Enfilade

From the research program’s website (it includes lots of interesting materials in addition to details of the upcoming conference). . .

Origins and the Legitimacy of Architecture in Europe, 1750–1850
Leiden University and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, 1–2 May 2015

Organised by Maarten Delbeke, Sigrid de Jong, and Linda Bleijenberg

From Thursday 30 April to Saturday 2 May 2015 we will host an international conference at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, to conclude our research program at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). Supported with generous funding from NWO, the project aimed at understanding how, between 1750 and 1850, changing views about the origins of civilization and the arts have affected the theory and practice of architecture in Europe. More in particular, the project aimed to understand how these views of origins, and especially the primitivism they often imply, have been adopted in architectural discourse to buttress the legitimacy of architecture in society.

The questions the conference wishes to address include: how do architectural origins relate to questions of architecture’s legitimacy as an artistic and cultural practice in the period under consideration? Why are origins deemed relevant to address these questions? To which particular architectural problems does the question of origins pertain? With which intellectual contexts and debates do architectural theory and practice enter in dialogue through the matter of origins? How do architectural origins relate to the primitivism that is manifest across a wide range of intellectual and artistic practices of the period? How do notions about origins sustained in historiography writ large affect architectural history and ideas about the historicity of buildings?

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F R I D A Y ,  1  M A Y  2 0 1 5

9.30  Registration and coffee

10.00  Welcome by Maarten Delbeke

10.15  Session I. Myths
• Eric Moormann, ‘Mehr Modell und Puppenschrank als Gebäude’: How Pompeii Did Not Enhance Architectural Studies in the Eighteenth Century
• Hendrik Ziegler, Goethe and the Classical Canon in Architecture
• Sigrid de Jong, Myths of Origins: Stonehenge in the Royal Academy’s Architectural Histories

12.30  Lunch break

14.00  Session II. Histories
• Erika Naginski, On the Colonial Origins of Architecture: Building the ‘Maison Rustique’ in Cayenne, French Guiana
• Matteo Burioni, Imaginary Geographies and Imagined Beginnings: Pietro della Valle, Fischer von Erlach, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand
• Petra Brouwer, Origins of Architecture in the First Architectural History Survey Texts of James Fergusson, Franz Kugler, and Wilhelm Lübke

17.00  Book presentations, Sigrid de Jong and Caroline van Eck

18.00  Keynote Lecture
• Mari Hvattum, Heteronomic Historicism

19.00  Reception

S A T U R D A Y ,  2  M A Y  2 0 1 5

9.30  Registration and coffee

10.00  Session III: Objects and Language
• Christopher Drew Armstrong, Theorizing the Orient: The Discourse on Origins, Language and Identity in the Paris Académie des Inscriptions
• Maarten Delbeke, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture around 1820
• Ralph Ghoche, ‘La pensée simple que présente un cône’: Unity and Simultaneity in Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux’s Tomb of Dumont d’Urville

12.15  Lunch break

13.45  Session IV: Religions and Rituals
• Tomas Macsotay, The Distracted Believer and the Return to the First Basilicae: Marqués de Ureña’s Reflexiones sobre la arquitectura, ornato, y música del templo (1785)
• Caroline van Eck, Quatremère de Quincy on the Origins of Architecture, Sculpture and Society: The Debate about Primitivism among Enlightenment Critics of Religion
• Richard Wittman, The Purity of Origins: Architecture in Rome after Napoleon