[1]
Styles, Revival Styles, California Styles

From: Volker M. Welter <welterarthistory.ucsb.edu>

California’s architectural history is characterized by a rich heritage of revival style architecture and a world-famous modernist legacy. Following historian Harold Kirker, the former was initially sustained by an architectural frontier at which immigrants arrived with architectural styles in their luggage until in the later nineteenth century the citizens’ gazes at buildings within their state resulted in revivals of earlier Californian architecture. The rise of twentieth-century Modernism reduced this eclectic heritage to a mere prelude of California’s true architectural coming out. Today, the revival style past exists within scholarly debate at best as a somewhat frivolous period from California’s earlier history and at worst as the long shadow of the colonial past.

Yet the ubiquity of revivalist architecture from the later nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, decisive decades for the emergence of modern California, raises questions about the relevance of this architecture for visions of the state, its landscapes, cities, physical fabric, and infrastructure. Was Santayana accurately anticipating California’s built future when he stated at UC Berkeley in 1912 that in American architecture “the colonial mansion […] stands beside the sky-scraper”?

The popularity of revival styles also poses questions for the historiography of Californian architecture. Do they just signify aesthetic and personal choices? Or also cultural, economic, environmental, and socio-political aspirations and ideas? Were revival styles imported through channels other than immigration? What about print and visual media? How do we think today about the meaning and importance of revival styles for California’s architecture?

Analytical or interpretive papers are invited that address singular aspects of Californian revival stylenarchitecture from the nineteenth to approximately the mid-twentieth century (individual buildings,styles, distribution channels, building types, architectural firms, etc.) or are of comparative orientation.

Session Chair: Volker M. Welter, University of California at Santa Barbara, welterarthistory.ucsb.edu
Application deadline: 2 June 2015

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[2]
The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Early Modern Europe

From: Martijn van Beek <m.j.m.vanbeekuu.nl>

Thinking about the creation of ‘national styles’ in architecture, most people will refer to the 19th century: the period of the rise of national states and the attempt to codify specific geographically and nationally defined identities, based on models from a glorious past. Nevertheless, five hundred years before this era, humanist scholars, artists, monarchs and other political leaders all over Europe had already charged themselves with a comparable task. In late medieval and early modern Europe, c.1400–1700, authority was formally based on lineage, and in all countries political ambitions and geographical claims were supported by true or false historical reasons. Architecture was also used to express these ideas of national or local history and that history’s oldest roots in the distant past. In this session we invite explorations concerning strategies of the use of these sources for the construction of new local or ‘national’ identities in architecture (c. 1400-1700).

In their quest for an appropriate past architects and patrons did not only focus upon the iconic remains of classical Rome. In many places in Europe they also seeked to use their ‘own’ antiquity as a source for contemporary design. Meanwhile the concept of the Rome-centred Renaissance has been seriously challenged. Recent scholarship has stressed the important role assumed by non-Central Italian antiquities in the genesis of ‘Antique’ architecture. Moreover, the definition of the ‘Antique’ has turned out to be far more elastic and encompasses more than ‘Rome’. We invite papers that reconsider the pivotal role assumed by local antiquities both of true antique (or pre-historic) origin, as well as those of later date that were regarded as antique.

Session chairs
Konrad Ottenheym, Utrecht University (The Netherlands) <k.a.ottenheymuu.nl>
Martijn van Beek, VU University Amsterdam (The Netherlands) <m.j.m.vanbeekuu.nl>
Application deadline: 9 June 2015