Diefendorf, Jeffry “I Love That City, But Which City?”
“The
One and the Many:
Debates About Cultural History”
ABSTRACT: The past several decades have seen the emergence of a new domain in history and architectural history, broadly known as the "built environment." A major asset is that historians can - indeed must - explore the interaction of various historical sub-fields, ranging from economic, political, and social history to more recent interests in community life, institutions, advertising, gender and ethnicity. Intellectual history was often occluded in this purview, but the rubric of "cultural history" now encompasses many of these themes. It also adds a challenging new dimension to the historian's craft: the role of visual culture and architectural creativity. Often dismissed as overly elite, subjective or epiphenomenal, visuality, and artistic creativity have too easily been put aside, especially when social science models of history seek to pin down a fixed set of forces or actors which, in principle, determine the general pattern of environments and their effects on larger society.
During these same years, the idea of cultural history (often touted but seldom closely analyzed) also pushed architectural historians beyond their usual disciplinary focus on a supposedly autonomous "architecture culture" and the designer as a singular individual who convinces powerful clients to do his bidding. This has taken two directions. One shows a marked preference for "vernacular" cultures ("Architecture without Architects" in Bernard Rudofsky's well-known exhibition and book of 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art). The other brings professional designers into the picture, seeking to comprehend more fully interrelations with industry and with clients; the moral or social as well as formal intentions, simultaneously naive and progressive, they seek to represent in the forms they create; and the effects, often quite unintended and rarely analyzed, of those forms on social groups, public policies, and the environment.
This conference offered an opportunity to trace overlaps and differences in these two related disciplines. This talk focused on histories of American domestic architecture, which has been a dominant theme in the past quarter-century.
Session I, Keynotes: The History of the History of the Built Environment