Notes on Reinhold Martin’s “Professional Histories”

“Architecture and its Pasts” Symposium paper

1. “There is only history, and that’s all… That’s all there is, period.”
2. Historically inaccurate to think that digital is driving students and faculty away from history. Historians were quicker than architects in computing.
3. Macy conferences in 1958 - Annalles historian Fernand Braudel (game theory and social maths to history writing)
4. 1970 statistics and data - social historian Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie: “Tomorrow’s historian will be a computer programmer or he will no longer exist”
5. Quantitative history would yield surprising discoveries as to the role of non-human actors
6. *Early quantitative history dominated by mid-century desire to align historical knowledge with natural and social sciences from genetics to economics - failure by historians to take up statistical methods pioneered with help of computers by sciences is a failure to render history scientific
7. Relevance of history for architecture: history as science has been 
8. Given set of facts that can be treated as historical rather than natural: note oxymoronic “history of science” (constructivists vs. those who wanted science to be treated as a branch of metaphysics)
9. History of science: implicitly relativizes science (this is the crux of the science wars)
10. History of science: immediate post war period - American universities: efforts of figures like James B. Conant (Harvard president - changed the core curriculum to make students understand the historical nature of science) - Kuhn was a product of Conant’s objective.
11. Structure of Scientific Revolutions: opened the door to constructivism
12. History of Science underwent a paradigm shift of its own in 1960s - science as contingent on external factors.
13. Still, very little history taught in science
14. Ratio of historians to practicioners: 48 vs 1086 (??) - similar in architecture (probably)
15. Production of actual professional historical knowledge is very small
16. Historians ambivalence: can illustrate progress, or undermine it
17. History as a form of truth telling: partakes of the same scientific authority it tries to relativize.
18. But what about knowledge proper to other professions like medicine or law? In house version of Kant’s conflict of faculties: reflective and applied knowledge: higher faculties (theology, law, medicine) which had limits of free exercise of reason; lower (philosophy) should adhere to disinterested norms of to reason and morality. Modern university: begins with separation of power/instrumentality from knowledge (philosophy - today: arts and sciences). U of Berlin 1810: but underwritten by power necessary to build the university and enforce its laws, such as academic freedom (Derrida talk at Columbia in 1980 makes this point in Mochlos).
19. Late 19th C (largely in US) this separation is between new professions (architecture) and the classical humanities, where the teaching of history was important for building model citizens for the new republic (teaching ancient history). Thomas Jefferson’s program for UVA: curriculum (became state law) architecture was treated as branch of mathematics. Anatomy theatre is off the lawn - allegory of modernization.
20. Labs today in architecture school: history and science have long been bedfellows… what would a lab with an historical consciousness look like - associated with Phil rather than theology faculty. Lab work is eminently historical because the lab model has come about by a process of historical construction and must be interrogated.
21. “Teach architectural history as the best history of science is taught today, as the contestable accumulation of contingent truths.” Understand architecture as an epistemic thing - indissolubly linked to material conditions and truth claims.

Part II

1. Historian’s most fundamental axiom: the simple fact that things change. Actually, epistemic things.
2. Often overlooked in pseudo-innovation of laboratory work. Studio work: student’s have no difficulty imaging that certain things can change. Post modern modesty: can’t imagine that all things can change.
3. Lack of imagination is result of a post modern modesty drilled since childhood - possible to fetishize earth shattering innovation such as personal computer, but what is most profound is what is least noticed: the re-invention of consumer masses as self-fulfilled persons complete with personal preferences to which the system responds obligingly with ever-greater refinement.
4. Corresponding so-called truth forcefed since 1989: there is no historical alternative to this system: so, work on small problems as though they were big ones.
5. end of history narrative underwriting the neo-liberal consensus is prime candidate for replacement by a new historical consciousness: things do, and can change, and thus one might actively pursue structural change.
6. Arch history: causality: how things changes, who is responsible and why
7. Causality: often anything but linear - eg. Kuhn
8. Build discourse to put architecture back into history - don’t demolish canon, but teach students to expect much more out of the canon.
9. Returns to faculty of law: the canon can refer to secular or theo. Re-cast canon as law course, rather than grand tour. History plays small role in law school. At CU, only electives - has 5 out of 90 faculty who are legal historians.
10. Historical narratives cannot int.. the lawfulness of the law
11. Historical knowledge lends its authority in architecutre by positioning aesthetic judegment as a kind of science - which RM thinks it is - devoted to discovery of architecture’s inherent lawfulness. Survey courses are thus aesthetics reconstituted as science reconstituted as law, rather than a course on style.
12. Potential autonomy of historical research? Architecture is more messy, studio and history are mixed.
13. “Historical consciousness and the transformative possibilities that that implies.”
14. Writing and teaching history requires narrative coherence over and against the fragmentary evidence. So, an architectural past suggests an archaeological perspective, acknowledges this fragmentation, and may be able to achieve a more historically accurate picture of any given past. Eg. the Parthenon, any building treated as archaeological fragment can be interrogated, and entire worlds can be reconstructed from these fragments. “In other words, look closely at the inside and you see the outside.” This raises a question: if architecture is to be reconnected to its pasts and architectures, who’s pasts and who’s architectures do we mean today? Acropolis helping to stage Greek nationalism in the 19th century, locates antiquity in the very crosshairs of global capital.
15. Recent debates over redoing the canon have yielded subfields (comparative globalizations, etc). Does globalization reorganize categories? The “normal science” of architectural history ignores such questions at it’s own peril. In architecture, “normal science” takes place as much in the lab/studio as in the library. The cliche of the global studio - students and teachers traipsing unreflectively into the global reserve to identify ahistorical truths about urbanization - eg. learning from X studio, save the world studio, etc. This studio lives in the ever present - the history of nationalism can be useful corrective. 
16. Globalization ideology is usually dolled out by stats (talking points). Why 50% urbanized has acquired this symbolism, I don’t know… It’s main rhetorical function is to wash away in the sheer blindingness of statistical sublime any historical question as to how and why this came about, and what it actually means.
17. To rethink architecture’s relationship to history, is to rethink teh studio, particularly with respect to the global. Can’t teach history in studio, but can think historical questions. Eg. “the housing question” (19th C London). Question framed more simply: design public/social housing in Mumbai. Pedagogically: double estrangement: context (far away, unimaginable) and program (can only approach housing in historical terms - because NY and Mumbai have no public housing policy to speak of today). Mumbai: profit-oriented initiatives in the form of public-private partnerships. Only available imaginary in which public housing exists lies in the past (lies in the archive of international modernism).
18. Most students approach privatization as a law to be obeyed - studio projects that obey the hegemonic ethos of the developer. The relationship between arch and money is irreducibly aesthetic and historical.
19. Make the drive towards privatization and the arch’l imaginaries that feed it, seem that much less inevitable. That is, to set up the conditions under which a historical consciousness might develop.
20. Arch typifies the intellectual conflicts between instrumental and reflective knowledge in the university.
21. We are insufficiently haunted today by “the presence of the past” - made anti-foundationalist and spectral rather than foundational in tone, this indirect presence mediated by pedagogy and the historicity of knowledge must be conjured in the classroom to avoid a foreclosed future.
22. Therefore, teaching history is hardly an academic exercise “teaching as such”, professional teaching, where the past returns everyday without repetition. Reminds of the basic double binds that play out daily in a conflict of the faculties - the return of the past as a problem rather than as a fact, elicits historical consciousness that lies at the base of all arch knowledge. 
23. What is historical about arch is a recurrent dispute about the proper arrangement of past, present and future and who does the arrangement and to what end. It is from this irreducible historicity, replayed a little different each time, that the discipline derives its authority and responsibility.