Present members of the Committee:

Christine Mengin, Andrew Ballantyne, Reto Geiser, Hilde Heynen, Dietrich Neumann, Nancy Stieber, Karin Theunissen.
Attendance: thirty colleagues.

Christine offered words of welcome. She briefly described the history of the formation of the EAHN and the earlier organizational meetings held at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in Vancouver in 2004, the SAH – INHA Conference in September, 2005, the Annual Meeting of the SAH in Savannah in 2006, and the IXth DOCOMOMO International Meeting in Ankara in 2006.

The EAHN began as an informal association with the aim of increasing communication among architectural historians related in some way to Europe.  In 2005 it  started  a website and a mailing list and was  established as a temporary association registered with the French Republic. A provisional committee was formed and has met twice for business meetings, once in Berlin in January 2006 and once in Delft in January 2007.

As a result of discussions before and after the meeting in Delft, a mission statement for the EAHN was drafted. It can be viewed on the EAHN website where it has been published as part of a brochure about the EAHN.  The brochure was distributed to those attending the Pittsburgh meeting.  In addition to the website and mailing list, the EAHN has launched study tours. The first was made to Ljubljana in July 2006.  In planning are creation of a newsletter and a journal, conferences, setting standards for the judgment of academic publications in architectural history, and activities of thematic groups.  The EAHN  remains open to suggestions for other activities and welcomes all those who wish to contribute to its continued formation.

Christine presented the members of the provisional committee in attendance at the meeting: Andrew Ballantyne (University of Newcastle, UK), Nancy Stieber (University of Massachusetts, Boston), Reto Geiser (PhD candidate ETH Zürich), Karin Theunissen (TU Delft),    Christine Mengin (Paris, University of Paris I),  Hilde Heynen (KULeuven), Dietrich Neumann (Brown University)

Christine invited those present to introduce themselves and identify their institutional affiliations.  (See the attached list.)

She then described the study tours, to be organized and already organized. Their aim is to bring  together architectural historians, architects, and preservationists, with networking among colleagues as the main objective. Costs are kept low accessible to all  by  using modest hotels and keeping the tours  short (5 days or less).The Ljubljana tour, which she described briefly, was a success in all these respects.  Upcoming is a two-part tour to Romania, starting with a tour in late September to Sibiu, this year the cultural capital of Europe, to be followed next year by a tour to other parts of the country.  Future tours to Barcelona and Russia are in planning stages.

EAHN is open to other proposals for tours. Those with suggestions should contact Carmen Popescu  at  crmv@noos.fr

Nancy Stieber then described the efforts and goals relative to publications:
Efforts:
•    The brochure containing the mission statement of the organization
•    Bookmarkers announcing this meeting.

(These were designed by  Reto Geiser , who is thanked by the EAHN.  )

Goals:
 
•    a quarterly newsletter to be launched by the end of 2007
•    an academic, peer-reviewed journal (A long term goal)

The newsletter will provide updates on EAHN activities.  Each issue will include a brief article describing the research activities of an institute, museum, or academic department.  It will announce upcoming EAHN tours and report on tours completed. Listings will include calls for papers, announcements of conferences, lectures, and exhibitions, as well as brief reviews of books, films, exhibitions, and websites.  To provide the newsletter with up-to-date information, correspondents will be recruited from a number of countries.  By using standard templates for filing their information, the correspondents will not only contribute to the newsletter, but also help creation of an EAHN archive of information about the activities of architectural historians. 

A major intention of the EAHN is the creation of a journal. There is an obvious need, for there are very few general, peer-reviewed journals for architectural history. The aim is to have a proposal ready by the next business meeting, which will take place in Leuven, Belgium, in January 2008. The publications subcommittee has already agreed to propose that the journal be peer-reviewed and beautifully designed.  One issue still under discussion is in which language or languages the articles and abstracts are to published

Christine Mengin took up the subject of annual meetings. While this is the 60th meeting of the SAH, it is good to have learned that it took the organization a while to start organizing annual meetings.  In this respect, the well-attended meeting of the EAHN during  INHA-SAH Paris conference was very inspiring because it indicated a strong interest in a European based organization of architectural historians, while the success of the conference itself demonstrated the need for large, general conferences on architectural history in Europe .

EAHN is collaborating in the preparation of the planned  SAH-ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich) meeting in 2008.  Dietrich Neumann, First Vice President of the SAH , provided  information about the planned Zürich conference, organized with the gta (the institute for history and theory of architecture within ETH). Andreas Tonnesmann  and Reto Geiser will be involved. It is scheduled for the second week of June 2008. The topic will be roots of modernism in architecture on both sides of the Atlantic, for the period 1880s-early twentieth century. The aim is a new look at national exchanges and exchanges between nations not previously studied. The attendance is expected to be between the 100 who attended  the first SAH/London conference on Hitchcock-Summerson and  the 400 at the SAH/INHA.

We have been invited to organize a meeting at the University of Minho in Portugal  in 2010 that would be keyed to that city's selection  as one of the cultural capitals of Europe in 2012.  Jorge Correia made a brief presentation of the proposal and of the steps to be taken before it is concretized. Brainstorming is needed to choose the theme of the conference and the parameters of that theme.

Christine mentioned the two existing thematic subgroups of colonial architecture and Eastern European architecture. She is in the course of organizing a third on judicial architecture.  She sees an opportunity for learning about the architectural traditions in the different European countries for court buildings and for demonstrating the important contribution architectural history can make to the building program which is currently a burning issue in Europe. She  hopes to build a network of interested scholars and is planning to apply for a research grant with the EU. Hélène Lipstadt suggested that the great success of the INHA/SAH meeting indicates that setting up a subgroup devoted to ‘interdisciplinarity’ would be of interest to many, and offered to organize it.

Hélène Lipstadt spoke of how DOCOMOMO US is now introducing software that will allow the building fiches that various individuals and chapters prepare for the national and international register to be published on line. Could this be a model for our efforts to make  the EAHN  known and a way to make the website more effective as a place where everything is brought together?

She asked what place is being made, if any, for existing national groups of architectural historians? Nancy Stieber answered that the idea was to avoid any system of national working parties. It is rather important that the Network is and that it remain one of individuals rather than groups  and to avoid the introduction of internal politics and national competition

Karin Theunissen reported on a proposal from Delft University that it provide a half day a week in administrative support to the EAHN.  Christine explained that this is a very promising opportunity, and we are grateful to Karin Theunissen and Delft University for working to develop this offer.

The meeting was opened to discussion from the floor. The nature and value of ranking architectural publications for the citation indices now being prepared in different European countries and by the European Union and for the discipline and the problems created by such ranking were the major subjects of discussion.

Hilde Heynen  summarized the current situation.  Due to recent changes in the way that faculty publications are assessed, journals that publish architectural history are being ranked.  In order to provide the point of view of those in the field itself, Hilde Heynen together with other Belgian colleagues drew up a list ranking publications in architecture according to the criteria of whether they are peer-reviewed or not, and whether they are international or national. The list can be viewed on the EAHN website:  http://www.eahn.org/publications/periodicals/index_html.
Hilda  described the effort undertaken by herself and colleagues, noting that there are problems that are specific to the discipline that remain unresolved. An extension of the initiative would be a method of ranking  books and books chapters, which are extremely important in our discipline, and not taken into account in standard lists. These lists are important as more European countries turn to systems of assessing faculty publications, particularly as architectural history is not well-served by current citation indices. She explained that the pressure to rank publications exists already. Assessing of content can not always be done by reviewing the actual content of publications, for there are practical and logistical constraints to such an analysis, which explains the necessity of a ranking system and reference to citation indexes.

The following members of the Network then contributed to the discussion.

• Dirk van den Heuvel asked if it should be assumed that an international magazine is by definition more important than a local one, as international ones are less likely to accept articles on particular local architectures, as, for example, specifically Dutch topics.
• Dana Arnold, who has been involved in EU’s European Science Foundation (ESF) process and UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) , described the difficulties encountered there, particularly the classification of architectural history with art.  She asked how any ranking of publications endorsed by EAHN could influence the official rankings endorsed by the EU.  
• Hélène Lipstadt proposed that when situating itself vis-à-vis the bibliometric question, there are two paths to be taken. The Network can be involved, while, at the same time, remaining very critical of the process, and showing that critical attitude by using a ranking done by peers for peers, rather than by a overarching bureaucratic organization. The creation of the list is very important in two respects: it serves the purpose of the Network by conferring legitimacy, while projecting and protecting disciplinary specificity.
• Reto Geiser mentioned the inclusion in a Network index of books and book chapters which are important, but not taken into account by current indices.
• Branko Mitrovic New Zealand noted that in Australia andd New Zealand,  funding  is also determined by publications. The SAHANZ solution to the omission of architectural history from indices is to make their annual conferences refereed and to publish the proceedings as a refereed publication.
• Hélène Lipstadt asked how  the quantification of research output works in the different countries. Dana Arnold explained that in the UK, there will be an attempt to determine the impact of books based upon how often they are borrowed in the library. In her experience, many other disciplines have complained about the unsuitability of quantified assessment of research productivity,   e.g. music, literature.
• Andrew Ballantyne explained that decision makers often do not listen to the arguments formulated by scholars from the humanities, for the model from medicine and the sciences is prevalent,  and that it is very hard to circumvent this. In the end, this is how the funding in the future will be distributed.
• Nancy Stieber noted that there is differentiation between different countries, as Hartmut Frank had explained, in Germany quantified assessment is not applied.   This implies that each nation has autonomy about how its scholars are assessed and thus the EAHN may be able to play an important role in representing the disciplinary perspective of architectural historians.
• Dana Arnolds noted that in the UK,  universities do have autonomy,  but there is pressure from the EU. If one wants to tap into this funding (notoriously difficult for the humanities), EU standards for  ranking and quantification are crucial.
• Hartmut Frank argued against the EAHN enabling quantified assessment of scholarship by created a ranked listing of journals.  He noted that  if we see ourselves as weak and ineffective, we cannot but accept the rules of bureaucracy.  The way to react is to show what we are doing, bringing forward the content of our work. He dismissed the importance of any list originating in the EU because  national organizations and private organizations are more important for this discipline, and the quality of the content is more important than is quantification. He objected that the effort to publish in English by foreign scholars is often not worthwhile because there is little correlation between the excellence of research and the language in which it is published.
• Nancy Stieber noted that it is important not to focus too much on the role of EAHN in the assessment of research as a main effort of the EAHN when the primary aim is rather to bring scholars who have been prevented by institutional and national barriers from developing fruitful exchanges.  The Newsletter’s short articles on research institutions, for example, will provide opportunities for people to find out what their colleagues are doing as will the planned conferences and tours.  The problem of research assessment does, however, indicate the potential usefulness of the EAHN because it allows people from different countries to find out how others are handling similar challenges. 
• Christine Mengin suggests other objectives, such as the publication of a list of published books; list of PhD candidates in different countries; and the gathering of  existing [lists.  The problem is that architectural history is often on the margin of different things (art history, architecture, etc.). We have to aggregate this material, we need more visibility towards ourselves and towards the exterior. To demonstrate her point, she described the ERIH (European Reference Index for the Humanities), created by the ESF (European Science Foundation) in 2001, with the support of the European Union. The citation index  is devoted to the 'human sciences' and humanities and will thus make up for  the American Art and humanities index américain, which inadequately reports on these areas. It comprises categorized lists of research journals selected by internataional expert panels and through broad consultuation in 15 disicplines  of the humanities. The list will be released in October 2007, and is expected to be revised every 4 years. The next stage is the indexing of  monographs. Dana Arnold  has  been involved in the process. Christine noted that the grouping of art history with art, as opposed to history in this index proves the invisibility of the history of art, and a fortiori, that of architecture in the space of research in both France (as she knows from her previous posting to the French ministry of research), and in Europe, generally.

Conclusion:

Christine Mengin repeated her welcome to new and old members of the Network. It is open to all initiatives and all who wish to contribute their energy. It aims at launching a snowball effect by conserving all possible information about our activities and drawing attention to the fruits of our combined efforts.

Text by Helene Lipstadt