sense of tension. I believe it is this feeling of tension that will awaken the spiritual sensibilities latent in contemporary humanity . . . " (258) (David's pick)
"The architectural pursuit implies a responsibility to find and draw out a site's formal characteristics, along with its cultural traditions, climate and natural environmental features, the city structure that forms its backdrop and the living patterns and age old customs that people will carry into the future." (258)
Hassan Fathy, "Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture," 1986, in Theories and Manifestoes
(Lindsey's Picks)
“...Before the advent of the industrial era and mechanization, man depended on natural sources of energy and available local materials in forming his habitat according to his physiological needs.” (144)
“Successful solutions to the problems of climate did not result from deliberate scientific reasoning. They grew out of countless experiments and accidents and the experience of generations of builders who continued to use what worked and rejected what did not.” (144)
“the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Tropics are industrially underdeveloped and cannot afford the luxury of high-technology building materials or energy-intensive systems for cooling. Although traditional architecture is always evolving and will continue to absorb new materials and design concepts, the effects of any substitute materials or form should be evaluated before it is adopted. Failure to do so can only result in the loss of the very concepts that made the traditional techniques appropriate.” (145) (also David)
“Although traditional architecture was evolved intuitively over long periods, it was based primarily on scientifically valid concepts. The modern academic world of architecture does not emphasize the value of investigating and applying concepts and, therefore, has no respect for vernacular architecture. Now is the time to bridge the gap between these widely different approaches.” (145) (also David)
Canizaro (on hold)
Hobsbawm and Ranger, "Inventing Traditions," in The Invention of Tradition
(Raechel's Picks)
"Traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented." (1)
"Societies since the industrial revolution have naturally been obliged to invent, institute or develop new networks of such convention or routine more frequently than previous ones. Insofar as they function best when turned into habit, automatic procedure or even reflex action, they require invariance, which may get in the way of the other necessary requirement of practice, the capacity to deal with the unforseen or inhabitual contingencies. This is a well-known weakness of routinization or bureaucratization, particularily at the subaltern levels where invariant performance is generally considered the most efficient." (3)
"In all such cases novelty is no less novel for being able to dress up easily as antiquity." (5)
"Yet all historians, whatever else their objectives, are engaged in this process inasmuch as they contribute, consciously or not, to the creation, dismantling and restructuring of images of the past which belong not only to the world of specialist investigation but to the public sphere of man as a political being." (13)
"Whatever the historic or other continuities embedded in the concept of 'France' and the 'French'- and which nobody would seek to deny - these very concept themselves must include a constructed or 'invented' component. And just because so much of what subjectively makes up the modern 'nation' consists of such contructs and is associated with appropriate and, in general fairly recent symbols or suitably tailored discourse ( such as 'national history'), the national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without careful attention to the 'invention of tradition'." (14)
Vale, "National Identity and the Capitol Complex," in Architecture, Power and National Identity
(Kat's Picks)
"Capital cities and the parliament buildings constructed within them would seem to be ready purveyors of national identity, since they are ostensibly built to serve and symbolize a nation-state as a whole. Frequently, however, since their siting and appearance are chosen by the leadership rather than the populace, the resultant place hardly resembles a truly national identity. Architecture and planning are often used as tools for promoting something called national identity, but many dimensions of this phenomenon remain unarticulated." (48 para. 2)
"...National identity is not the overriding issue: the goal is identity in the eyes of an international audience. Consequently, part of the national identity of some developing countries has come to be defined according to the dictates and tastes of Western consumers. Parliament buildings, like many hotels, are designed to be in keeping with the preexisting international image of the country: the building must confirm-- and thus perpetuate-- a stereotype. The danger is that the cultural richness negated by international modernism will reappear in cartoon form. The box with the flag in front of it is replaced by a building that is a flag itself. One form of design denies the possibility of an architectural contribution to national identity: the other reduces architecture to a three-dimensional, government-sanctioned billboard advertising selected aspects of indigenous culture." (54 para 1)Vale, "Papua, New Guinea," in Architecture Power and National Identity
(Kat's Picks)
"The Parliament House is intended as a monumental announcement of Papua New Guinea's arrival on the international scene. In its architecture, art, and furniture it purports to create a representative collage of designs from many of the country's diverse component cultures. Designed and built during a period of backlash against any monumentalism that was thought culturally irrelevant, the building seeks to promote an image of Papua New Guinean identity." (169 para 1)
"...on many levels, the building is very appropriate for its purpose. As an advertisement for independence and as an idealization of the hopes for representative democracy, the building inspires confidence." (185 para 2)
"What is consumed is its image -- the image that the leadership of the new state wishes to convey to its own people and to the world. While such consumption occurs in this case of any public building with a strong image, whether in Waigani or in Washington, there may be special consequences when its presence acts to consume a vernacular tradition as well. The production of tourist art and, by extension, tourist architecture inevitably involves the negation of the original culture-bound meanings and ritual associationss of a given artifact and its transmutation into a marketable work of art." (188 para 2)O'Connell, "Constructing the Russian Other: Viollet-le-Duc and the Politics of an Asiatic Past," in Architectures of Russian Identity
(Annsley's Picks)
"Its unraveling will support Hobsbawm's thesis that histories legitimate nations, and that national histories are by definition inventions. Analysis of this situation will extend that thesis to the art historical case, showing how the invention of an architectural tradition, describable in words and images but also buildable in the present day, could be seized upon as an unusually potent tool for the inculcation of the desired national identity" (90)
"Crucial to the project's success would be the author's skill at performing the delicate operation of separating, as though surgically, the various bits of foreign matter that had accreted onto the Russian national body over time. But not all intrusions were equally invasive; according to Rondot, Butovsky's book would bring to the fore neglected works of "incomparable richness" and "rare nobility" that had developed under "Asiatic" or "Greek" influence." (94)
"These misappropriations of architectural message, this slippage between theory and practice, tell a cautionary tale about the calculated marriageof architectural form to political agenda. While clearly capable of proclaiming desired messages in enduring, conspicuous and monumental form, architecture is also a volatile and infinitely manipulable expressive vehicle, whose meanings are exceedingly difficult to control across time and space." (100)
Kirk Semple, "Iraq confronts Hussein Legacy Cast in Bronze," April 8, 2007, New York Times
Pratt, "Criticism in the Contact Zone," in Imperial Eyes, Travel Writing and Transculturation
(Alison's Picks)
"Redundancy, dicontinuity, and unreality. There are some of the chief coordinates of the text of Euroimperialism, the stuff of its power to constitute the everyday with neutrality, spontaneity, numbing repetition. In recent years that power has become open to question and subject to scrutiny in the academy, as part of a large scale effort to decolonize knowledge. This book is part of that effort. The effort must be, among other things, an excercise in humility. For one of the things it brings most forcefully into play are contestatory expressions from the site of imperial intervention, long ignored in the metropolis; the critique empire coded ongoingly on the spot, in ceremony, dance, parody, philosophy, counterknowledge and counterhistory, in texts unwitnessed, supressed, lost, or simply overlain with repetition and unreality. It calls for the story of another letter"(2)
"...contact zones, social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, grapple with eachother , often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination - like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today" (4)
"the term 'Transculturation'...Ethnographers have used this term to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into thier own, and what they use it for. Transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone" (page 4)
'contact zone' is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect" (5)
"The eighteenth century has been identified as a period in which Northern Europe asserted itself as the center of civilization, claiming the legacy of the Mediterraneanas its own. It is not surprising, then, to find German or British accounts of Italy sounding like German or British accouns of Brazil" (10)
Said, "Images of the Past, Pure and Impure," in Culture and Imperialism
(Sarah's Picks)
"Cultures are humanly made structures of both authority and participation, benevolent in what they include, incorporate, and validate, less benevolent in what they exclude and demote." (15)
"At a time when the older filaments and organizations that bound pre-modern societies internally were beginning to fray, and when the social pressures of administering numerous overseas territories and large new domestic constituencies mounted, the ruling elites of Europe felt the clear need to project their power backward in time, giving it a history and legitimacy that only tradition and longevity could impart." (16)
"Similar constructions have been made to the opposite side, that is, by insurgent 'natives' about their pre-colonial past, as in the case of Algeria during the War of Independence (1954-1962), when decolonization encouraged the Algerians and Muslims to create images of what they supposed themselves to have been prior to French colonization." (16)
Porter, "Orientalism and its Problems," Post-Colonial Studies Reader
(Lauren's Picks)
"Are we so positioned by a given historical and geopolitical juncture that misrepresentation is a structural necessity or is there a place of truth?" (150)
"Said makes it clear that he is concerned with the way in which the so-called Orient, from the Eastern Mediterranean to South East Asia, "became known in the West as its great complementary opposite since antiquity . . . Furthermore, Orientalism is variously defined as 'a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient, as a hegemonic Western discourse . . ." (150)
"Such an approach will, I hope, show that there already exist within Orientalism itself alternative and only partially silenced counter-hegemonic voices . . ." (153-4)
"The complexity of the narrator's persona, his aspirations and self-doubt, his sense of estrangement from his own culture, the sympathy for a distance from the Arab culture he shared for roughly two years, are part of the story Lawrence tells [in Seven Pillars of Wisdom]" (157)
"Passages that reproduce a generalized Orientalist discourse alternate with those that recall the intensity and tedium of war, the confusions of sexual desire and spiritual yearning, and scenes of thrilling natural beauty" (158)
"Thus it is far from clear that in the implied contrast between Western civilization and Western barbarism--the traditional Orientalist trope--the good is on the European side." (159)
Low, "Architecture of Female Seclusion," in Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture
(Tera's Picks)
"Both culture and social system are grounded in space. That is to say, people interact within physically defined areas that carry meaning and they do so in particular ways. Social and physical space are two dimensions of the same system; the third is temporality. All three are bounded and mutually constitutive." (160)
"And like the syntax of language, the spatial arrangements of our buildings and communities reflect and reinforce the nature of gender, race, and class relations in society." (160)
"The cultural norm of the separation between the sexes has been trumped by the pull of community, when spatial and economic needs come to the fore."(161)
"The structures they built express the African archetype of rooms within/around a courtyard. Ghanaian vernacular architecture is constituted by a variety of characteristics that vary in different parts of the country...In addition, outside influences on building design, materials and techiniques introduced by Europeans in the south and the Muslims in the north also affect form." (165)
"The zaure, the traditional transit point, becomes a corridor. Thus, principles of Hausa spatial organization take on an altered form." (171)
"There are contrivances employed to advertise the ordering to those outside the household and to socialize those within." (167)
"Becase the behavioral or conceptual segregation has never been the reality in this Accra community, it is hard to say when the architectural changes have occurred and whether the changes in use have caused changes in conception." (178)
Waronker, "In Search of India's Synagogues," in Weil, India's Jewish Heritage
"A look at the synagogues that were eventually built reveals much about Jewish life in India over an extended period of time and the state of the relationship between Indian society and its Jews."
"When seeing them for the first time, foreigners and nationals alike are surprised by what they deem the un-Indian or Christian appearance of these buildings. This reveals much about the social standing and aspirations of these particular Jews in India. In building as they did,the Baghdadis, and to a less flaunting degree the urban Bene Israel decided, with very rare exception, not to draw from the impressive Hindu and Islamic architectural traditions."
[re: Cochin synagogues] "The significance of these structures is not in their monumentality, luxurious appointments, or remarkable construction techniques, but rather as buildings that are appreciably indigenous in appearance, planning and detailing. While they do not fall under any definitive stylistic umbrellas and are hence difficult to label, they indeed blend with the Indian landscape."
Ching, Jarzombek ad Prakash, "Hagia Sophia," in A Global History of Architecture
"It was originally dedicated by Constantine in 360 CE and rebuilt after the fire of 404. But after the ruthless suppression of his political enemies in the Nike uprising, . . the emperor Justinian called in the mathematician Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus to design the new structure. In five short years (532-37 CE) they produced a daring and lofty domed structure whose fabric is still largely intact today. Sheathed in marble and gold, its splendor made it one of the most talked about buildings in the Christian world." (264)
Necipoglu, "The Life of an Imperial Monument: Hagia Sophia after Byzantium," in Hagia Sophia from the Age of Justinian to the Present
"Hagia Sophia's successive adjustment to modified circumstances and its capacity to absorb change while remaining essentially unchanged was due largely to an uninterrupted recognition of its unique formal qualities and its rich aura of symbolic associations through the centuries." (195)
"In this unique building, past and present were juxtaposed to invite a recognition of the Ottoman sultans as the successors of the Byzantine emperors and of the triumph of Islam over Christianity." (198)
"The original construction of Hagia Sophia signified the triumph of Christianity over paganism under Justinian; its second consecration as Mehmed II's royal mosque represented the final victory of Islam that had been predicted by various signs." (200)
"These poems and the continuous life of Hagia Sophia as a mosque for nearly half a millenium testify to the success of it mythical history, which was orignally part of Mehmed' II's efforts to legitimize the preservation of the Byzantine church as the main imperial mosque of the new Ottoman capital." (202)
"The symbolic appropriation of Hagia Spphia by the new dynasty and faith through the "invention of tradition" was complemented by subtle changes in its architecture and decoration over the centuries." (202)
"This relatively simple inscription program, deliberately kept to a minumum, was enough to communicate the orthodox Islamic identity of the mosque in which selectively preserved figural mosaics were still visible to remind the Muslim congregation of the long life of Hagia Sophia, which had witnessed the progress of religion from paganism to monotheism , a process finally sealed by the message of the Prophet Muhammad that completed the revelation of Christianity." (220)
Necipoglu, "The Selimye Complex," in The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire
"Sinan strove to build a dome as large as that of Hagia Sophia without alluding to its plan and elevation, which he had already reworked in the Suleymaniye. The claim of 'infidel' architects that the Muslims were incapable of matching the dome of the ancient church had induced him to fight his own artistic battle. The titanic dome of Selimye transmuted the spoils of Cyprus into an architectural statement of the triumph of Islam over Christianity." (246)
"the dome on eight squinches was an old scheme in the rich monumental heritage of Islamic architecture, just as the use of eight turrets around a dome belonged to a 'design tradition stretching from Iran to Sind'. . . Since the octagonal dome of the Ilhkhanid imperial mausoleum, once surrounded by eight turrets, was the largest in the Mulsim lands (25 metres wide), it constitutes a proper Islamic complement to the Romano-Byzantine dome of Hagia Sophia, which is emulated in the 31.22 meter wide Selimye dome. . . . Sinan's biograph likens it to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, an octagonal commemorative structure marking the sacred rock where God's throne would descend during the Last Judgement according to a widely held belief." (246-7)
"Sinan's miraculously floating 'Islamic' dome not only challenges that of Hagia Sophia, but also those of famous Mulim religious momuments. Its dematerialized transition zone rests on eight fluted piers surmounted by muquarnas 'capitals' from which the arches of the dome grow organically." (252)
Bentley and Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters
(Lisa's Picks)
"[Ivan III] He made the Byzantine double-headed eagle the symbol of his authority and he adopted the elaborate pomp and ceremony of the Byzantine court for use in Muscovy. He also sought to beautify and glorify his capital, and under the influence of his wife Sophia he commissioned Italian architects to rebuild the Kremlin, the fortress that stood at the heart of Moscow." (701)
"During the last years of her reign, Catherine abandoned the program of westernization and adopted extremely conservative policies for fear that further reform might encourage revolutionary turmoil in Russia. After more than a century of westernization, the tsarist autocracy adopted policies like those of contemporary rulers in China, Japan, and Islamic empires aimed at limiting foreign and especially western influence." (707)
Brumfield, History of Russian Architecture
(Shima's picks)
"in 1818, the project was awarded to the young French architect and veteran of Napoleon's army, Auguste Ricard de Montferrand. In 1814, Montferrand, without prospects for advancement after the defeat of Napoleon, sent an album of project sketches to Alexander, who invited him to Russia. Even this sudden rise to prominence in a distant country could not have prepared for the architect's unexpected victory in the cathedral competition." (400)
"The Russian love of color and narrative on church interiors, denied in the relative austerity of neoclassicm, here returns with a force amplified by technical means unknown to the medieval church. The malachite surfaces of the iconostasis columns and the pervasive use of gilt for architectural details are two of the more obvious examples." (401)
Gautier, Theophile, Russia (1860s)
(Lauren's picks)
"It must not be imagined that the cathedral of St. Isaac's, with its noble, pure and severe lines, its sober, rare ornamentation, its austerely antique style, presents through this perfect regularity a cold monotonous, or tiresome aspect of the architecture, that for lack of a better term is called classic. The gold of its cupolas, the rich variety of its materials, are sufficient to prevent it from falling into this misshap, and the climate colors it with a thousand unexpected effects of light and shadow, that make it appear entirely Russian. The fairies of the North flutter around the great monument, and nationalize it, without affecting its grandiose and antique appearance.
The Russian winter possesses a poetry all its own; its rigors are compensated by beauties, effects, and extremely picturesque aspects. The snow covers with silver the golden cupolas, accentuates with a shining line the entablatures and frontals, touches with white the brass acanthi, places luminous points on the statues, and changes every relation of color under its magic transformations. St. Isaac's, thus seen, assumes an entirely local originality." (305)
Bentley and Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters
(Nick's Picks)
"The American commander, Commodore Matthew C. Perry, trained his guns on the bakufu capital of Edo (modern Tokyo) and demanded that the shogun open Japan to diplomatic and commercial relations and sign a treaty of friendship. The shogun had no good alternative and so quicky acquiesced to Perry's demands. Representatives of Britain,the Netherlands, and Russia soon won similar rights." (839)
"The Meiji government sent many students and officials abroad to study everything from technology to consititutions and it also hired foreign experts to facilitate eonomic development and the creation of indigenous expertise." (840)
"this document established a constitutional monarchy with a legislature, known as the Diet, composed of a house of nobles and an elected lower house. The constitution limited the authority of the Diet and reserved considerable power to the executive branch of the government. The "sacred and inviolable" emperor commanded the armed forces, named the prime minister, and appointed the cabinet. Both the prime minister and the cabinet were responsible to the emperor rather than the lower house, as in European parliamentary systems. . . . The Meiji constitution recognized individual rights, but it provided that laws could limit those rights in the interest of the state, and it esbablished property restrictions on the franchise ensuring that delegates elected to the lower house represented the most prosperous social classes." (841-2)
Rudofsky, "Train Travel," in Kimono Mind
(Adam's Picks)
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Watanabe, "Josiah Conder's Rokumeikan: Architecture and National Representation in Meiji Japan," Art Journal, Fall 1996
(Lauren's Picks)
"For Inoue, attaining equality with Western nations meant first appropriating Western civilization . . . From his standpoint, if the achievement of equal status with the West would safeguard Japan's sovereignty, then Japan had to adopt Western ways. His insistence on thorough westernization--from dress to table manners and dancing--was designed to achieve that end. In order to safeguard its national identity, Japan needed to become westernized . . ." (25)
"At the end of his life, in a speech he gave in 1920, he [Josiah Conder] justified the use of Saracenic elements in his design for the Ueno Imperial Museum: According to my studies of the Japanese national style (though I am an ardent admirer of the beauty of Japanese art), there are no decorative or patterned forms or outlines that can be structurally adopted in the construction of timber buildings. Therefore, if one wishes to maintain a systematic method when building in brick or stone, then one needs to search within Indian or Saracenic architecture for forms that will confer an Oriental character on a building."
Tseng, "Styling Japan: The Case of Josiah Conder and the Museum at Ueno, Tokyo," JSAH, December 2004
(Maggie's Picks)
"Because the ultimate objective of assimilation was to maintain autonomy, a design such as Conder’s museum embodied the visual order of ambivalence, of the contradictory desire to simultaneously collapse and maintain cultural/racial difference between Japan and the imported other.” (474, 3)
“The dicotomies of West versus East, structure versus decoration, architecture versus non-architecture were frequentlycalled into play to support the British experts’ undeniable racial reading of their own indomitable Western technology in service to the insubstantial native
tradition.” (480, 1)“The new Meiji government reguarded Western building technology as an essential component of the overall strength and prosperity of Europe and America, and promptly set up the Public Works Ministry in 1870 to launch the process conventionally termed the “Westernization” or “modernization” of Japan’s urbanism and civic infrastructure.” (480, 1)
“Conder’s conceptualization of Japan... his assertion of an existing, homogenous “national style” or “national architecture” and the need to both perpetuate and improve it... his deliberate semantic fusing of the terms “Japanese,” “Indian,” “Saracenic,” “Eastern,” and “Far Eastern” as equivalent signifiers of Japan... his definition of these non-Western styles soley by their ornamentation and architectural fragments. Underlying these constructions was the notion that his interest was not in architecture that was Japanese but in architecture that he believed to represent Japanese-ness.” (487, 5)
Bentley and Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters
"Aided by powerful technologies, European states launched an unprecedented round of empire building in the second half of the nineteenth century. Imperial expansion began with the British conquest of India. competition between imperial powers led to European intrusion into central Asia and the establishment of colonies in southeast Asia. Fearful that rivals might gain control over some region that remained free of imperial control, European states embarked on a campaign of frenzied expansion in the 1880s that brought almost all of Africa and Pacific Ocean territories into their empires." (854)
"To stabilize affairs and forestall future problems, the British government preempted the East India Company and imposed direct imperial rule in India. In 1858 Queen Victoria (reigned 1837-1901) assigned responsibliity for Indian policy to the royal authority in India and administered the colony through an elite Indian civil service staffed almost exclusively by Englishmen. Indians served in low-level bureaucratic positions, but British officials formulated all domestic and foreign policy in India." (855)
Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash, Global History of Architecture
"In 1911, at a coronation darbar in Delhi, India, George V announced his decision to build a new capital for Imperial India, one that could unfalteringly display the English determination to maintain Britsh rule in India in perpetuity. " (674)
"Immediately a debate raged over whether the architecture should acknowledge the 'indigenous' idom or reflect the conventions of colonial neoclassicism. After intense lobbying by advocates of both sides, viceroy Lord Charles Hardinge decided that a design that was 'plain classic' with a 'touch of Orientalism' would be best." (674)
Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity
"Lutyens' architectural inclusivity inolved more complex transformations. In spite of his frequently voiced condescension toward both Hindu and Muslim architecture and a thorough dislike for the British Indo-Saracenic contributions to Indian cityscapes, Lutyens did seek to develop for India 'some new sense of architectural construction adapted to her crafts' and to initiate 'what may become a new and inspiring period in the history of her art.' In translating their hybrid visions, both Baker and Lutyens were drawn to the simpler forms of the oldest Buddhist monuments, imagery that was as nonpartisan as it was irrelevant . . .The question was not simply one of taste, but also of high politics. The Viceroy was quite clear on this point: he felt it would be a "grave political blunder' to place a purely Western town on the Delhi plain . . ." (94)
Metcalf, An Imperial Vision
(distribute in class)
Kurokawa, "Symbiosis of Different Cultures/Intercultural Exchanges," in The Architecture of Symbiosis
"The year 1868 marked the beginning of the Meiji period, during which time Japan began to try to modernize and Westernize itself. . . The 'world-view' ideal preached the progressive Westernization of all countries, which would lead to the creation of a perfectly homogeneous planetary culture based on Western values. The linguistic instrument for that culture's establishment was to be Esperanto, and its architectural instrument the so-called international style. That pure product of Western culture was to become a universal icon." (92)
"Western culture shoud not be viewed in terms of a linear development but in terms of it relationship with the world's other cultures. Levi-Strauss relativized the notion of cultural superiority and recognized each culture's legitimate place in a multidimensional worldwide reality. . . The universal icon of modernism was shattered to bits and we became free to create an architecture nourished by many different civilizations. The new syncretism rest on the principle of cultural equi-distance, which I believe is the essential condition for passage from the international style to the multicultural style toward which we are now moving." (92)
"The design of the roof and walls of the builidng refers to the traditional Japanese kura (warehouse) of the nineteenth century. As for the materials of the facade, the combintion of stones, tiles, and alumnium adds to the impression of various periods in symbiosis." (119)
Kurokawa, Intercultural Architecture: The Philosophy of Symbiosis (London, 1991) (not in reader)
"For me, architecture based on the philosophy of symbiosis is created by being deeply rooted in one's own history and culture and at the same time making positive efforts to incorporate into the work elements from other cultures. Since no single, universal ideal architectural iconography exists, architects must first express their own culture. At the same time, they must collide with other cultures, engage in dialogue with them, and, through symbiosis, create a new architecture that is both local and global." (159)
Steele
Mari-jose Amerlinck