Journal of Architecture_Being specific: limits of contextualising (architectural) history

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Being specific: limits of contextualising(architectural) historyCarmen Popescu aa University Paris I–Sorbonne, Paris, France

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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

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(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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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

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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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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-

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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


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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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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


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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

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contextualising


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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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

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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


[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


[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

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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

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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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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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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

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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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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-

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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.

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contextualising


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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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http://www.theoangelopoulos.com/ulyssesgaze.htm

http://www.theoangelopoulos.com/ulyssesgaze.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8336789.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8336789.stm

[. . .]; 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.

852


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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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Journal of Architecture_Being specific: limits of contextualising (architectural) history

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