Between document and monument : architectural artifact in an age of specialized institutions

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical analysis of the transformations in the definition of a modem architectural artifact and the artifact's changing status in an institutional context. This work develops on a series of themes which proceed on the assumption that various procedures performed by specialized institutions in architecture have been effective in the process of the definition of an architectural artifact. It starts from the proposition that transformations in the definition of architectural expressions are due to the confluence of specific institutional procedures. Since the 1970s, architectural culture was enriched with the rapid emergence and growth of a number of specialized institutions, namely, architectural museums, archives, research centers, and galleries. At the turn of the nineteenth-century, the field of architecture had witnessed a comparable process with the emergence of various architectural societies and professional organizations. Transforming the collector's practices of the enlightenment, these modern institutions sought to establish the foundations of an architectural knowledge based on documents. These institutional practices would also lead to the construction of an architectural culture based on monuments. In my study, I examine the continuation of this activity, arguing that our late twentieth-century institutions both inherited from and critically transformed these foundational projects. In the following six chapters, I examine different procedures taking place in these institutions: collecting, exhibiting, preserving, indexing, cataloguing, and instiTUtionalizing. Focusing on different materials, each thematic chapter investigates the shifts among the intellectual outcomes of these procedures. Their material and conceptual aftermath are the subject of every chapter. Each autonomous chapter is meant to gain precision from its contextual relation to the others and to the definition of the architectural artifact itself. It is not the intention of this dissertation to trace back the historical development of architectural institutions nor to choose its examples from a single geographic or historic location. Rather, by formulating the question as 'what are the intellectual consequences of a specific process and its effects on the definition of an architectural artifact?' it critically analyzes the working logic of specialized institutions in the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. Institutions function in the discipline not as instruments of self-powered or autonomous entities but as intellectual members of a larger cultural mechanism. Their operation regulates and is regulated by the dynamics of the discipline of architecture and is informed by a larger social framework. A concluding chapter relates the specific processes taking place in specialized institutions to disciplinary performance. It emphasizes the contradiction between process and product. This analysis will lead us to suggest that for institutionalized artifacts of architecture, there is no absolute state of being merely a document (a factual, formal, objective evidence) or a monument (a conditional, relativist, subjective interpretation). Rather, I argue that the various processes performed in specialized institutions coalesce into these two distinct statuses. This correlation suggests the integration of architectural culture into a larger cultural system.