The Proceedings of Spaces of History / Histories of Space: Emerging Approaches to the Study of the Built Environment

In the past three decades, a growing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences have turned their attention to the spaces of the built environment as a means to understand historical and social processes, thereby dramatically affecting our understanding of the latter. Edward Soja has defined the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences as “a response to a longstanding ontological and epistemological bias that privileged time over space in all the human sciences, including spatial disciplines like geography and architecture.” Soja thus positions spatiality against temporality, or space against history. In turn, the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has led to a “social turn” in disciplines that study the built environment, particularly architectural history.

In this paper, I discuss the ways in which Michel Foucault’s and Henri Lefebvre’s “spatial turn” have enabled both scholars to overcome what they understand as a disciplinary crisis in regards to the subject matters of their studies. While Foucault attempts to resolve a crisis in the study of historical object of events, Lefebvre is concerned with the limits of society as a research object for the study of capitalism.

Positioned at the intersection of the study of built space and history, architectural history has long assumed a privileged position with access to study the objects of the built environment. Yet, if the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences was resulted from an attempt to resolve a disciplinary crisis concerning subject matters, does it imply that architectural history’s “social turn” also signifies a similar crisis in the study of architectural subject matter? How has the social science nature of contemporary research in the built environment affected the methodologies and the discipline of architectural history?

In 2004, the municipality of Tel Aviv initiated a New Urbanistic urban-renewal project for one of its main thoroughfares, Ibn Gvirol Street. The plan prioritizes pedestrian traffic and encourages mixed uses. It was preceded by a design for the adjacent former Arab dwelling of Someil, made in 1997. In this plan, the remains of the village along with its topography are to be demolished, making way to a new design: integrated in all aspects of the urban texture.

This place, historically extrinsic to the urban continuum, had a potential for functioning as an Other Space in the city. It is persistently different from its context within space, society, and political allusions. Its historical capacity as a place for the disenfranchised makes it a possible Thirdspace – where Henri Lefebvre locates the struggle for Right to the City. However, New Urban plans are now transforming this site towards assimilation into the city.

New Urbanism draws from the past in search for locality. In Israel, where spatial-political amnesia is prevalent, it is challenged by conflicting memories. Other Spaces may act as reminders, whose presence in the urban environment prevents elimination of history and difference. Without them, the diversified becomes uniform and the Other is excluded.

The increasing contradiction between “High-Architecture” and “Low-Architecture” that has been made explicit after the bursting of the “Brick-Bubble” calls for a revision of the teaching of design and history. The change in the European education curricula dictated by the Bologna Process (EHEA) has provided an appropriate context to implement brand new creative subjects, in which history is no longer an isolated subject narrated as facts of the past, but another tool that offers the students a framework to critically engage with the complexity of the built environment. “Idea and Form” is a recently created first-year undergraduate-program subject that interrogates how objects, buildings, cities, and landscapes are shaped focusing on the critical analysis of both their processes of creation and development. “Idea and Form” places its main focus on showing the dialectics between the creative processes and the contingencies of the everyday life, the single-handedly designed projects and the unconsciously and collectively generated realities. Based on historically grounded themes, it offers a clearly understandable theoretical foundation for the development of the different design subjects of the architectural studies curriculum, while challenging the design theories taught in architecture schools until now, primarily focused on the analysis of authored works of architecture.

Efforts to cross boundaries separating history classrooms and design studios are hampered by the very different objectives of historical and design teaching. Whereas design requires synthesis and clarity, the study of history should challenge and complicate students’ assumptions about the relationships between design and culture. More importantly, studio-based considerations of historical objects—often through the study of ‘precedent’—necessarily emphasize the formal and instrumental value of a work, while historical knowledge requires instead an emphasis on the ideological and cultural underpinnings of form. This paper views the productive tensions between these differing objectives through the lens of the diagram. The potential for diagramming exercises as components of history-based learning is examined through projects completed by my students in the context of semester-long historical research assignments. These activities complement written work with less traditional procedures that apply diagramming processes to diverse non-formal problems including the evaluation of textual evidence and the mapping of ideological content.

This paper discusses two processes of production of space and how historiography of architecture relates to them. The first one is based on professional design of extraordinary spaces (monuments) and is widespread during the 20th century, even in the design of ordinary buildings. We understand it through Henri Lefebvre’s ‘conceived space’: the architect’s intellectual work dominates the builder’s manual work by means of abstract concepts, tools and codes. Its products are the objects of prevailing histories of architecture reinforcing the very concepts used before. In contrast, the second process relates to Lefebvre’s ‘lived space’. It is collective and cooperative, characterized by people’s engagement and negotiation on nonhierarchical building-sites, in which design, building and use are simultaneous. It creates everyday spaces in constant change, such as Brazilian favelas. Prevailing histories of architecture do not include this second process, because there are no concepts, schools, authors or finished products to be reified, while alternative approaches, also called ‘new history’ (School of Annales, ‘history from below’, microhistory, Alltagsgeschichte), have not yet reached the academic field of architecture. Our question is how to include the production of lived space in this field, as the way of making history is crucial to define the understanding of students and professionals about their role in society.

Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular concepts for mapping spatial relations. These languages have delivered considerable benefits to the theorization of spatial production. But the terms are often of less utility in telling the histories of particular places. They often confuse, rather than enlighten, when it comes to understanding the constellations of representation, action, meaning, and power at play in the histories of specific features of the built environment. The concepts themselves are not at fault; rather it is the tendency to see them as concepts and concepts only that hinders. As a cultural historian, I believe that uncovering spatial histories demands a close attention to specific, contingent processes, change over time, and struggle among discourses and actors. Revealing the way that spaces become actual places requires distilling from abstractions precise accounts of particular actors and discourses related in a process of flux and struggle across time and space.

How has the study of the built environment changed the historiography of gender? This paper analyzes the shifts in the historiography of women and gender in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American history. It examines the evolution from a metaphorical concept of spheres to a more complex understanding of the interactions between space and gender. In the 1960s, feminist historians introduced the concept of ‘separate spheres’ as a way to understand the history of women in the nineteenth century. When historians, in the 1970s and 1980s, began to study actual spaces it became clear that the relationship of gender and space was more complex than the dichotomies of public and private, male and female, urban and suburban, which reinforced the idea of separate spheres. The study of actual spaces demonstrates that the boundaries of everyday life were more porous than those idealized by separate spheres and spaces. Further, scholars in the 1990s were able to show how the design, spatial arrangement, and décor of spaces contributed to the construction of masculinity and femininity in relation to each other.

This article seeks to reconnect the late-twentieth-century theoretical development of a social conception of space in the social sciences and urban planning with a technique that was developed in the early twentieth century, during World War I: aerial photography. As a tool of representation, aerial photography has often been linked, in the work of numerous late-twentieth-century scholars, to "top-down" urban planning programs that ignored the psychological needs of urban inhabitants on the ground. As we will see, however, the new ways of seeing offered by the airplane led, simultaneously, to the emergence of a "bottom-up" approach to urban planning that focused on the everyday experience of urban residents. The view from above, in fact, gave rise to the view from below.

On the occasion of the drawing up of the new Master Plan for the Municipality of Dicomano (Tus-cany), the authorities requested not just a project from the planners, but the initiation of a process that ‘could create and develop a dialogue between inhabitants and institutions’. The dialogical planning included a one-year Laboratory with schools (for children between 8 and 11 years), which involved young generations in the discussion of urban values, sense of belonging and transforma-tion of spaces. The idea was that of valorizing children’s knowledge on city space, and their role of “multipliers” for involving their families in the planning process. A specialized team of architects and planners followed the experience, seeking to avoid the “marginalization” of results and guaran-teeing their confluence into the “adults’ plan”. Being Dicomano a city destroyed twice during the XX century (by an earthquake in 1919 and the IIWW in 1944), the first idea was to rebuild the his-tory of spaces, creating a dialogue between new and old generations. The Children Plan proposal played as a catalyst for other citizens, which then were involved in the participatory process which shaped the Structural Plan. The paper analyses some features, limits and results of this experience.

Gentrification theory deals with the issue of converted buildings. However, it solely offers a diminished reading of the process of so-called aestheticization and of other sensual refurbishments that take place when undesired, decaying buildings are made desirable. Often, this rather ‘mundane’ process remains a black-box. In this paper, a reconfigured attention to atmospheric settings such as converted buildings are, is offered. From an Actor-Network-Theory point of view, it will be argued that when speaking of conversion as a process that transforms buildings one mainly speaks about material-semiotic changes made in the buildings’ atmospheres. Atmospheres in this view are actors of sociality that create their own actor-networks. Translated to converted buildings, thus, Atmospheric-Actor-Networks (AAN) configure how the sensual refurbishment of those buildings takes shape. With this perspective in mind, emphasis is placed on a case study of the conversion of the Palace of the Republic in Berlin in 2004-05 in which the benefits of this atmospheric-actor-network reading of aestheticization is exposed.