Abstracts
This whole maze of evidence: rethinking social history through Hunt v. Parmly
Erik Carver, Columbia University.
In architectural histories invoking the 1861 lawsuit brought by Richard Morris Huntagainst his client Eleazer Parmly, the verdict—securing fixed fees for architects—serves as support for larger narratives of professionalization and social closure. But by advancing competing arguments, with their respective bodies of visual and verbal evidence, the trial transcripts question authorship in ways that reveal the instability of the social and its dependence upon the contingencies of material and aesthetic production.
At a Safe Remove: The Story of Lunar Receiving Laboratory
Edward Eigen, Harvard University.
The narrative of this paper retraces, and, at the same time, follows the transit of unprecedentedly rare bits of evidence on their inbound voyage to earth. The history of the Apollo Space Program typically takes as its discursive point of origin John F. Kennedy’s challenge: “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon.” What is not as consistently cited in commemorations of this auspicious era is the final clause of the president’s incautious fiat: “and returning him safely to the Earth.” It is this perilous homecoming, the return to Earth, that is the interpretive crux of this investigation.
Failing Memories and Forgotten Histories: The Early Church of San Giobbe, Venice in Dispute
Janna Israel, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
This paper evaluates conflicting evidence about the history of the church of San Giobbe in sixteenth-century Venice presented during a land dispute. By evaluating the gaps and discrepancies in the evidence accumulated about the church–including personal testimonies, city views, testaments, legislation about ecclesiastical taxes, and architectural design motifs–this paper seeks to understand how the function of the building’s narrative changes over time, and how shifting power dynamics transform the types of evidence generated and the narratives produced about the site.
Evidence about Evidence: Architecture and Coin Trials in late Medieval Europe
Lauren Jacobi, MIT.
In late medieval England, during a ritual known as the Trial of the Pyx, coins were put on judicial trial to test the fineness of their metal content. They were then inspected and stored at Westminster Abbey in a vaulted undercroft beneath the monks’ dormitory. Such events raise questions about the ontological status of coins. They also help us consider the types of spaces where evidence was gathered and archived in early modernity. The paper examines a series of case studies that address the kinds of evidence deployed in instances in which money was tested, as well as the ways in which architectural history as a discipline employs evidence and crafts narrative.
Settling Dreams: Responsibility, Inheritance, and Belonging in Narratives of Land
Ijlal Muzaffar, Rhode Island School of Design.
What does it mean to settle and how is it related to questions of evidence? Does it matter if write a certain history as a narrative of land as oppose to that of space? In this talk I mine a family history of settlement in a desert landscape, a history that cuts through Scottish engineers measuring size of silt particles in canals and relatives appealing to the Queen’s Privy Council for justice, to see how claims of belonging and responsibility are sustained by conjuring what we might call “acceptably indeterminate” evidence at different but intertwined levels of a long settlement enterprise. Instead of looking for written evidence to prove or disprove stories narrated over generations in political, professional, and familial circles, I’ll consider these stories as evidence themselves and explore what new forms of archives and evidence inhere in oral histories, especially when they seek to describe land instead of space.
From Chronicles to Storia: Bruno Zevi’s L’architettura. Cronache e Storia and the integration between theory and practice
Daria Ricchi, University of Oxford.
Bruno Zevi’s magazine L’architettura. Cronache e Storia, 1955 -, is an example of Italian idealism influenced by the philosopher Benedetto Croce. Thanks to the magazine Zevi explains the difference between chronicles and history after WWII and how it applies to architecture and its history. By using Croce, Zevi explains what turns chronicles into storia (i.e. the use of fantasia and interpretation). The difference between chronicles and history further helps to understand the difference between architectural theory and practice and how to foster the integration between the two.