Nor is conquest required for the transit of ideas about space, structure, or ornament, all of which can travel along trade routes independently of the expertise that created them.Īrchitecture thus provides an excellent lens through which to view the transformation wrought by the waves of European colonization that, beginning in the 15th century, eventually subordinated much of the rest of the world, as well as for understanding how, following the collapse of that system, its impact, which very much continues into the present, may best be judged. And yet, throughout human history and almost certainly even earlier, buildings have been shaped by the mobility of people, including construction labor, skilled artisans, building contractors, professional architects, and the people who employ all of them, as well as of the objects that carry with them decorative motifs and even ideas about structure. The use of locally available materials and the importance of nuanced responses to climate help ensure that approaches to architecture, and especially to preindustrial vernacular structures, have often been celebrated for creating or indeed embodying particular cultures. 2Īll of this makes architecture an alternative to language and literature as a marker of identity that is deeply rooted in place and yet easily influenced by outsiders or newcomers. 1 Whatever the intention of the original designer and his or her client, a building’s meaning is typically much less stable than those of texts as over time it can very easily acquire new associations entirely outside the control of its creators, depending above all on what transpires within or just beyond its walls. Despite a considerable body of theory, often influenced by linguistics, about how they communicate meaning, buildings are usually relatively mute, particularly to those not educated in the nuances they may be intended to convey. Styles, spatial configurations, and constructional systems can all be imported, or indeed exported, but the experience of a particular structure is almost always tied to a specific location. Buildings, despite the possibility of prefabrication, typically travel less easily. They can, however, be mastered by people who are not native speakers it is also, of course, possible to be bi- and even trilingual from early childhood. ![]() Languages have precise meanings that cannot always be easily translated into other tongues. ![]() Language and architecture are both closely associated with the expression of cultural identity, yet they function very differently. While the second and third of these had long been addressed in relation to British settler colonies, architectural history’s global turn meant that they could no longer be considered in isolation from new comprehensive histories of imperialism. ![]() Whether or not they fully engaged with the theories articulated in scholarship whose initial focus was the analysis of literature, in the case of Said, or of history, in that of subaltern studies, 21st-century architectural historians have paid unprecedented attention to the post-1500 architecture of the Global South, to colonial architecture and its relationship to economic exploitation, to post-independence architecture especially in relation to international modernisms, and to the impact that colonialism had on the architecture of the metropole. Although architectural historians took more than a decade to fully absorb its implications, there are few humanities or social sciences disciplines that since the 1990s have been more thoroughly transformed by this once radical shift in perspective, which has changed how the architecture of almost all parts of the world is understood. During this period, Edward Said’s book Orientalism and the early work in subaltern studies both challenged the supposedly dispassionate character of Western scholarship on North Africa and Asia by demonstrating the degree to which it had been skewed by racial and class bias. In the last quarter of the 20th century theories of the postcolonial were usually closely tied to the experience of British and French colonialism in a band of North African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian colonies stretching from Morocco to Malaysia.
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