John Macarthur

Picturesque is a term which owes part of its historical success to its ambiguity, signifying both an origin of subjectivist aesthetics and a popular naïve taste for the rustic. For historians of art and architecture this ambiguity is ramified by an issue of translation between ‘picturesque’ and its usual equivalent in German, malerisch. In Heinrich Wölfflin’s influential account of the history of art since the Renaissance, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), he systematized das Malerische as a formal value in dialectic with ‘the linear’. He defined the art historical malerisch by contrasting it with the belief of naïve observers that picturesqueness was a property of objects. These two inflections of picturesque already existed in English usage, but to make them clearer, translations of Wölfflin since 1932 have rendered the more complex use of malerisch through the neologism ‘painterly’.

Other historians did not accept the neologism. In particular, Nikolaus Pevsner, imbued with the German tradition, wrote in his English language texts of the malerisch qualities of architecture and urbanism as ‘picturesque’. Thus, a level of confusion has resulted in distinguishing ‘painterly’ and ‘picturesque’, as if there was a conceptual difference marked in everyday language, rather than a difference constructed by the institutions of art history. Translations, and particularly those that make common words into defined terms, are valuable points of historical enquiry in their own right. At such points we can recover some of the complexity and historical density that has been lost in the schematisation that has come about through translation.

How to Cite: Macarthur, J., Aitchison, M. and Cepl, J., 2019. Das Malerische and the Picturesque: Seeing Architecture in Translation. Architectural Histories, 7(1), p.5. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.290

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. [...]

What kind of architectural knowledge was cultivated through drawings, models, design-build experimental houses and learning environments in the 20th century? And, did new teaching techniques and tools foster pedagogical, institutional and even cultural renewal? Architectural Education Through Materiality: Pedagogies of 20th Century Design brings together a collection of illustrated essays dedicated to exploring the complex processes that transformed architecture’s pedagogies in the 20th century.

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.

Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.

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.