HomePaths, braiding, hybridizations: a planetary history of architecture and the urban

Paths, braiding, hybridizations: a planetary history of architecture and the urban

Parcours, tressages, hybridations : une histoire planétaire de l’architecture et de l’urbain

Revue « Transversale, histoire, architecture, urbain, paysage » n°9 (2025)

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Published on Friday, March 21, 2025

Abstract

What we will question for this issue 9 of Transversale is how an architect's perspective and practice are formed when he travels or receives instruction abroad, and whether or not this results in a weaving of influences; is to question architecture as a paradigmatic cultural crossroads: figures of astonishing travelers-architects naturally, but also methods, processes, measurements, itineraries, flows... 

Announcement

Presentation

The editorial board of the journal Transversale (histoire architecture urbain paysage), is launching its call for articles for its 9th issue (2025) on the theme:

If the Westernization of the history of architecture fails to describe it in its entirety and, in the fields of architecture and urban planning, the "provincialization" of Europe can contribute to opening up unique and fertile researches. Without going back to the Annales, or even to the anti- and post-colonial positions of the 1950s, we will recall that the journal Quaderni Storici was founded in 1966 and that "global" and/or "world" history has experienced great development in the United States. A "planetary" history of architecture seems to us to be possible on these bases, today even better shared in British and American literature than in France. This is how American authors such as Francis Ching, Mark Jarzombek and Kathleen James-Chakraborty have attempted global syntheses of architecture, although still strongly marked by the Eurocentric vision. Even though, in this broader vision of "global" architecture, the architectures of several continents are more often juxtaposed than truly problematized according to the paths, exchanges and hybridizations that can result from them. This is the reason for the present call for articles.

In continental Europe, since the early works of Gottfried Semper and his famous Karibische Hütte (1863), the works of architects, urban planners and historians on what could be called an anthropology of primitive architecture or, with Caroline Van Eyck, the outline of a "global history of material culture", are far from being in the majority. In fact, the majority of treatises and histories of architecture still classically trace back to Greece and Roman -Vitruvian- Antiquity the birth of the project, of the design itself, without which there would be no architecture. The modern period would thus begin sui generis with Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, as Anne Cauquelin noted in 1979: "L’enjeu, le pari architectural, c’est cette jouissance démiurgique de tenir un monde (l’ouvrir, le « donner » à vivre). Référence : la Renaissance, époque bénie du pouvoir-architecte (à lire Venturi, ce moderne, on est frappé du nombre de références au XVIe italien)". However, for about twenty years in France, several conferences and studies have worked on opening up architectural questions outside the agreed epistemological walls, first of all naturally in the areas where France has traded and colonized the most: the Mediterranean and the Near East, overseas and Africa. Similar research has been conducted - to stick to the French field - in the field of former colonies, most often through the prism of architectural heritage, raising the question of the relationship between "regional architecture" and "metropolitan architecture", or that of urban planning transposed to the colonies in a different social and climatic context. Works on the Atlantic axis and the Caribbean are also fruitful, whether they focus on experimentation or the concept of cultural “crossroads”, or on personal destinies and networks of influence, from the Gulf of Mexico to the China Sea.

These works follow on from more general works such as those of Gwendolyn Wright on urban planning in the French colonies in Morocco, Madagascar and Indochina, or of Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Odile Goerg on European cities overseas. Always through the prism of urban planning, these are sometimes more specific incursions, whether monograph, biography or prosopography. In reality, on all aspects of the production of French architects and urban planners around the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia, recent studies are profuse - and we have not even mentioned the numerous and remarkable monographs of ORSTOM from the 1950s to the 1990s, nor the very many recent doctoral theses, available on line by HAL.

More specifically for the medieval period, several art historians have produced a prosopography of "exogenous" artists, that is to say those who were able to work outside their original artistic area. This work carried out around Jean-Marie Guilloüet wanted to consider quantitatively the question of artistic transfers in Latin Europe, including the field of architecture. Travel, but also acculturation: from the reissue of the first practical French treatise on architecture in 1685, François Blondel insisted on the fact that "Louis le Grand […] ne s’est pas contenté d’envoyer des gens habiles dans les pays où l’on voit encore quelques vestiges de la grandeur des Romains et des Grecs, afin d’en apporter des dessins pour servir à former le goût de la bonne architecture : mais même sa Majesté a établi une Académie à Paris où les règles de cet art sont publiquement enseignées avec les parties de mathematique qui sont nécessaires aux architectes." This is a way of saying that travel is not a substitute for training in school and that in the European competition that was played out in the 17th century, the "scientific" and cultural competence of the architect is worth at least as much as imitation or inspiration.

This call for articles does not therefore exclusively question what we could call the architect's apprenticeship novel. Whatever the motivations for the journey or activity outside one’s native country, forced (exile, the search for refuge far from war or persecution) or chosen (the search for academic and/or field education), they give rise to the emergence of intersections of thoughts and forms. This question of the braiding of motifs and architectures of plural origins, varied threads leaving each one its visible autonomy in texture and color even if it participates in the whole, constitutes in our eyes a specific subject.

And when this midfield, if we understand by it the product of a cultural geometry, cannot exist, how does a hybridization of cultural gestures operate? For example, what does Itō Chūta, the first Japanese historian of architecture, draw from his trip to Paris and the Ottoman Empire, which traces the possible filiations via India between Etruscan temples of the 4th century and the architecture of the Hōryūji in Nara? However, in the 1880s, the arrival in Japan of the English architect Josiah Conder introduced a Western architecture that immediately inspired practitioners such as Tatsuno Kingo (Tokyo Polytechnic, 1888). In the same period, a generation after Richard Morris Hunt, hundreds of American students, crossing the Atlantic, studied architecture in France. Beyond and without being able to mention all the past or current works, the current documentation highlights, for their sole relation to France, the travels, studies and achievements of European, Algerian, Moroccan, Egyptian, Iranian, Russian, Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean, American and many other countries architects. When in French schools of architecture and in the majority of standard works on the theory and history of architecture, it is a European vision of architecture that is mainly questioned and exposed, the architectural hybridizations implemented testify to enriching and sometimes painful negotiations between the acquired, the discovery and the project.

Thus, the perspective of this issue 9 of Transversale is both specialized in its theme and broad in its geographical scope. What we will question is how an architect's perspective and practice are formed when he travels or receives instruction abroad, and whether or not this results in a weaving of influences; is to question architecture as a paradigmatic cultural crossroads: figures of astonishing travelers-architects naturally, but also methods, processes, measurements, itineraries, flows... From one construction site to another, over very long distances and this since Antiquity, the project manager, his collaborators and/or his executors, whose profession is nomadic "by nature", become themselves agents and vectors of materials and know-how, canons and theories, convictions and beliefs. The construction of a sanctuary then becomes the ephemeral and syncretic crossroads of cultures, crystallized in stone: the stupas of Gandhara at the turn of our era, on the shores of the Black Sea with the Empire of Trebizond, in Cyprus where the witnesses of the diffusion of Gothic remain.

It is therefore not only the journey of the architect or urban planner (or of those who want to become one), often conceived as an opportunity for sampling or tracing, because experimenting with elsewhere is accompanied by rereading, reinterpretation and even resistance, which are not exclusively part of a colonial framework of thought. This experimentation can also immediately turn out to be a documentary exercise "for later", collected in notebooks and drawings on the spot. And then the architect is never alone: ​​to what extent do the visions of other architectures interact for each of the actors and/or travelers (borrowings, quotes, assemblages)? Robert Venturi - who cannot be considered a defender of the vernacular or of the multicultural in architecture - insists on the observation of « contradictory levels » that are the contrasts of scale, form and purpose: "Les éléments peuvent être en même temps beaux et laids, grands et petits, ouverts et fermés, continus et articulés, ronds et carrés, structure et espace. Une architecture qui contient plusieurs niveaux de signification engendre l’ambiguïté et la tension." Isn't this ambiguity what allows us to better grasp the quality of architectures that translate through their spaces, their uses and their details of form and ornament, the reticulated manifestation of several cultures and a subtle adaptation to diverse environments? Because in this debate obviously comes the question of the material available and used, the climate and the site, the conception that one has of a durability.

Three approaches to articles on these architectural “pathways”, “hybridizations” and “braiding” can be proposed within the framework of this call for articles, without chronological limits:

  • The first would be in line with this monographic (or even biographical or prosopographical) recommendation by Fernand Braudel, concerning : "N’est-il pas bon que l’histoire soit d’abord une description, simple observation, classement sans trop d’idées préalables ? Voir, faire voir, c’est la moitié de notre tâche." The journeys and exchanges between people who have designed and built both in their native country and in "L’Autre Pays" are particularly welcome;
  • The second would rather be in the observation of the very measures and processes of braiding or hybridization, following in this the phenomenon of acculturation described by Vitruvius as a resistance of the other to oneself: "Il ne m’est pas venu à l’esprit de déprécier les inventions des autres pour faire valoir les miennes. À l’inverse, je me sens infiniment redevable aux auteurs qui ont recueilli les pensées ingénieuses des hommes de talent de toutes les époques et nous ont procuré, chacun dans sa partie, une ample moisson."
  • The third would be a more theoretical approach on an "architecture of exchanges", both situated, contextualized (whose diverse cultural roots would each be visible and deep), although coming from fields where the construction of historical time is fundamentally different, starting from the observation that this research has long been conducted on the visual arts, music and poetry, rather than in architecture. This work can notably account for the effects of the discovery of some "alliés substantiels" and the composition of dialogues and correspondences.

Submission procedures and timetable

Proposal to be sent by 30 April 2025 :

  • title
  • abstract (1 page)
  • CV (1/2 page)

to:

gilles.a.langlois@gmail.com.fr
marie.gaimard@gmail.com
leonore.losserand@paris-valdeseine.archi.fr

Timetable

  • Notification of acceptance: 15 May 2025
  • Submission of article: 1st September 2025
  • Return to authors after double-blind reading: 30 September 2025

Articles should be between 25,000 and 30,000 characters long.

They may be written in French or English.

Sources, bibliography and references are given in footnotes. Abstracts (10 lines) in French/English and 5 keywords in French/English should be sent in the same file. Illustrations (royalty-free) will be attached in separate files.

See attached editorial charter for details.

Revue transversale / histoire architecture paysage urbain

Managing editor: Gilles-Antoine Langlois

Editorial secretaries: Marie Gaimard and Léonore Dubois-Losserand

Scientific journal with an international board and double-blind peer review, founded and published in 2016 at ENSAPBx (nos. 1 and 2), co-published by ENSABx / CNRS Passages - ENSAPVS / EVCAU (nos. 2, 4, 5), published by ENSAPVS / EVCAU digitally (HAL) and on paper (nos. 6, 7, 8).
From issue 9, published by ENSA Paris-Val-de-Seine/EVCAU and ENSA Normandie/ATE, distributed by MSH Paris.

Sections: transversale publishes

  • an annual thematic dossier;
  • 1 or 2 ‘Varia’ per issue;
  • the ‘Research materials’ section hosts current research reports;
  • the ‘Pathways’ section is devoted to the work of students at ENSAPVS and ENSA Normandie.

Editorial board

  • Directeur de rédaction : Gilles-Antoine LANGLOIS, PR émérite ENSA Paris-Val de Seine
  • Secrétaires de rédaction : Marie GAIMARD, MCF ENSA Normandie et Léonore DUBOIS-LOSSERAND, MCF ENSA Paris-Val de Seine

Scientific committee

  • Fabien BELLAT (EVCAU)
  • Gauthier BOLLE (MCF ENSA Strasbourg)
  • Serge BRIFFAUD (PR ENSAP Bordeaux)
  • Sébastien CHERRUET (MCFA ENSA Normandie)
  • Laurence CHEVALLIER (MCF ENSAP Bordeaux)
  • Émilie D’ORGEIX (PR EPHE)
  • Samuel DRAPEAU (MCF ENSAP Bordeaux)
  • Ammar ELOUEINI (PR Tulane University New Orleans)
  • Marie GAIMARD (MCF ENSA Normandie)
  • Gwenn GAYET-KERGUIDUFF (IR EVCAU)
  • Laurence GILLOT (MCF Université Libre de Bruxelles)
  • Jean-Pierre GUILHEMBET (PR Université Paris Cité)
  • Gilles-Antoine LANGLOIS (PR ENSA Paris-Val de Seine)
  • Léonore DUBOIS-LOSSERAND (MCF ENSA Paris-Val de Seine)
  • Giulia MARINO (PR Université Catholique de Louvain)
  • Gilles RAGOT (PR Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
  • Claire ROSSET (IR ATE)
  • Donato SEVERO (PR émérite ENSA Paris-Val de Seine)

Date(s)

  • Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Keywords

  • architecture, histoire, ville, paysage, espace, transfert culturel, histoire mondiale, histoire globale

Contact(s)

  • Marie Gaimard
    courriel : marie [dot] gaimard [at] rouen [dot] archi [dot] fr
  • Léonore Losserand
    courriel : leonore [dot] losserand [at] paris-valdeseine [dot] archi [dot] fr
  • Gilles-Antoine Langlois
    courriel : gilles [dot] a [dot] langlois [at] gmail [dot] com

Information source

  • Claire Rosset
    courriel : claire [dot] rosset [at] rouen [dot] archi [dot] fr

License

CC0-1.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

To cite this announcement

« Paths, braiding, hybridizations: a planetary history of architecture and the urban », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Friday, March 21, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/13jb9

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