Eric Garberson is associate professor of art history and director of the interdisciplinary doctoral program in media, art, and text at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. His current research focuses on the origins of art history as an academic discipline in early nineteenth-century Germany, with a particular emphasis on Berlin. He has published articles on the university training and careers of E. H. Toelken, Gustav Heinrich Hotho, Franz Kugler, and Ernst Guhl. Other articles examine the training and teaching of Wilhelm Stier at the architecture academy (Bauakademie/Allgemeine Bauschule), where he taught a practice-oriented design studio and developed the first academic courses in architectural history. This research will be carried forward in a book, currently in progress, on Kugler and his foundational survey text, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (1842). The book situates Kugler and the Handbuch in the institutional and intellectual context of early nineteenth-century Germany, arguing that art history emerged as an academic discipline based on foundations laid by art and architectural practice and the empirical-hermeneutic disciplines of classical studies (philology and archaeology), Germanistik (the study of German language, literature, and culture), and history.
Period Style or Timeless Universal? The Modern in the Historiography of Architecture
Is modern architecture a timeless universal or just another in the long march of historical styles? Answering this question requires a fundamental re-examination of the concept “period style,” starting from its formulation in the early nineteenth century. Architecture was defined as an essence unto itself, as structure and form, and its individual manifestations were believed to reveal the deeper spiritual forces at work within distinct, internally coherent periods. Instead, architecture should be understood as cultural production: forms originate in one time and place but take on new meanings in other times and places. Likewise, historical periods are heuristic devices, externally imposed frameworks for organizing inconsistent and uneven continuity and change. Redefining period and style—and dissolving the connection between them—provides the basis for rejecting the very possibility of timeless universality and for defining modern architecture as the product of one cultural moment available for reuse in new times and places with new meanings. The rejection of historical forms in the early twentieth century constitutes a stark formal rupture that obscures cultural and theoretical continuities with the nineteenth century, not least similar claims to suprahistorical validity (and modernity) for both historicist and non-historicist forms. Conversely, the formal continuity of modern architecture today obscures conceptual and theoretical ruptures that have occurred since its inception over a century ago. Modern forms no longer carry the same meanings they did then, just as even older historical forms took on new meaning in the nineteenth century as architects used them to create their own modern architecture.