Listening attentively to a session respondent at the Transfer and Metamorphosis conference
Photograph: EAHN

Informal conference discussions in Zurich
Photograph: EAHN

The joint ETH / SAH / EAHN conference brought together several dozen scholars from four contintents to exchange ideas in Zurich
Photograph: EAHN

Transfer and Metamorphosis: Conference Report

Transfer and Metamorphosis: Architectural Modernity between Europe and the Americas 1870-1970
Zurich, 26-29 June 2008

Joint International Conference organized by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the European Architectural History Network (EAHN)

What seems more appropriate for an international meeting of architectural historians from both sides of the Atlantic than to reflect on the cultural interference and interaction between their continents, than to discuss specific case studies of exchange, appropriation and modification within the field of architecture? And so a group of about seventy dedicated architectural historians, art historians and architects gathered for a three-day conference hosted by the ETH Zurich to celebrate the first joint effort of the grand old American SAH and its relatively young European transnational equivalent the EAHN--already this institutional detail questions the traditional reading of “old Europe” versus the new Americas--to share and to debate research findings about a time period roughly framed as “modernity.” However, the conference organizers--Dietrich Neumann (Brown University, Providence), Andreas Tönnesmann and Reto Geiser (both ETH Zurich)--seemed to propose this “modernity” as a continuous, unfinished project of socio-economic, political and cultural transformation, since for the opening lecture they won over the Zurich-based architect and studio professor Marcel Meili to give a personal insight into the transatlantic motifs and traces within his practice, research and teaching over the last three decades.

Carol McMichael Reese and Thomas F. Reese (both Tulane University, New Orleans) set a complementary reference point for the space and period examined when they addressed metropolitan urban development in Latin America, ranging from the independence of the former colonies of Spain and Portugal in early nineteenth century to the postwar period of the mid-twentieth century. Within their collaborative presentation Reese and McMichael Reese introduced a theoretic framework to analyze the meta-level of cultural transfer between donor culture and recipient culture, yet at the same time they unfolded specific conclusions from a comparative analysis of Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Panama City as examples of differing historic evolutions. In a comprehensive way Reese and McMichael Reese combined a critical reading of economic basis with questions of representational superstructure, the discourse of cultural role models with identity debates and nation building.
This broad methodological approach to the eponymous phenomena of transfer and metamorphosis in architecture between Europe and the Americas was one of the consensual aspects of the whole symposium: even if most of the twenty-eight selected papers of the six sessions focused more on specific case studies of individual architects, of themes or types, of cities, regions or of institutional structures, almost all speakers related the formal with the social, the cultural with the political, the discursive with the economic and ideological. Hence the discussions did not revolve so much around questions of artistic “influence” based on schools, styles or biographies, but addressed the socio-economical fuel of architectural practice, such as the consequences of petrodollars on the urban landscape of Caracas (Viviana d’Auria, KU Leuven) or the contribution of political or economic refugees as “agents of modernity,” as Anat Fallbel (University of Campinas, São Paolo) explained with a comparative study on the Russian-born architects Gregori Warchavchik and Wladomiro Acosta, who were educated in Germany and Italy respectively, before they moved to Argentina and Brazil in the 1920s. Joana Mello de Carvalho e Silva (University of São Paolo) presented a similar case study of avant-garde European ideas transferred by individual architects from Germany and France that became modified and hybridized by local factors morphing into a regional variation of modern architecture. On the other side of these readings of complex historic strata we find case studies on a diaspora practice that reflected back into the architectural discourse of the culture of origin, such as Hilde Heynen (KU Leuven) demonstrated with Sybil Moholy-Nagy and her interventions in postwar Germany.

In his inspiring lecture Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton University) made a similar case, though with respect to a different medium: not architecture nor architectural publications, but the cinematic representation of space. Levin traced a “narrative shift” from the Panoptical surveillance perspective of the camera per se in early movies to a self-reflective mode of postwar cinema that put the panoptic condition and asymmetric view of the (hidden) camera on display, up to a “structural” perspective of films mapping the contemporary invisible continuous space of surveillance by means such as public CCTV or digital screening of personal data. According to Levin, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (BRD, 1960) by Fritz Lang, who left Germany in 1933 for the U.S. and returned in 1956 for his last film productions, shows the “narrative” use of surveillance staged as integral part of the plot, since Lang does not only carries on with the references to Hitler’s rise from his Dr. Mabuse series of the interwar period, but exposes the continuation of Nazi structures in postwar Germany as well, inducing an atmosphere of anxiety.

Often it is the distant perspective of the traveler, foreigner or immigrant that questions the practice of the everyday, renders identity and tradition as social constructions, and reframes cultural practices such as architecture, which turns “otherness” into an “agent of modernity,” as observed by many of the speakers. These processes of cultural transfer, hybridization and appropriation are highly complex and specific, so most presentations opted for detailed case studies as a reliable methodological approach. Sometimes, however, we miss the step from analysis to synthesis, how the individual case relates to a broader debate on different time frames and regional variations of a global development, how architectural history contributes to a history of modernity.

Ole W. Fischer
Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule (ETH), Zürich