Moderator: Tiago Castela (CES-UC/DARQ) | Comentator: Jorge Figueira (DARQ/CES-UC)


Overview

History teaching in the professional education of architects, having sidelined the debates of postmodernism and the "linguistic turn," settled quietly into a reproduction of the research-focused professor's craft. Architectural history courses are thus now seen both as a preparation for the specialization of future scholars, and as an introduction to non-disciplinary criticism. Such a perspective entailed suppressing, but not overcoming, the debate on the place of history within the disciplinary field of architecture. This conference aims therefore to bring to the fore the discussion about the specific character history may take on in the education of professional designers.

To this end, I address the definition of architectural history's subject matter: this may alternatively be the evolution of relations of production and of ideologies, which implies an anti-disciplinary bias and chronological segmentation; or it may be the palimpsest of the built environment built up over time, a subject of disciplinary expertise in archaeology and morphology often handed over to design studio courses.

Finally, I explore three modes of appropriation of the built environment and their implications for professional education: comparative architecture, which set up the canonical textbook format of the twentieth century; analytical architecture, now almost forgotten among historians but still popular in construction systems textbooks; and historical architecture, unapologetically dedicated to the critique of cultures and ideologies that are self-conscious of their own historicity.
 

Bio note

Pedro Paulo Palazzo | Architectural historian and a historic preservationist specializing in the western Mediterranean and Portuguese-speaking world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My research explores the interfaces between traditional and modern construction as well as between the learned architecture of classicism and vernacular typologies.

Currently associate professor at the University of Brasilia School of Architecture and Urbanism and a visiting scholar at the University of Coimbra Center for Social Studies. Member of the Documentation committee of Icomos Brazil.