Maarten Delbeke

Exhibition catalogue, edited by Maarten Delbeke, Dirk De Meyer, Bas Rogiers, Bart Verschaffel  /
Exhibition: Museum voor Schone Kunsten (MSK, Museum of Fine Arts), Ghent, 20 Sept 2008 – 18 Jan 2009  /
Book chapters:  Dirk De Meyer, Archeologie en inventie: Piranesi kunstenaar, archeoloog, ingenieur, polemist, architect, handelaar  /  Maarten Delbeke, Roma antica, moderna e sacra: Piranesi en de vedute-traditie  /  Bart Verschaffel, Piranesi's Carceri: een postscriptum  /  ...

In his landmark volume Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion paired images of two iconic spirals: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Borromini’s dome for Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. The values shared between the baroque age and the modern were thus encapsulated on a single page spread. As Giedion put it, writing of Sant’Ivo, Borromini accomplished “the movement of the whole pattern […] from the ground to the lantern, without entirely ending even there.” And yet he merely “groped” towards that which could “be completely effected” in modern architecture-achieving “the transition between inner and outer space.”
The intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs is now widely acknowledged. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of the intellectual history of modern architecture and the history of architectural historiography. It considers the varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism.
Presenting research by an international community of scholars, this book explores through a series of cross sections the traffic of ideas between practice and history that has shaped modern architecture and the academic discipline of architectural history across the long twentieth century. The editors use the historiography of the baroque as a lens through which to follow the path of modern ideas that draw authority from history. In doing so, the volume defines a role for the baroque in the history of architectural historiography and in the history of modern architectural culture.

Contents:
Defining a problem: modern architecture and the baroque, Maarten Delbeke, Andrew Leach and John Macarthur; Engaging the past: Albert Ilg’s Die Zukunft des Barockstils, Francesca Torello; Größstadt as Barockstadt: art history, advertising and the surface of the neo-baroque, Albert Narath; The ‘restless allure’ of (architectural) form: space and perception between Germany, Russia and the Soviet Union, Luka Skansi; Geoffrey Scott, the baroque and the picturesque, John Macarthur; Against formalism: aspects of the historiography of the baroque in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933, Ute Engel; Riegl and Wölfflin in dialogue on the baroque, Evonne Levy; Beyond the Vienna School: Sedlmayr and Borromini, Marko Pogacnik; Pevsner’s Kunstgeographie: from Leipzig’s baroque to the Englishness of modern English architecture, Mathew Aitchison; The future of the baroque, ca. 1945, Andrew Leach; Giedion as guide: Space, Time and Architecture and the modernist reception of baroque Rome, Denise R. Costanzo; Reading Aalto through the baroque: constituent facts, dynamic pluralities, and formal latencies, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen; Taking the sting out of the baroque: Wittkower in 1958, Andrew Hopkins; Pierre Charpentrat and baroque functionalism, Maarten Delbeke; From spatial feeling to functionalist design: contrasting representations of the baroque in Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture, Anthony Raynsford; From Michelangelo to Borromini: Bruno Zevi and operative criticism, Roberto Dulio; Between history and design: the baroque legacy in the work of Paolo Portoghesi, Silvia Micheli; Steinberg’s complexity, Michael Hill; The ‘recurrence’ of the baroque in architecture: Giedion and Norberg-Schulz’s approaches to constancy and change, Gro Lauvland; The future of the baroque, ca. 1980, Maarten Delbeke and Andrew Leach; Bibliography; Index.

The tercentenary commemorations in 1967 of Borromini’s death had demonstrated how an historical subject like the oeuvre of this key figure of the Roman baroque could sustain the attentions of many varied modes of historical analysis. Lectures, exhibits, books, films and many other interventions treated Borromini’s buildings (realized and otherwise), his drawings and inventories (as sources and documents alike), the Opus Architectonicum, secondary historical and biographical accounts and so forth as legitimate historical subjects. They had visited upon them the disciplinary tools of art historians from Rudolf Wittkower to Giulio Carlo Argan alongside new scholarship by those invested in Borromini’s archives, in the restoration of his buildings, in his manner of design, in his reception and in the lessons offered by his work to the present. Borromini emerged from this event as a complex and interdisciplinary historical and biographical subject that could exist in an architectural culture experiencing a watershed moment of disciplinary maturity—a form of détente between conflicting historiographical investments, with the academic and public program of the anno borrominiano demonstrating a format within which these interests could occupy the same corpus. The investment of the architect-historian in such a figure as Borromini was, at this time, as legitimate as that of the art historian specializing in architecture (or, even generally, in the art of the seventeenth century), as was that of the architect practicing (and thinking) in a manner demonstrating his or her cognizance of the present’s historicity. [...]

The guidebook is not merely a registration of the city and its historical evolution or of the changing preferences of visitors but a device that selects and arranges aspects of the city – real as well as imaginary – into a coherent representation of that city. This is particularly the case in Rome, a city composed of three different entities: the ancient, Christian and – from the second half of the seventeenth century onward – modern capital, each with their own monuments and histories. From the sixteenth century onwards, Roman guidebooks employ the categories of ‘Roma antica’, ‘Roma sacra’ and ‘Roma moderna’ to define and represent these three components. In this essay, we argue that the changing application of these labels in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century reflects not only the far-going physical transformation of the city over that period but also new ways of thinking about the identity of Rome. The reconfiguration of the three ‘Romes’ in the space of the guidebook, operated by means of a continuous rearrangement of sections, illustrations and descriptions, illustrates how successive authors and publishers attempted to fit the three well-established categories onto reality. An examination of how English visitors reacted to Rome will demonstrate how effective the categories of ‘Roma antica’, ‘sacra’ and ‘moderna’ were in organizing the perception of the contemporary city and its analogs.

The idea that the writing and teaching of art and architectural historians has lent values and ambitions to the development of twentieth-century architecture is now widely accepted by its scholars. The studies that have considered this coincidence, and especially those written since the turn of the twenty-first century, have demonstrated the clear intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of writing both the intellectual history of modern architecture and the modern history of architectural historiography. It considers the many and varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction, in particular, with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism.
As the following chapters attest, whether this traffic of ideas was driven by the historian or fostered by the architect, the century leading up to the various postmodern declarations for the new historicism that emerged around 1980 evidences a long process of sifting through historical research and distilling from it moments – be they forms, concepts or models of the architect’s practice and its scope – against which to calibrate the ambitions of architecture across the modern era. By considering the many examples presented here and the sometimes surprising extent of their inter-referentiality and their shared dependence on certain sources – even when put to drastically different uses – this book interrogates an historiographical phenomenon that is widely appreciated but rarely called to account. [...]

We test the assumptions of this roundtable by reflecting on what we position here as an artificial if useful distinction: between those disciplinary habits and norms of architectural historians focussed on pre-modern epochs and those working with the modern age. Despite appearances there is not a dearth of historiographical studies in pre-modernist architecture, but that this attention to history’s mechanisms is played out on two registers. The first is of architectural history as a product of the long twentieth century itself, where its histories function as modern artefacts—even when they concern subjects that might be cast as medieval, renaissance or baroque. The studies of the histories of these eras, we claim, use the proximity of modern knowledge to enter the mediated worlds of a deeper history, and to approach those worlds by understanding the nature and circumstances of their mediation. This, we argue, is the study of historiography to better understand the modern era and its legacy, and in a way compounds the problem identified by the chair. The second register relates to the rise over the later twentieth century of a professional art (and architectural) history that draws no operating distinction between the world of ideas and artistic and architectural production—and in which attention to the fine grain demands attention, too, to the treatment of that fine grain within the discipline to date, and in which, therefore, historiography is processed as a matter of course within histories of the epochs under review. Both historiological registers, we argue, ultimately speak to twentieth-century disciplinary legacies and to an increasingly demonstrable capacity to consciously attend to the interplay of architecture and history—across history, for a range of disciplinary audiences—in which history itself, in all its guises, functions as an artefact while its historian confront the complications of contemporaneity.