The Asociación de historiadores de la Arquitectura y el Urbanismo (AhAU) is happy to announce the call for papers for its III International Congress under the theme “Lo construido y lo pensado. Correspondencias europeas y transatlánticas en la historiografía de la arquitectura” [Built and Thought. European and Transatlantic Correspondence in the Historiography of Architecture] is now open until the 15th February 2021.
“All history of architecture obeys an intellectual construction. It is, therefore, a circumstantial discourse that always raises a provisional point of view among many other possible ones. From Giorgio Vasari, with Las vidas de los más excelentes pintores, escultores y arquitecto, to the historiographic project of Manfredo Tafuri, each generation has read the past from the specific problems of its own present.
What have been the prospects and scope from which the history of architecture has been built since the Renaissance humanism to this day? To sketch a profile on
how the construction of the history of architecture has been approached is one of the main challenges aspired by this meeting.
For what is the history of architecture used for? From the Renaissance till nowadays the history of architecture, drawn in many cases by architects, has been at the service of a professional practice that sought in it its legitimation. However, such a procedure has now become useless; even more so in a changing world like ours, in which the historian, in his eagerness to break univocal interpretations, does not work to judge the past or impose irrefutable truths but to interrogate it. From what positions can the history of architecture be built nowadays? While the historiography of the architecture is defined as an incomplete and unfinished project in which, on the one hand, there is an inexcusable need to conserve the characteristic objectivity of all scientific procedures and, on the other, incorporate the new paradigms that define our time. At same time, it is more necessary than ever to configure the the work of architectural historians around their ability
to define problems, rather than achievements or successes, and from the will of address the construction of knowledge that should be reversed in society,
in our case, fundamentally, through research and teaching, but also through the dissemination of knowledge you have to get out of the closed circles where you traditionally has developed.
In short, this congress aims to recognize the opportunity to reflect on the historiographic construction of architecture from within and from without at the same time, that is, to meditate on the discipline itself, but within the currents of thought and the new challenges that characterize the contemporary world and the universe of culture, in order to build another history.”
The congress will take place in Madrid from 18th to 19th November 2021.
For more information, please go to the AhAU website or download the Call for Papers here [Spanish] and here [English].
