Enfilade

This session is part of next year’s EAHN conference; the full Call for Papers is available here:

‘Character’ in Global Encounters with Architecture, 1700–1900

Session at the Conference of the European Architectural History Network, Aarhus, 17–21 June 2026

Chairs: Sigrid de Jong, Dominik Müller and Nikos Magouliotis

Proposals due by 19 September 2025

The eighteenth century was at once the period when Classical architecture was canonized in the Western world and beyond, and the moment when its supposedly universal ideal came into crisis. The study of competing practices and traditions of various medieval (Romanesque, Gothic, Byzantine) and vernacular architectures in Europe, and the allure of ‘Oriental’ styles (filtered through Turquerie and Chinoiserie) challenged the claims of Classicism, as did the encounters with different extra-European building traditions through travel and colonialism. These encounters prompted an avid preoccupation with cultural difference, as evidenced in Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), Vico’s Principi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla natura delle nazioni (1725–44), and Hume’s Of National Characters (1748).

Before the systematic global histories of architecture of the nineteenth century, and previous to the notion of style, Western authors employed a particular term to describe cultural specificity and difference: character. Stemming originally from the Greek word χαρακτήρ, its meaning evolved from the tool with which one carved signs on a wax or stone surface, over denoting these signs themselves, to the imprint these had on a reader or viewer. The distinctiveness of that impact, and the marks of identity of a whole culture in its environment and material culture, was encapsulated by its character. As such, from 1750 onwards the notion of character became ubiquitous in a variety of languages and was used in reference to people, buildings and landscapes, and shared across different genres of writing and scientific disciplines: from travel literature, political theory and ethnography, over treatises of art and architecture, to gardening manuals.

This session interrogates the architectural category of character in the globalizing world of the long eighteenth century, by zooming in on its meanings, implications, and complexities in moments of encounter between Western and non-Western cultures and architectures. We draw on recent inquiries into how Western travellers conceptualized non-Western architectures (Brouwer, Bressani, and Armstrong, Narrating the Globe, 2023), but also on works aiming to show how indigenous thinking conceptualized and criticized Western political and aesthetic norms (Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021).

We are interested in instances of encounter addressing the following questions:

• How have Western accounts used the notion of character to describe non-Western architectures, building traditions, cultures, landscapes and places?

• How was the notion of character employed for architectures that challenged Western taxonomies and categorizations of architectural style?

• Which are the analogous notions in native languages that have been used to respond to encounters with Western architectures? How were these employed to process cultural specificity and otherness, and to describe, translate, acculturate or criticize Western cultural expressions (including mores and manners) from an indigenous perspective?

We welcome papers dealing with one or more of these questions in the period c. 1700–1900, across geographies. We are eager to discuss a variety of written, visual, and material sources, drawn from various disciplines, to expand the critical history of the term character beyond its well-established place in the history of European architectural theory.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted by 19 September 2025 to sigrid.dejong@gta.arch.ethz.ch, nikolaos.magouliotis@gta.arch.ethz.ch, and mueller@arch.ethz.ch, along with the applicant’s name, email address, professional affiliation, address, telephone number, and a short curriculum vitae (maximum one page). Abstracts should define the subject and summarize the argument to be presented in the proposed paper. The content of that paper should be the product of well-documented original research that is primarily analytical and interpretative rather than descriptive in nature.