The Vila Flor Cultural Centre in Guimarães, venue for EAHN 2010.
Photograph: EAHN 2010 / Carlos Moreira

EAHN 2010 in the Portuguese Press

The EAHN First International Meeting received coverage in both local and national media in Guimarães and throughout Portugal.  Two articles in a leading national daily newspaper, Público, deserve particular mention: an interview with conference keynote speaker Denise Scott Brown in the paper’s 21 June 2010 issue, available (in Portuguese) at http://ipsilon.publico.pt/artes/entrevista.aspx?id=259339.  And the following essay by conference keynote speaker Paulo Varela Gomes from the paper’s 19 June 2010 issue, which Professor Gomes has kindly made available to us in his own English translation:

EAHN

This improbable and unpronounceable acronym stands for “European Architectural History Network,” and as you read this column the last of the three days of this organization’s first international meeting is taking place in Guimarães.

Architectural history is on the grow everywhere.  Apart from its intrinsic value as a tool for knowledge, it is essential for economic activities that mobilize huge quantities of money and people: architecture itself, heritage conservation and rehabilitation, urban and territorial planning and, increasingly, cultural tourism.

The European Architectural History Network was created between 2005 and 2006 by architectural historians who arrived at the conclusion that, in order to meet each other and exchange views in large international fora, European researchers in the field could not limit themselves to the activities of the powerful North American Society of Architectural Historians, whose journal and annual conventions are architectural history’s most stimulating and up-to-date venues.  Furthermore (and here we enter the field of politics in its European dimension), a pan-European organization was mandatory to avoid each country creating its own organization, leading to a patchwork solution.

The EAHN was set up thanks to the outstanding stamina and diplomatic skills of literally a handful of researchers.  Young Portuguese architectural historians were involved in the process practically from the beginning, and were later associated with the organization’s leading body.  This is the proof that a new generation of architects and historians, aged between thirty and forty, has realized that we can no longer live in isolation and provincialism.  Jorge Correia, of the University of Minho’s architecture school, is one of these researchers.  With the support of his university, he “offered” Guimarães to the EAHN as the location for its first international meeting.

Coming from Europe and its surroundings, over 150 researchers from about thirty countries traveled to Guimarães: Irish and Israelis, Portuguese and Turks, and practically everyone in between. Some Australians and Canadians were also present, together with a large contingent from the United States that demonstrates the still-unchallenged quality of North American research in the field.  It is a pity that so few Germans participated in the meeting, because German research can rival that of the Americans.

The meeting was characterized by a vibrant creativity as architects, historians and other researchers and professionals debated many different subjects from the more conventional, like the history of Italian palazzi, to those that are not conventional at all, like the city turned into fiction by the media.

Thus, the European Union of architectural history exists. For years on end I have been repeating a mantra to my students: go away, go study abroad. Here you will learn nothing particularly stimulating. But during these three days, “abroad” came to Portugal.  Let’s hope the seed now planted will bear fruit.

Paulo Varela Gomes
Universidade de Coimbra