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Being specific: limits of contextualising(architectural) historyCarmen Popescu aa University Paris I–Sorbonne, Paris, France
Available online: 09 Dec 2011
To cite this article: Carmen Popescu (2011): Being specific: limits of contextualising (architectural) history,The Journal of Architecture, 16:6, 821-853
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Being specific: limits ofcontextualising (architectural)history
Carmen Popescu University Paris I–Sorbonne, Paris, France
Introduction
As soon as the Balkans stepped into modernity, the
orientation of the area’s culture was determined by
a constant negotiation with History. Explicitly
exposed as the narrative of a grand local history—
to be read in the larger context of the Hegelian
Universal history—or skilfully reinterpreted and
concealed behind the schemes of modernisation,
this dialogue was the price that this ‘backward’
periphery had to pay for the desired integration
with the ‘civilised’ world.
This paper examines how architectures in the
Balkans were used as a powerful instrument of
entering historicity. Leaving aside the earlier his-
toricist phase, it focuses on the renewal of local
architecture from the 1920s to the 1960s, atten-
tively orchestrated around the use of folk and ver-
nacular elements. While this ‘particularist’ reading
responded to the expectations of the Occidental
gaze—resuming in a certain manner the first for-
mulae of local identity invented and disseminated
by the Universal exhibitions, where Balkan pavi-
lions were often presented as ‘primitive huts’
inhabited by ‘authentic’ peasants—it was also
used by local architects as a subtle strategy of
integrating the latest trends of the international
scene. By doing so, they not only emulated
some of the masters of modernism, but they
managed to turn the ‘primitiveness’ of local tra-
dition into a tool for rethinking modern architec-
ture: a strategy that proved to be limited both
in the field of architectural production and in
the realm of historiography.
Limits of contextualising history
Even as Francis Fukuyama announced the end of
universal history, in the Balkans its rhythm was
becoming more frantic.1 While old history was evac-
uated from part of the peninsula, new history was
bursting in: former Communist countries hurried
to get rid of the phantoms of the past, welcoming
‘the triumph of the West’.2 Powerful images of
the torn-down icons of the recent past were broad-
cast all over the world through international media;
history was steadily and ineluctably cleared away, as
in Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), where
the broken pieces of a monumental Lenin were
carried away by a barge on the Danube (Fig. 1).
While intellectuals endeavoured to find ‘the key to
lost innocence and essential truth, to an under-
standing of Balkan history’,3 old heroes were
replaced by new ones: in Pristina, capital of the
newly created Republic of Kosovo, the statue of
Bill Clinton would henceforth dominate the
endless rows of slabs of the Socialist era (Fig. 2).4
But as globalisation reverberated across the
peninsula, the ‘triumph of the Western idea’ was
translated from ideology to topography,5 reactivat-
ing the map of geopolitics. Thus, history seemed
to repeat retrieving mechanisms similar to those
that animated the Balkans6 throughout the nine-
teenth century, while slightly adjusting its vocabu-
lary. The struggle for ‘integration’—within the
European Union and/or the Western geopolitical
sphere—replaced the ‘recognition’ sought a
century earlier. The Balkans were reminded of their
peripherality once again, of the (perception of)—
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political, economic, cultural—backwardness,
against which they had been fighting from the
early nineteenth century onwards, when they
attempted to reach emancipation by assimilating
the great models of ‘civilised’ Europe.
From its beginnings in the nineteenth century, this
hoped-for assimilation of the Western values of
modernity, intended to erase the decried ‘Oriental
barbarity’, implied a thorough (re)construction
both in terms of identity and history. Building iden-
tity (and, through it, history) was crucial in a time
when ‘national character’ constituted a central cri-
terion for admission to universal history: which,
according to the Hegelian perspective, accepted
only ‘peoples fully conscious of what they were
and what they were about’. For peoples ‘but half
awakened’, like those of the Balkans, entering
history demanded an entire readjustment of local
coordinates in keeping with Western values: parallel
to the absorption of occidental progress (a remedy
against centuries of backwardness), Balkan
countries were required to produce a defined,
recognisable identity.7
When the Balkans eventually stepped into histori-
city,8 they got caught in its swirling movement.
Maria Todorova has analysed this instrumentalisa-
tion by the dominant history under the term of
‘balkanism’, a notion she forged as a reply to
Edward Said’s orientalism.9 I argue that balkanism
is the result of historicity and the way this latter is
reflected in the artistic/architectural historiography,
which in the nineteenth century defined itself as a
discipline by mapping its territory in terms of ‘radiat-
ing centres’ empowered with a civilising mission.10
In such a scheme, peripheries have a place solely
as a prolongation (or rather, in most cases, an altera-
822
Being specific: limits of
contextualising
(architectural) history
Carmen Popescu
Figure 1. Theo
Angelopoulos, Ulysses’
Gaze (1995) –
dismantled Lenin
floating on the Danube,
Romania (courtesy of
Theo Angelopoulos Film
Productions).
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823
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Figure 2. Bill Clinton:
statue in Pristina,
inaugurated in 2009
(photograph courtesy
of Hannah Michin).
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tion) of the dominant discourse or for their particu-
larism. Balkanism durably marked the self-image of
the region through its cultural production.
This paper will examine the architecture of the
Balkans in the nineteenth and the twentieth centu-
ries—with a focus on the decades from the 1920s to
the 1960s—viewed as both a powerful strategy of
integrating history and a symptomatic reflection of
what Hegel called the ‘struggle for recognition’. I
will attempt to demonstrate how, disregarding its
degree and means of representation—that is,
whether employing historical or ethnic references,
being used ideologically or aesthetically—this archi-
tecture embodies the dilemmatic, indefectible
binding of the region to history. This is a history
that is heavily contextualised, in order to justify the
appurtenance to historicity: claiming to be rooted
in their specificity, Balkan architects might thus
expect a place in the history of architecture. In theor-
etical terms, I would translate this as the art of
improvising with history.
Entering history
The era of modernity is conditioned by history. Being
part of universal history is compulsory, particularly
for aspiring nation-states. Hence, every opportunity
is taken to make visible the fact of their belonging to
this meaningful narrative.
Architectural history underpins this interaction:
architecture is ‘the result of and inseparable from
history’, stated Banister Fletcher at the beginning
of the last century.11 Nurtured by evolutionism and
taxonomy, as well as by the Hegelian approach
that marked art historiography in the nineteenth
century (in different ways, such as Schnaase’s and
Taine’s), his ‘Tree of architecture’ is rooted in its
context—represented by six anthropomorphic char-
acters: on one side are Geography, Geology and
Climate, and on the other Religion, Society and
History—and grows branches of ‘historical’ and
‘non-historical styles’. There is no place in this tree
for Balkan architecture, with the notable exception
of the Byzantine, seen rather as a short-lived pro-
longation of Greek (and Roman) antiquity. Since
architecture represents ‘the advancement of civilis-
ation’, the peninsula appears to be excluded from
the ‘civilised’ world.
Under the scrutiny of the occidental gaze, seeking
for historiographical categories, Balkan architec-
tures had but one solution: to become narrative, a
precondition for all peripheral cultures in the era
of modernity: ‘Better the rudest work that tells a
story . . . than the richest without meaning’, as
Ruskin put it in his ‘Lamp of memory’.12 Narrativity
opened the path for architecture from peripheral
cultures to be engaged with western discourses
(whenever the latter took it into account): more
than any other, this architecture from peripheral cul-
tures is assimilated to language and is bound to
‘speak’.13 The contextualisation demanded from
peripheral cultures, the Balkans included, implies
that their potential notoriety lies in their symbolical
meaning and not in their intrinsic values.
This narrativity was considerably enhanced by uni-
versal exhibitions, which forged, through the geo-
cultural rendering of their scheme and the ‘stagist’
concept of history14 displayed by their installations,
powerful images of historicity. History and ethno-
graphy formed the two voices of the same dis-
course—after the Rue des Nations, inaugurated at
824
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(architectural) history
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the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878, the next
edition, of 1889, presented the Histoire de l’Habi-
tation humaine, where historic dwellings alternated
with ethnographic ones, thus paralleling what had
been seen as an accepted truth since the advent
of western historicity: that discovering ‘primitive
civilisations’ equalled ‘travelling in time’ (Fig. 3).15
Balkan pavilions were hence animated by this evol-
utionist vision, meant to ‘recreate . . . the earliest
history of the world’.16 Most often they were occu-
pied by ‘peasants’—like the Bulgarian hut, part of
Garnier’s installation in 1889 or the tableau vivant
offered by the Serbian pavilion in 1900, where
Smiljka and Milica wove rugs before the astounded
public—as if to remind one that the inhabitants of
the peninsula ‘became the live figures of what
came increasingly to be seen as the Volkmuseum
of Europe’.17
Thus, the public of the exhibition was trans-
ported through space and time simultaneously:
‘Besides the architecture of the country, rep-
resented by the construction itself, and the interior
with its carpets, fabrics and peculiar Romanian
pottery, the Romanian cabaret had the particularity
that it accurately reproduced a part of Romanian
national life and that the public truly believed
itself transported to the banks of the Danube,
three thousand kilometers [sic] from Paris. All com-
bines to give this illusion: first, the music of
lautars, a music which can indeed turn heads . . .;
the young Romanian girls, who are all authentic.’
(Fig. 4)18 It was authenticity, indeed, that universal
exhibitions meant to perform through such instal-
lations: but that was, nevertheless, different from
the authenticity perceived within a national
context, as in the exemplary ‘hunter’s cabin’ at
the Columbian Exhibition in 1893. Whilst this
latter represented wilderness as associated with
the American spirit—the untamed, unaltered
nature; the challenge and the fascination of trans-
gressing natural frontiers19—the peasant huts
from the Balkans staged a time that was
untamed, unaltered by civilisation: the ultimate
border of the continent. Untamed geography
versus untamed history.
The other voice of the discourse of the universal
exhibitions was articulated by the historicist con-
structions of the national pavilions. Thought to per-
sonify the identity of each people of the peninsula,
official pavilions were however amazingly similar,
sharing a common vocabulary, inspired by religious
architecture: Byzantine for the Christian nations
and Ottoman for the Muslim (Fig. 5). What was
this uniformity standing for? Was it supposed to
reflect the effervescence of revivalisms that flour-
ished everywhere on the globe at that time (in the
Balkan case a form of orientalism, both in terms of
aesthetic doctrine and mere fashion)?20 Or,
knowing that most of the pavilions were designed
by Western architects, did it represent a taxonomic
image, comfortably suitable to recognising the
peninsula?
Moreover, how did these identity constructs fit
into the intense modernisation scheme that
enthused the entire region at the turn of the
century? All through the nineteenth century,
Balkan architectures assiduously copied western
models, thus hoping to make the latter’s prestige
their own. Decades later, western languages,
spoken or architectural, bring the Balkans closer
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Being specific: limits of
contextualising
(architectural) history
Carmen Popescu
Figure 3. Charles
Garnier, The Slavic
House: Histoire de
l’habitation humaine,
1889, Universal
Exhibition Paris
(published with the
permission of the
Institut National
d’Histoire de l’Art
[INHA], Paris).
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to ‘civilisation’: ‘It is thanks to the French language
that I manage to lighten the heavy inheritance of
an aggressive tongue’, confessed the Serbian
avant-garde writer Ljubomir Micic (1895–1971)
through the words of one of his characters.21 In
the second half of the nineteenth century (but
also in the years afterwards), foreign architects
together with local ones, trained in some of the
most influential European centres of the time—
such as Paris, Berlin, Munich or Vienna, which
divided into spheres of influence the geography
of the peninsula—strove to turn Balkan capitals
into more or less convincing replicas of famous
occidental metropolises. Hence the Balkans had
their ‘little Paris’—a title disputed by other periph-
eries—that civilised the image of this ‘savage
Europe’ (Fig. 6).22
‘National styles’ represented a different tactic for
entering modernity, albeit dictated by the same
mechanism of historicity. Perceived as a reaction
against the rapid modernisation of the traditional
(another label for ‘backward’) societies, they consti-
827
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Figure 4. Romanian
restaurant at the 1889
Universal Exhibition,
Paris: (1) the lautari
band; (2) ‘the young
Romanian girls who are
all authentic. . .’, in Les
merveilles de
l’exposition de 1889
(Author’s collection).
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tuted the ‘true’ alternative to the revivalisms
invented by western architects who were seeking
for ‘the Orient brought near’. Academicism, ‘neo’
and ‘national’ styles, each, in its own way, had
their own recognisable forms of expression, which
nevertheless partook of the common language of
the occidental discourse. Architectural identity, be
it nationalist or revivalist, articulated this ‘universal’
language perfectly well, but with a local ‘accent’:
its syntax was built up on western schemes,
adorned by the narrativity of local historicist or ver-
nacular elements (Fig. 7). A ‘cultivated’ yet ‘auth-
entic’ form of architectural expression, comparable
to a certain extent to the manner in which local
elites intensively practised the foreign languages in
vogue, as Harry de Windt observed in the fancy
828
Being specific: limits of
contextualising
(architectural) history
Carmen Popescu
Figure 5. Pavilions of
the Balkan countries at
the 1900 Universal
Exhibition in Paris:
1. Romania; 2. Serbia;
3. Greece; 4. Ottoman
empire (Author’s
collection).
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Figure 5. Continued.
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Figure 5. Continued.
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Capsa Restaurant in Bucharest: ‘Nearly all spoke the
national language interspersed with French words
and expressions—a kind of jargon which was evi-
dently confined to the ultra-smart circles.’23
This hybridity blurred the gaze of young
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, to become famous as
Le Corbusier, when he crossed the Balkans seeking
for ‘authenticity’, during what he later called his
Voyage d’Orient (1911). The capitals of the young
nation-states of the peninsula disappointed him—
’the architecture is useless, like life here’, he wrote
about Bucharest, ‘the Ecole des Beaux-Arts [is]
everywhere, since only architects who have gradu-
ated from Paris work here’24—as much as the
green landscapes of the Balkans did: ‘I must admit,
however, our first disappointment: the Balkans are
green and we had dreamed them red. Red as the
brick on which beats the sun; dry, arid and
without vegetation. We didn’t even dare hope to
be attacked by brigands because we’d been told
there weren’t any.’25
Turning tradition modern: the revenge of the
‘good savage’
Like western explorers at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, the young Swiss architect dreamed
one hundred years later of travelling through
history. Passionate for the local folklore, which he
Figure 5. Continued.
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not only sketched in his notebooks but also pur-
chased on many occasions,26 the homo balkanicus
whom Le Corbusier hoped to meet during his trip
certainly did not look like the contemporary local
intellectuals, dressed in western clothes and yearn-
ing for modernity, but more like La Fontaine’s
Danube Peasant, whose wisdom was concealed
under his savage appearance:
His chin nourished a bushy beard,
His whole hairy person
Was like a Bear, but a Bear without graces
Under a heavy brow, his eye was hidden,
A crooked look, broken nose, thick lips,
Wearing a tunic of goat’s hair,
And a belt of bulrushes.27
An iconic sign of the peninsula’s past, seen as a
closed chapter after 1918, the ‘good savage’
made a spectacular reappearance in the interwar
years. The context was rather paradoxical, since
the era of the ‘non-yet’—the time of expectation
in the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’28—
seemed to be over in the Balkans. At the end of
the First World War, the reconfiguration of the
peninsula, wherein some of the existing nation-
states strengthened their positions while others
were newly born, contributed to a geopolitical
832
Being specific: limits of
contextualising
(architectural) history
Carmen Popescu
Figure 6. The Old
Konak, Belgrade; lavish
Occidental decorum for
Oriental ‘barbarity’—
the caption of the
illustration published in
Harry de Windt,
Through Savage
Europe, reads: ‘The
window from which the
bodies of the late King
and Queen were
thrown is the fourth
from the left in the
right-hand building—
the left-hand one being
the new Palace’
(Author’s collection).
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833
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Figure 7. Petko
Momchilov and
Friederich Grunanger,
Mineral Baths, Sofia,
1904–07 (Author’s
photographs).
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reassessment that brought it nearer to western
values. For the first time, the effervescence in the
Balkans was almost synchronised to western moder-
nity. The new wave of modernisation materialised
through massive campaigns of construction, which
introduced modern architecture in the region,
turned, in some cases, into an emblem of identity.29
Meanwhile, parallel to this development, an increas-
ing interest in peasant (and vernacular) art gained
ground within architectural milieux.
The reasons for this sudden burst of interest were
multiple. The general orientation in human sciences
towards an ethnological perspective, which had
evolved steadily over the last decades, was stimu-
lated by a new approach in art history, which for
the first time introduced ‘folk arts’ (l’art populaire)
as a distinct field of the discipline.30 As a pro-
longation of historiographic efforts at the end of
the nineteenth century, many of the Balkan archi-
tects were still associated in the first decades of
the twentieth century with writing the architectural
history of their respective countries. Hence, aside
from an interest in the monumental (embodied
most often by the religious edifices), they progress-
ively shifted towards the study of peasant architec-
ture, paying attention both to its typologies and its
construction methods.
Studying peasant architecture was, above all, a
personal commitment. Most often, this reflected
the necessity to lessen a gap in professional edu-
cation: ‘I knew the dwelling in the time of
Ramses II and Nebuchadrezzar, I knew the lacus-
trine hut and the cave of the primitive man, I
knew the Roman castrum . . . but I did not know
the Romanian rural house at all’, confessed the
Romanian Florea Stanculescu (1887–1973).31
Like him, other major representatives of the
second generation of Balkan architects involved
in identity issues—the Greek Dimitris Pikionis
(1887–1968), the Turk Sedad Hakkı Eldem
(1908–88) amongst others (Fig. 8)—started to
explore the peasant/traditional house on their
own, aiming to draw from the analysis of its typo-
logisation responses relevant to contemporary
architectural needs. ‘I drew many houses of
Aegina . . ., attempting to record at the same
time in a series of architectural compositions the
first ideas and conclusions that began to take
shape in me regarding some particular questions
of modern Greek architecture’, wrote Pikionis
about his explorations during the Balkan Wars
(1912–13) and the First World War, an exploration
which bore fruit as early as 1921 when he
designed the Moraitis house.32
Typological analyses led to the idea of a ‘matrix
house’, a notion shared by Stanculescu and
Eldem,33 embodying not only the principles of
local architecture but also the elusive genius loci.
Thus, the study (and the understanding) of
peasant architecture fulfilled a noble mission that
had already preoccupied the previous generation.
Beyond all other professional consequences—after
the war, Stanculescu held key positions in the Minis-
try of Agriculture, elaborating typologies for the
new rural environment; in 1932 Eldem began a
seminar on the ‘Turkish house’ at the Academy of
Fine Arts—the study of peasant architecture was a
matter of moral duty, as Aristotelis Zachos (1872–
1939) had already stated in 1911 in his influential
essay ‘Laıki architectoniki’.34
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The idea of a moral duty animated architects all
over the peninsula, nurturing artistic manifestos
and associations with explicit national agendas.
But nationalism was not the first aim; for instance,
the Bulgarian ‘Native Art’, founded in 1919 by
artists and architects, strongly rejected crude nation-
alism, favouring what they called the ‘native
feeling’.35 This ‘native connection’, which echoed
the racial theories of the time, translated at the
same time into a positioning that was seminal for
architecture, because it expressed ‘rootedness’ not
only metaphorically but also in a physical manner.
If Balkan architecture was symbolically rooted in
an historic/ethnic narrative, thus serving national
projects, it was above all rooted in its actual soil, in
a specific site, responding to its characteristics. By
taking into account this positioning, Balkan archi-
tects emulated those of their western colleagues
who advocated the importance of context. While
learning from their western colleagues, explicitly
835
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Figure 8. Sedad Hakkı
Eldem, modern
reconstruction of a
traditional Turkish
house: from the
‘Anatolian houses’
series, 1929 (courtesy
of Suha Ozkan Private
Archive).
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claiming their affiliation as a proof of modernity,
they in turn taught them a determining lesson,
which was about contextualisation. When the 4th
CIAM was held in Greece in 1933, the guardians
of the Modern Movement were astounded by the
indefectible connection between architecture and
its site: ‘What present-day architecture is exploring
and what many minds do not yet understand is
the tendency toward taking the site into account
while simultaneously erecting an abstract edifice,
as one can find here [in Greece]’, wrote Sigfried
Giedion (Fig. 9).36 A few years later, it was Bruno
Taut’s turn to express his admiration for the tra-
ditional architecture of Turkey.
The context, as revealed by the Balkan lesson, was
not limited to the site, as Giedion had put it: it was a
‘mental landscape’ more than a ‘natural land-
scape’.37 Thus, the visible face of geography aside,
it encapsulated history as the sedimentation of
time, summing both of them up in one single
concept ideally materialised by peasant/vernacular
architecture. It was this latter, and not modern archi-
836
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Carmen Popescu
Figure 9. Sigfried
Giedion, photograph of
Pyrgos village, island of
Santorini: published in
Cahiers d’Art, 1934
(published with the
permission of the
Institut National
d’Histoire de l’Art
[INHA], Paris and
Verena Keatinge-Clay).
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tecture, that first taught Balkan architects the prin-
ciples of ‘organic authenticity, simplicity and
formal austerity’.38 ‘[The] Romanian peasant is the
best Romanian architect’, affirmed George Matei
Cantacuzino (1899–1960), who, like Pikionis,
believed that the local and the universal met in
peasant/vernacular architecture.39
It was the ‘primitivism’, a notion praised by
modern art in general, of this architecture that ren-
dered its message so valuable. This lesson reminds
one of the wisdom of La Fontaine’s Danube
peasant: the barbarian teaching the cultured occi-
dental a lesson. Emulating the new modernity of
the West, the Balkan artist knew how to take
advantage of ‘primitivism’ and rushed through the
gate left open by the myths of modern art. He
hence vigorously promoted his ‘primitive’ nature,
which echoed Benjamin’s ‘new barbarism’.40 The
Bulgarian poet Geo Milev (1895–1925)—who in
1920 had written the manifesto ‘The native art’
for the homonymous association—extolled ‘East
primitivism’; Brancusi amazed the cosmopolitan
chic elites in Paris with his peasant clothes, his
bushy beard (like the Danube peasant’s) and his
mamaliga, while Micic, leader of the avant-garde
group Zenit, proclaimed the ‘balkanisation of
Europe’.41
Though it sounded merely like a provocative
slogan, typical of avant-garde manifestos, the
phrase held many meanings. Its origin is to be
found in Micic’s experience of the First World War:
‘My people are crucified in the name of civilisation.
. . . So: Down with this civilisation!’.42 Civilisation
appeared to blur moral values and to have lost the
true meaning of words: if the war was presented
as the battle of civilisation against barbarity, then
the sides were not what they seemed to be. Thus
‘balkanising Europe’ would have not only reinstated
the lost notions, but also rejuvenated the degener-
ate civilisation—’civilisation is too savage to be
human!’, affirmed Micic43—through the impetus
of the new barbaric energies. ‘We seek a new
man of barbaric genius!’: the providential man
who could have saved Europe was ‘Barbarogenius’,
the son of Zeniton, the noble barbarian killed by
civilisation, and of Fata Morgana.44 As in the old
myths, Micic’s character was a fantastic creature,
inheritor of the barbaric force of his father and the
(illusory) genius of his mother. Barbarogenius embo-
died the symbol of the ‘primitive’ vitality that the
Balkan artists would have breathed into European
culture.
On primitive huts
Micic’s novel raises an unspoken question: was
Zeniton, the Balkan artist, primitive by origin or
was he primitivised by the gaze of the (corrupted)
Occident? The answer is implicit in the book,
which depicts the Occident as dehumanised.
However, the use of their ‘primitivism’ by the
Balkan artists is not to be understood (only) in
terms of ‘resistance’45 but also of ruse. Their con-
stant recourse to the particularism of their folklore,
to their ‘primitiveness’—to be translated first in
terms of ‘exoticism’ and later of ‘rootedness’—
shifted from being the consequence of a ‘colonising’
authority to being an instrument of self-
advertisement. So it was stated: ‘The barbarian is
essentially particularist, but on this score, almost
everyone nowadays is rushing into barbarity’.46
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Figure 10. George
Oprescu, Peasant art in
Roumania, special issue
of The Studio 1929
(published with the
permission of the
Institut National
d’Histoire de l’Art
[INHA], Paris).
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I argue that in Balkan architecture, ‘rootedness’
was also a strategy.
When the Society of the Nations developed the
‘folk arts’ into a legitimate domain of art history,
countries from Central and Eastern Europe—
notoriously perceived as rich in folklore but deficient
in great art—contributed significantly to this new
approach. For scholars in these areas, including the
‘folk arts’ as a constitutive field of art history
amounted to the possibility of overcoming the
obligatory reference to the Western canon: Josef
Strzygowski’s (1862–1941) example is the best-
known in this sense.47 It is noteworthy that the po-
sition of secretary of the International Institute for
Intellectual Cooperation was held in 1923–1930
by a Romanian, the art historian George Oprescu
(1881–1969), author of several studies on ‘folk
arts’ (Fig. 10).48 In his position, and with the help
of his friend Henri Focillon (1881–1943), who was
himself a supporter of this new domain, Oprescu
was instrumental in organising the first international
Congress of Folklore, which took place in 1928 in
Prague, a symbolic venue situated almost in the geo-
metrical core of this harmonic concert of nations
that Europe pretended henceforth to be.
Within the historiography of art, the hierarchisa-
tion was the result of both a restrictive system of
values and of nationalist visions, and ‘folk arts’
were supposed to play the role of a ‘unifying’
element. Hence, their study was expected to
smooth differences and to erase discontinuities,
as Focillon stated in his substantial foreword to the
proceedings of the congress in Prague: ‘The study
of cultures shows that there exists, at the border
of classes, areas of penetrability, a kind of border-
land where elements meet and tend to amalgamate,
forming . . . a common basis’.49 ‘Folk arts’ were not
to be seen as secondary movements or as substi-
tutes for great art, but as a realm ruled by specific
rules—both forming the ‘two faces of the human
kind’. According to Focillon, this ‘twofold human-
kind’ held two different conceptions not only of
space but also of time: to accelerated occidental
time would thus correspond, on the other side of
great art’s frontier, a time where past and present
were contemporary.
It was precisely this shortcut in the constant flow of
the linear time of history, the coexistence between
past and present, that represented the force of
Balkan ‘rootedness’. The architecture produced
839
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Figure 11. Le
Corbusier, drawing
from his trip to the
Balkans in 1911,
representing a cula in
Romania: sketchbook 1,
page 65 (published with
the permission of
ADAGP: la societe
francaise de gestion
collective des droits
d’auteur dans les arts
visuels [peinture,
sculpture,
photographie,
multimedia, . . .]).
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here in the interwar years transported western archi-
tects through time, as had, decades before, the
‘primitive huts’ of the first universal exhibitions.
The study of the peasant house represented the
key to this secret access to the irreversible flow of
time. The numerous examples built all over the
Balkans provided a twofold contextualisation,
seeking a local (rooted in the national soil and able
to capture the spirit of the place) yet modern
(expressing essential ‘truth’, ‘authenticity’) architec-
ture. They had a predecessor in a building they most
probably ignored, the villa designed by Le Corbusier
for his parents when he came back from the voyage
d’Orient. As remarked, the Jeanneret-Perret House
(1912) represents a selective and synthetic mixture
of the experiences accumulated by the young archi-
tect during his Balkan and German journeys: a
design that he was to disregard as an anachronism
immediately after its completion (figs 11, 12).50
The analysis of this edifice reveals a series of
interpreted Balkan elements that later were to
make the fortune of the architecture in the
peninsula: the cubic, simplified geometry of the
general volume, the partition in the glass-paned
windows, the whiteness of the facade (the villa
was to be known as ‘la maison blanche’), the
carefully studied dialogue with the site (each room
in the villa opens to a different aspect of the
landscape), the complementary ‘summer-room’
and pergola, etc.51 ‘Reinforced concrete and
dominated Orientalism and the love of the new
here implying a powerful understanding of the
ancestors, this is what occupies my thoughts’, the
young architect had written to his friend when
working on his parents’ house.52
840
Being specific: limits of
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Figure 12. Le
Corbusier, Jeanneret-
Perret villa, La-Chaux-
des-Fonds, 1912
(Author’s photograph).
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Figure 13. Florea
Stanculescu, ‘Cubic
house’: the architect’s
own house, Caminul
(1929) (Author’s
collection).
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842
Being specific: limits of
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Figure 14. (1) Henriette
Delavrancea, villa at
Balcic (courtesy of the
Museum of the
Romanian Peasant);
(2) Nikola Dobrovic,
villa Vesna, island of
Lopud,1939
(photograph courtesy
of Damir Fabijanic).
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Figure 14. Continued.
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An approach that was, undoubtedly, close to that
adopted by Balkan architects when translating the
vernacular treasures of their countries: Greek archi-
tects interpreting the ‘Aegean house’, Turks the ‘Ana-
tolian’ one, Romanians the cula from Oltenia and the
Dobrudja house, etc. (Fig. 13). In many cases, the
results were surprisingly similar: Henriette Delavran-
cea’s (1894–1987) villas on the Black Sea (Eforie
and Balcic, from 1934 to 1940) echo the Corbusian
aesthetics of Nikola Dobrovic’s (1897–1967) villa
Vesna (island of Lopud, 1939) (Fig. 14), but also
the horizontality of Pikionis’ design (experimental
school, Thessaloniki, 1935), anticipating the frag-
mented volumes of Efthymiadou’s house-studio
(Athens, 1949). Stjepan Planic’s (1900–80) and
Drago Ibler’s (1894–1964) commitment to functional
forms and sensibility for local materials remind one of
the interpretations of the vernacular by Duiliu Marcu
(1885–1966) and Octav Doicescu (1902–81), and so
on. These similarities show two different things:
despite the distinct national and regional labelling,
the Balkan vernacular constituted a common ‘reser-
voir’, providing local architects not only with specific
motifs and typologies, but also with a consistent ima-
ginary horizon of interpretation. This latter, at the
same time, was definitely subjected to the approach
of influential western contemporary architects—
aside from Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright was
among the most powerful models in the penin-
sula—who were inspired by vernacular forms.
By proclaiming the specificity of their work,
Balkan architects not only claimed synchronisation
with western experiments, but had direct access
to the yearned-for ‘essential truth’: ‘The universal
spirit has to merge with the national spirit’,
affirmed Pikionis about his experimental school in
Thessaloniki.53 Hence, once achieved, after
having resisted the whirl of historicity, their speci-
ficity placed Balkan architects ahead of their
western colleagues. Was this the revenge of the
‘good savage’?
Beyond history: new labels, old strategies;
marketing authenticity
At a first glance, Balkan architecture had finally
found its place on the map of architectural pro-
duction: especially so, since after 1945 the accent-
uation of the modernist crisis opened a new path
for peripheral cultures. The latter gained visibility
through the maturation of a new sensibility that
started to manifest itself before the war, which
was precisely the lesson taught by Greek architec-
ture to the CIAM: contextualisation. It is highly prob-
able that the already-mentioned text Giedion wrote
for Cahiers d’Art stimulated his reflections on ‘new
regionalism’, published two decades later.54 Moder-
nist historiography—which, before, had explicitly
decried the war’s regionalisms and (particularly)
nationalisms—recognised henceforth the force of
particularism ‘that satisfies both cosmic and terres-
trial conditions’ (another manner of designating
the ‘universal’ and the ‘local spirit’).
‘Western man has now, very slowly, become
aware of the harm he has inflicted by his interfer-
ence with the way of life of other civilisations’,
conceded Giedion, ‘whether this has been interfer-
ence with those natural rhythms in the lives of
primitive peoples . . . or whether it has been an
injection of rational Western mentality into the
oldest existing civilizations, without simultaneously
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presenting some worthy antidote.’55 Once again,
issues of time were posing questions for the
principles of modern architecture: ‘Through its
contacts with both primitive civilizations and
ancient civilizations, contemporary architecture
has enlarged both its domain and its scope. It
has been deepened as well as widened’.56 The
expanded field of modern architecture (and of its
historiography) hence comprised new territories,
and the Balkans held a specific place within this
enlarged remapping.
In the early 1980s, a powerful historiographic tool
was formulated—’critical regionalism’—that, like its
predecessor ‘new regionalism’, founded its dis-
course on Greek architecture. This latter represented
(for various reasons) the visible part of the Balkan
iceberg as seen by western commentators, who
admitted that ‘Greece [read: the Balkans] has been
particularly privileged with regard to the Modern
Movement. . . . The avant-garde architecture of the
twenties and thirties was not far removed from
the whitewashed vernacular of the Cycladic Islands
[read: Balkan villages]. In fact, certain modernist
manifestations, above all Le Corbusier’s Purism,
had been partially inspired by these very same proto-
types’.57
The attractiveness of this architecture lay
undoubtedly in its rootedness—an operative
remedy against modernism’s long-time ‘refusal to
be absorbed into its site’58—but also in other
characteristics, such as its inclusiveness and
humble appearance. This latter, especially, might
have been equated with Heidegger’s ‘poetical dwell-
ing’: it presented the world, rather than represented
it, an approach that was to become familiar to advo-
cates of ‘critical regionalism’, which was itself
inspired in part by readings of Heidegger.59 What
before could have been perceived as ‘primitivism’
in Balkan architecture—see, among others, Pikionis’
Aixoni neighbourhood (1951–54) and Tiberiu Niga’s
(1906–79) Catelu district in Bucharest (1955–57)
(Fig. 15)—had eventually achieved a philosophical
dimension: the ‘primitive’ hut turned into Heideg-
ger’s hut.
For his Architecture without architects show at
the MOMA in 1965, which was to become
seminal in understanding the role and place of the
vernacular within modern architecture, Bernard
845
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Figure 15. (1) Dimitris
Pikionis, Aixoni
neighbourhood, Athens
(1951–54); (Benaki
Museum, Athens).
(2) Tiberiu Niga, Catelu
neighbourhood,
Bucharest (1955–57);
Arhitectura, no. 2
(1957).
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Figure 15. Continued.
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Rudofsky included some examples from Greece and
Turkey. ‘Vernacular architecture’, explained
Rudofsky, ‘does not go through fashion cycles. It is
nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable since it
serves its purpose to perfection.’60 Attempting to
‘break down our [western] narrow concepts of the
art of building by introducing the unfamiliar world
of non-pedigreed architecture’, the show echoed
the ‘seduction’ that had already operated on ‘an
earlier generation of modernists: Adolf Loos, Le Cor-
busier, Bruno Taut, Mies van der Rohe, Jose Luis Sert
among others.’ 61 Further, ‘captur[ing] the imagin-
ation of a new generation of architects in an unpre-
cedented manner’, thus opening their sensibilities to
the images of ‘Mediterranean hill towns and other
“exotic” structures’, the show and the related pub-
lication clearly articulated the theory that vernacular
architecture ‘had been central to the formulation of
modernism’.62 Peripheral cultures, ‘non-Western
societies’ and ‘pre-industrial Mediterranean
towns’, appeared hence as an alternative not only
to the threat of cultural homogenisation experi-
847
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Figure 16. Balkan Pop
Revolution (# D.R.
courtesy of Crammed
Discs).
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enced by the Western world, but also to the Modern
Movement’s internal crisis.
This new approach was undoubtedly beneficial in
general to Balkan contemporary architecture, but,
nevertheless, had hardly contributed in a concrete
way to making it more visible. This was a conse-
quence of the polarisation engendered by the
Cold War, which almost erased from contemporary
historiographies the countries integrated in the
Soviet bloc. But at the same time it resulted from
the ‘nearness’ of this region: in the globalisation
years, this ‘Orient brought near’ diminished its
‘exotic’ attraction, which was to be sought for in
remoter peripheries: hence the massive shift of
interest in ‘critical regionalism’ towards ‘tropical’
architecture.
848
Being specific: limits of
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Figure 17. Recent villas
in Gaziosmanpasa
district, Ankara
(Author’s photograph).
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Conclusions: an endless predicament—bound
to history
Particularism is undeniably a marker for peripheral
cultures: even if its forms and uses are various, the
specificity it advocates indicates an unsolved
relationship to History.
The contextualisation of Balkan architecture
increased after 1989: what might have been a
natural reaction against globalisation was, before-
hand, an immediate response to the geopolitical
re-framing of the region. In the new context, still
deprived of clearly established references, history
became central once again to the local discourse,
disregarding its content, be it the accumulated frus-
tration of a marginal region or the complementary
frustration added by the years of the socialist
regime. The new architecture of the peninsula
expressed a long-awaited revenge against history.
Paradoxically enough, apart from the emblems of
sheer westernisation—glass architecture and ‘mod-
erate’skyscrapers (understood in the former socialist
countries primarily as icons of capitalism)—and of
‘neo-localism’ (reviving the genius loci), most of
the energies were canalised by an uncontrolled
out-burst of a new vernacular (Fig. 16). Kai Vockler
assimilated the latter to the new urban folklore: ‘a
mix of traditional folk and popular music, inter-
national rock, pop and techno’, a music whose
nature ‘is just as promiscuous as its architectural sib-
lings’.63 Working on ex-Yugoslavia, Vockler bor-
rowed the local name for this music that has
spread all over the Balkans (‘turbo-folk’ in ex-Yugo-
slavia, ‘chalga’ in Bulgaria, ‘manele’ in Romania,
‘laıka’, in Greece, ‘arabesk’ in Turkey), designating
the new Balkan vernacular as ‘turbo-architecture’.
An ‘architecture without architects’, to paraphrase
Rudofsky, the new vernacular has instead a long
pedigree, forged by the globalised media; in
exchange for this globalised awareness, it turns its
back on what constituted the quest of many gener-
ations of Balkan architects: the ‘essential truth’ of
the peasant house (Fig. 17). Hence, the idea of
‘rootedness’ itself appears to have changed its (phi-
losophical) meaning.
Homo balkanicus is no longer Hegel’s ‘first man’,
nor Micic’s ‘Barbarogenius’. If ever he intended to
pursue his dream of ‘balkanising Europe’, he did
so through the turbo-folk songs receiving awards
in the Eurovision Song Contest. Meanwhile,
however, Europe ‘had already been provincialized
by history itself’.64 A history that seems far from
being ended in the Balkans. ‘There are no exits
from history’, Jack Lawrence Luzkow stated in his
response to Fukuyama. Entitled The Revenge of
History,65 Luzkow’s book pointed out how relevant
this idea is, particularly in the ‘vehement’ Balkans.
Seen from this perspective, contextualisation, so
well-mastered by interwar architects, represents a
predicament for Balkan culture. Architecturally, it
has little chance of survival outside this notion,
whilst within, it risks limitation and provincialisation.
To express this differently, what appears to be a
‘niche’ can turn into a dead end. Historiographically,
the situation is no better: a ‘horizontal’ reading as
opposed to a ‘vertical’ one—already discussed at
the Folklore Congress in Prague in 1928, and
reintroduced in recent years in the debates around
a ‘globalised art history’—would not prevent a
(constant) parallel with the ‘radiating centres’.
Would then the choral discourse of multiple
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historicities, of what Michel Foucault called ‘general
history’ as opposed to ‘global history’, be able to
provide a more and differently comprehensive
understanding of the Balkans?
Notes and references1. ‘The End of History?’ was first published as an essay in
The National Interest, 16 (Summer, 1989), pp. 3–18;
subsequently, it was enlarged and turned into a
book: The End of History and the Last Man
(New York, The Free Press Macmillan Inc., 1992).
2. What ended with the ‘end of history’, as Fukuyama
argued, was the ideological clash: Fukuyama,
‘Second Thoughts’, The National Interest, 56
(Summer, 1999), p. 16.
3. According to the synopsis of Ulysses’ Gaze: http://
www.theoangelopoulos.com/ulyssesgaze.htm
(accessed 03.02.11).
4. On 1st November, 2009, the statue was unveiled in the
presence of President Bill Clinton: http://news.bbc.co.
uk/2/hi/8336789.stm (accessed 03.02.11).
5. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier (Prin-
ceton, Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 20.
6. I use the term ‘Balkans’ to refer to a territory that might
evolve within the chronological span of this paper,
which covers (more or less) southern-eastern Europe.
But as well as a geographical reality, I use it as an intel-
lectual concept, as forged by the western gaze which
saw in it ‘otherness’: backwardness, barbarity, exoti-
cism, etc.; see Dusan I. Bjelic, Obrad Savic, eds,
Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Frag-
mentation (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2002).
7. Carmen Popescu, ‘Un patrimoine de l’identite: l’archi-
tecture a l’ecoute des nationalismes’, Etudes balkani-
ques, 12 (2005), pp. 135–172.
8. I use the term ‘historicity’ in the Foucauldian sense of
the process of framing history.
9. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York,
Oxford University Press, 1997).
10. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of
Art (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004),
p. 158.
11. Banister Fletcher, Architecture and Its Place in General
Education (London, B. T. Batsford, 1930), p. 1: the text
was first given as a discourse held before the Seventh
International Congress of Architects, London, 1906.
12. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(London, George Allen, 1901), pp. 335, 336.
13. See, for instance, Friederich Achleitner, ‘The pluralism
of modernity: The “Architectonic Language
Problem” in Central Europe’, in, Eve Blau and
Monika Platzer, eds, Shaping the Great City: Modern
Architecture in Central Europe (Munich, Prestel,
1999), pp. 94–106; Anthony Alofsin, When Buildings
Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg
Empire and Its Aftermath, 1867–1933 (Chicago,
Chicago University Press, 2006).
14. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Post-
colonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton
and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2008).
15. ‘The philosophical traveller, sailing to the end of the
earth, is in fact travelling in time’, Joseph-Marie de
Gerando, Observation of Savage Peoples (London,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 63.
16. Ibid.
17. M. Todorova, op. cit., p. 63.
18. ‘Outre l’architecture du pays, representee par la con-
struction meme, la decoration interieure avec des tapis,
des etoffes et des poteries roumaines tres curieuses, le
cabaret roumain a cette particularite qu’il reproduit fide-
lement une partie de la vie nationale roumaine et que le
public s’y croit vraiment transporte sur les bords du
Danube, a trois mille kilometres [sic] de Paris. Tout con-
court a donner cette illusion: la musique des lautars
d’abord, cette musique qui fait tourner bien des tetes
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[. . .]; les jeunes filles roumaines, qui sont toutes authen-
tiques.’: Les merveilles de l’exposition de 1889 (Paris, A la
Librairie illustree, 1890), p. 855.
19. For the ‘Boone and Crockett Club’ (also named the
hunter’s cabin), see Christine Macy, Sarah Bonnemai-
son, Architecture and Nature—Creating the American
Landscape (London, Routledge, 2003), pp. 35–39.
20. See Carmen Popescu, ‘Le paradoxe de l’orientalisme
balkanique entre geopolitique et quete identitaire’,
in, Nabila Oulebsir, Mercedes Volait, eds, L’orientalisme
architectural. Entre imaginaires et savoirs (Paris, CNRS/
Picard, 2009), pp. 253–272.
21. ‘C’est grace a la langue francaise que j’arrive a adoucir
le lourd heritage d’un language aggressif’: L. Mitsitch,
Barbarogenie le decivilisateur (Paris, Aux Arenes de
Lutece, 1938), p. 15. The author provided the ortho-
graphy of his name in order to facilitate its pronuncia-
tion in French.
22. ‘There are few countries in the less civilized portions of
this globe which do not possess their “Paris” or some
town so called on account of its resemblance to the
French capital—which resemblance generally exists
solely in the imagination of the inhabitants.’: Harry
de Windt, Through Savage Europe (London, Collins’
Clear-type Press, 1907), p. 279. De Windt named
both Belgrade and Bucharest as being a ‘little Paris’
of the Balkans, finding that there is ‘some reason to
the simile’ by comparison with other peripheral
cities, such as Saigon, Batavia and Irkutsk, which had
their own pretentions to this title.
23. Ibid., p. 287.
24. ‘L’architecture est futile comme la vie d’ici [. . .] de
l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts partout, car seuls les architectes
diplomes de Paris travaillent ici’: Le Corbusier, Le
Voyage d’Orient (Paris, Forces Vives, 1966), p. 50.
25. ‘Il faut avouer cependant notre desillusion premiere:
les Balkans sont verts et nous les avions reves rouge
[sic]. Rouge comme de la brique sur laquelle darde le
soleil; secs, arides sans vegetation. Nous n’osions pas
meme esperer etre attaque par des brigands puisqu’on
nous avait dit qu’il n’en etait point.’: Le Corbusier,
Voyage d’Orient, carnets (Milan, Electa/Fondation Le
Corbusier, 2002), pp. 74, 75.
26. See, for instance, different items listed in his note-
books, representing objects sent to La-Chaux-de-
Fonds : ‘1 petit tapis carre macedoine [sic]’, ‘1 chale
[sic] Budapest’, ‘pots Baja’, ‘pots Knajewatz’, icones
[sic] Gabrovo’, ‘tapis brode Bocchara’ [sic], etc.; Le
Corbusier, Voyage d’Orient, carnets, op. cit., notebook
I, pp. 52–55.
27. La Fontaine, Le paysan de Danube, fable 7, book XI
(Paris, Claude Barbin et Denys Thierry, 1679):
Son menton nourrissait une barbe touffue,
Toute sa personne velue
Representait un Ours, mais un Ours mal leche.
Sous un sourcil epais il avait l’oeil cache,
Le regard de travers, nez tortu, grosse levre,
Portait sayon de poil de chevre,
Et ceinture de joncs marins.
28. D. Chakrabarty, op. cit., p. 8.
29. Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Making:
Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic
(Seattle, University Of Washington Press, 2001). On a
more limited scale within national policy and bound-
aries, see the case of Croatian architecture in, Ljljana
Blagojevic, Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins
of Belgrade Architecture 1919–1941 (Cambridge,
Mass., The MIT Press, 2003).
30. The Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (L’Institut de
cooperation intellectuelle), organised under the auth-
ority of the Society of Nations in the 1920s, considered
‘folk arts’ as a privileged domain of action in art histor-
iography. Its influence was crucial in shaping the dis-
course of art history in the interwar years. See Daniel
Maksymiuc, ‘L’engagement au sein de l’Institut de
cooperation intellectuelle’, in, Christiand Briend,
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Alice Thomine, eds, La vie des formes. Henri Focillon et
les arts (Ghent, Snoeck, 2004), pp. 283–291.
31. ‘Motivare’, in Fl. Stanculescu, Contributii la afirmarea
arhitecturii romanesti (Bucharest, Editura Stiintifica si
tehnica, 1987), p. 48.
32. Text quoted in Alberto Ferlanga, Pikionis 1887–1968
(Milan, Electa, 1999), p. 84.
33. See, for Eldem’s ‘matrix house’, Sibel Bozdogan, Suha
Ozkan, Engin Yenal, Sedad Eldem: Architect in Turkey
(Oxford, Butterworth Architecture, [1987] 1989),
p. 45.
34. See Heleni Fessas-Emanouil, ‘Reconciling modernity
and tradition: The Balkan relevance of Aristotelis
Zachos (1871–1939)—Architectural approach and
work’, in. C. Popescu, ed., National and Regional in
Architecture: Between History and Practice (Bucharest,
Simetria, 2002), pp. 142–149.
35. Ljubinka Stoilova, Petar Iokimov, ‘The search for iden-
tifiably national architecture in Bulgaria at the end of
the Nineteenth Century and during the early Twentieth
century’, in, C. Popescu, ed., National and Regional,
op. cit., pp. 96–105.
36. ‘Ce que recherche l’architecture d’aujourd’hui et ce
que beaucoup d’esprits ne comprennent pas encore,
est justement qu’elle tende a tenir compte du
terrain, et qu’a la fois, elle dresse fierement l’edifice
abstrait, tel qu’il est ici realise’: Siegfried Giedion,
‘Pallas Athene ou le visage de la Grece’, Cahiers
d’Art, nos 1–4 (1934), pp. 77–80; 78.
37. D. Pikionis, quoted in A. Ferlanga, op. cit., p. 47.
38. Ibid., p. 40.
39. G. M. Cantacuzino, ‘Arhitectura si peizajul’, Simetria,
no. I (1939), pp. 26–31.
40. ‘Experience et pauvrete’, in, Walter Benjamin, Œuvres,
II (Paris, Gallimard, 2000), pp. 364–372.
41. L. Blagojevic, op. cit., p. 8.
42. ‘Mon peuple est crucifie au nom de la civilisation [. . .]
C’est pourquoi: a bas cette civilisation !’, L. Mitsitch,
Apres Saraıevo. Expedition punitive (Paris, Aux
Arenes de Lutece, 1933).
43. ‘La civilisation est trop sauvage pour qu’elle soit
humaine’ : this was the title of one of the chapters
of Mitsitch’s Barbarogenie le decivilisateur, op.cit.
44. Ibid., p. 19: ‘On cherche un homme nouveau au genie
barbare!’. Zeniton, embodying the solar energies, was
described by Micic in his novel as the ‘Unknown’ or the
‘Last Serbian Hero’.
45. See Felipe Hernandez and Lea Knudsen Allen, ‘Post-
colonizing the primitive’, in, Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel,
Adam Sharr, eds, Primitive: Original Matters in Archi-
tecture (New York, Routledge, 2006), pp. 73–85.
46. ‘Le barbare est essentiellement particulariste’, affirmed
a character in Micic’s novel, ‘mais a ce compte,
presque tous les peuples se ruent aujourd’hui a la bar-
barie’: Mitsitch, Barbarogenie le decivilisateur, op. cit.,
p. 25.
47. See Remi Labrusse, ‘Delires anthropologiques : Josef
Strygowski face a Alois Riegl’, in, Thierry Dufrene,
Anne-Christine Taylor, eds, Canibalismes disciplinaires.
Quand l’histoire de l’art et l’anthropologie se rencontr-
ent (Paris, Musee du Quai de Branly/INHA, 2010),
pp. 149–162.
48. George Oprescu, Arta taraneasca la romani (Buchar-
est, Cultura Nationala, 1923); Peasant Art in Rouma-
nia, special autumn issue of The Studio (1929); L’art
du paysan roumain (Bucharest, Academie roumaine,
1937), etc. The Foreword for this last publication was
written by Oprescu’s friend, the French art historian
Henri Focillon.
49. ‘L’etude des cultures montre qu’il existe, a la frontiere
des classes, des zones de penetrabilite, des especes de
banlieues ou se rencontrent des elements qui tendent
a s’amalgamer et a former [. . .] un fonds commun’:
H. Focillon, ‘Introduction’, in Institut International de
Cooperation Intellectuelle, Art Populaire (Paris, Edi-
tions Duchartre, 1931), pp. VII–XVI.
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50. See the comments on these mixed influences by Leo
Schubert, La villa Jeanneret-Perret di Le Corbusier
1912—la prima opera autonoma (Vicenza, Marsilio,
2006). See also Klaus Spechtenhauser, ‘The maison
blanche: Late rediscovery of a masterpiece? Remarks
on the history of the reception of the Villa Jeanneret-
Perret’ and Catherine Courtiau, ‘The history of transi-
tional work’, both in, Klaus Specthenhauser, Arthur
Ruegg, eds, Maison Blanche Charles-Edouard Jean-
neret Le Corbusier. History and Restoration of the
Villa Jeanneret-Perret 1912–2005 (Basel/ Boston/
Berlin, Birkhauser, 2007), pp. 12–25; 26–51.
51. See, for a detailed analysis, C. Popescu, ‘Modernity in
context’, in, C. Popescu, ed., (Dis)continuities: Fragments
of Romanian Modernity in the first half of the 20th
century (Bucharest, Simetria, 2010), pp.11–100;48–51.
52. ‘Le beton arme et l’orientalisme domine, et l’amour du
neuf impliquant la tres forte comprehension des ancetres,
voila ou retournent mes pensees’: letter to W. Ritter,
undated [1912], quoted in L. Schubert, op. cit., p. 100.
53. Quoted in A. Ferlanga, op. cit., p. 68.
54. The term was coined by Giedion in 1954, in an essay
with the same title, ‘New regionalism’, published in
S. Giedion, Architecture, You and Me (Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 138–151.
55. Ibid., p. 141.
56. S. Giedion, ‘Aesthetics and the human habitat
(proposals of Commission II on aesthetics at CIAM 9,
Aix-en-Provence, 1953)’, in Architecture, You and
Me, op. cit., pp. 93–98.
57. Kenneth Frampton, ‘Greek regionalism and the
modern project: A collective endeavour’, introductory
study to Liane Lefaivre, Alexander Tzonis, Atelier 66:
The Architecture, of Dimitris and Suzana Antonakakis
(New York, Rizzoli, 1985), pp. 4–8.
58. W. B. Michaels, op. cit., p. 90.
59. Simon Sadler, ‘Foreword’ to Adam Sharr, Heigdegger’s
Hut (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2006),
pp. IX–XIV.
60. B. Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A
Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture
(Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press,
1969), np. [second page].
61. Felicity Scott, ‘Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of nomadism
and dwelling’, in, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Rejean
Legault, eds, Anxious Modernism. Experimentation in
Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, Mass., The
MIT Press, 2000), pp. 215–237.
62. Ibid., p. 216.
63. Kai Vockler, ‘“Balkanology” and the future of the
European city’, S AM, no. 6 (2008): special issue, ‘Balk-
anology. New architecture and urban phenomena in
South eastern Europe’, pp. 8–11.
64. D. Chakrabarty, op. cit., p. 3.
65. J. L. Luzkow, The Revenge of history—Why the Past
Endures (Lewiston, NY, Elvis Mellen Press, 2003).
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