urban history_ what architecture does, historically speaking

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European Studies, where he co-chairs the Study Groupon the European

City. He has publishedon Berlin imageries, Americanism inGermany, and

commemorative practices in Central Europe. Among his currentprojects

are acomparison of the historical imageries of Berlin, Gdansk, Lviv, Riga,

and Vilnius and amonograph

on the concept of cultural landscape. He

recently edited two collections, one on the city of Lviv and the other on

composing urban history. His edited collection on urban history and Euro

pean integration will be published in 2006.

Urban History: What Architecture Does, Historically Speaking. . .

MAIKEN UMBACH

Manchester University

In recent decades, the visual (or pictorial) turn1 has directed

historians' attention toward the built environment just as

architectural historians have increasingly grounded their

analysesin historical

context, reconstructingthe socioeco

nomic and/or political parameters of the building activity

they study. Both disciplines thus appear to be converging.

The danger such a convergence poses is that both camps

will be left with an"imperialism of language," where only

what is recorded in written sources counts.2 Yet architec

ture is, first and foremost, somethingwe see. The inher

entlymore fluid and ambiguous connotations of semiotic

systems other than text, especiallythe visual, often appear

untrustworthy in comparison with archival records. Yet the

visual aspect of the built environment has to be seen as an

important historical source in its ownright?used along

side other sources, to be sure, but notsubsidiary

to them.

We need to think of architecture not (only) as the object

that needs to be explained, but as the object that does the

explaining.

Architecture offers usglimpses into thought processes

normally hidden from historical view. And these are the

processes that have been pushed to the forefront of atten

tion by cultural historians, under whose influence the par

adigmatic questions of the historical discipline shifted away

from "causation" toward"meaning." Meaning

isby

defini

tion fluid: traditions invented, remembered, half-forgotten;

identities tried out, and half-discarded; futures imagined,

planned, defended, half-abandoned. In shedding lighton

this shifty terrain lies architectural history's potentially

greatest contribution to history at large.

It is important then for historians to learn to allow

architecture to speak for itself. Ifwe decode it carefully, it

can offer insights intomentalities, memories, and other col

lective dispositions?and the rapidity with which such dis

positions change. Take, forexample,

the role that

architecture has played in expressing people's responses to

the process of modernization. Such responses not only

reflect how individuals coped with modernity; they also rep

resent political strategies. During the nineteenth century,

several of the rapidly industrializing cities inEurope?from

Barcelona toHamburg?carefully planned

their dramatic

spatial expansion not only to cope with its practical effects,

but also to address the perceived threat of mental disloca

tion. Much of the architecture that gave shapeto these

expansionswas

designedin such a

wayas to

generatea ver

nacular touch, a "sense ofplace."

If we assume, as most

modern scholars of nationalism do, that place-based iden

tities emerge not from a place per se, but from the way in

which architecture (and other rituals) interpret and stage

geographical belonging, the potential political power of

such architecturalstrategies

becomes apparent.In the case

of the expanding industrial cities facing the gigantic task of

assimilatinga vast influx of

immigrantworkers into an old,

elitist civic culture, fostering powerful regional loyaltieswas

often seen as asaving grace from the threat of rival, more

abstract conceptionsof collective

identity,such as class.3

More specifically,we

might consider imperial Germany.

The period between 1871 and 1914waslong

seenby histori

ans as asingle era, during

which a conservativepolitical sys

tem failed to adapt to the pressures of socioeconomic

modernization.By contrast, the interwar years

were treated

as the great laboratoryof

modernity.4Recent

scholarship pre

sents a different picture. The built environment has provided

important clues for this r??valuation.5 Take the example of"historicism." As a

style,historicism wasfirmly identified with

the German imperial regime and its grandiose official propa

ganda. Yet read moreclosely, so-called historicist buildings

document a fluid and dynamic relationship with the past: from

a reservoir ofstyles, employed according

to academic rules,

to an expressive idiom with multiple meanings, uniquely

suited to the representation of the hybrid identities so char

acteristic of the years around 1900, and incorporating allu

sions to collective, longuedur?e memories, a

subjectivestream

of consciousness, and other such modernist mentalities .6

14 JSAH / 65:1, MARCH 2006



On the micro level, too, architecture can illuminate the

way in which people lived modernity. Much exciting

research is currently devoted to the history of the domestic

interior. From Margarete Sch?tte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt

Kitchen to the socialist living room, the aesthetic and spa

tial arrangement of rooms defined identities, from themodern housewife to the new man of socialism.7 Throughout

history,rooms

provide clues about the ambitions of partic

ular social groups, the formation of new milieus, and the

definition of gender roles.Moreover, outside the realms of

elite history, the analysis of domestic interior space often

allows us, ashistorians, to

tap into the mind-set of those

who left few traces in historical archives. Domestic spaces

hold clues about theway people configured their lives, nav

igating between the poles of local roots and cosmopolitan

aspiration, politically tainted traditions and Utopian pro

jects,patriarchy

and social

climbing,

convention and

modernity. Clumsyterms like

"ordinary," "commonplace,"

and "middle-of-the-road" to characterize the lives of those

who "muddled through" the great political upheavals of the

modern age are indicative of the problems scholars still face

inendeavoring

towrite these histories. This task becomes

all the morepressing

asgrand ideological narratives like

modernization theory lose their credibility. If we can no

longerassume that "rationalization," "secularization," and

"disenchantment"automatically accompanied

the demo

graphic, geographical, social, and work-related transforma

tions of the past three centuries or so, then we have all the

more cause to examine cultural sources carefully in order

to establish how people "made their home inmodernity."

The sameapplies to the disintegration of other master nar

ratives, such as those about the "dark"Middle Ages, the

"rational" Renaissance, and so forth.Without generalizing

categories, the question of the day-to-day experience and

mind-set of contemporaries has to be posed afresh.While

addressing central questions of the historical discipline, such

investigations do anything but make the discipline of archi

tectural history subservient to it.Quite the opposite is the

case. If historians have to learn todecipher

material sources,

theyneed to

rely

on theguidance

of architecturalhistorians,

who are trained in the analysis of the visual. Yet this analy

sis has tomovebeyond older paradigms of style, toward a

notion of the aesthetic performance of identity,a

perfor

mance of which the rooms, houses, and cities we inhabit

leave amaterial trace.

Notes

1.The phrase "pictorial turn," modeled on Richard Rorty's "linguistic

turn," was coined inW. J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and Lon

don, 1994).

2. Peter Wagner, Reading Iconotexts: FromSwift

to theFrench Revolution

(London, 1995), 169; Ernest B. Gilman, "Interart Studies and the Imperi

alism of Language," Poetics Today 10 (1989), 5-30; andW. J.T. Mitchell,

Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986).

3.Maiken Umbach, "ATale of Second Cities: Autonomy, Culture and the

Law inHamburg and Barcelona in the Long Nineteenth Century,"

American Historical Review 110 (June 2005), 659-92; Hartmut Frank, ed.,

Fritz Schumacher. Reformkultur undModerne (Stuttgart, 1994); St?phane

Michonneau, "Soci?t? et comm?moration ? Barcelone ? lami-XIXe si?

cle," Gen?ses 40 (Sept. 2000), 6-32; Andrea Mesecke, Joseph Puigi

Cadafalch (1861-1956). Katalanisches Selbstverst?ndnis und Internationalit?t

in derArchitektur (Frankfurt amMain, 1995); Joan R. V?rela, La Renaix

en?a. La represa cultural ipol?tica (1833-1886) (Barcelona, 1991); Emili

Giralt, Pere Anguera, Manuel Jorba, et al., Romanticisme iRenaixen?a,

1800-1860 (Barcelona, 1995), esp. Feran Sagarra, "Arquitectura iUrban

isme," 162-204.

4. A useful overview of the different approaches isRichard Evans,

Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and theOrigins of

the Third Reich (London and Boston, 1987).

5. Two typical examples are Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and thePaths of

German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Searchfor Alternatives, 1890-1914

(Cambridge, Mass., 2000); and Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity:

Local Culture and Liberal Politics inFin-de-Siecle Hamburg (Ithaca, 2003).

6.Neil Levine, "The Romantic Idea of Architectural Legibility: Henri

Labrouste and theNeo-Grec," in The Architecture of theEcole des Beaux

Arts (London, 1977); andMaiken Umbach, "Memory and Historicism:

Reading between the Lines of the Built Environment, Germanyc. 1900,"

Representations 88 (2005), 26-54.

7. Interesting examples of this trend are Lore Kramer, "Rationalisierung

des Haushalts und Frauenfrage. Die Frankfurter K?che und zeitgen?ssis

che Kritik," in Heinrich Klotz, ed., ErnstMay und das neue

Frankfurt,

1925-1930 (Berlin, 1986), 77-84; Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday

Objects:A Cultural History ofWest German Industrial Design (Berkeley, 2004);

Victor B?chli, AnArchaeology of Socialism (Oxford, 1999); andWilliam

Brumfield and Blair Ruble, eds., Russian Housing in theModern Age: Design

and SocialHistory (Cambridge, England, 1993).

maiken umbach is a senior lecturer inmodern European history at the

University ofManchester in England. Her research concerns the role of

the built environment inmunicipal, regional, and particularist-identity pol

itics from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. She is currendy

preparing a

monograph

on German cities and the

genesis

of modernism in

the period 1890 to 1930.

LEARNING FROM ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 15

urban history_ what architecture does, historically speaking

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