Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Foreword

FOREWORD Architecture is often thought of as the product of the work of architects and other professionals who work with built environments. Architects, it is thought, make architecture, and therefore they are considered the appropriate focus for any study of the subject. Who architects are, and what they do, becomes the definition of “architecture.” Similarly, as architects are primarily the designers of buildings and other urban projects, they and these material objects are conflated into the term “architecture”—and architecture thus becomes “architects and the buildings they design.” With some notable exceptions, it is therefore this broad understanding of architecture that has come to dominate architectural and urban history for the last two hundred or so years. In particular, architectural historians and other interested parties have turned their attention to well-known individuals and buildings, writing monographs of the most influential architects and detailed studies of grand projects and major constructions. Even when they have considered less well-known architects and buildings, the same underlying logic often still holds. ix As a result of this, the history of architecture becomes the history of the production of architecture, an understanding of architecture that, while undoubtedly erudite, sophisticated, and suggestive, also has a central weakness: it is a history of architecture which stops at the moment when the building has been built. In other words, the whole history of architecture as a living entity—as something that has an afterlife, long after the construction crews have left and the architects have moved on to other projects—is largely absent. However, for the past decade or so, a new strand of architectural history has been emerging, one that refutes such a position and sees architecture as a dynamic entity that continues to have a life and importance long after the material object has been constructed. In particular, this new kind of architectural history sees the building as having a social, political, cultural, and environmental relevance that stretches far beyond the relatively short time of the building’s original conception and construction, and extends into decades or even centuries of prolonged existence. In addition, this new history sees that architecture has its ultimate meanings not in the world of the architect or of other built-environment professions, but in the ways in which the public (or publics) experiences, perceives, and understands it. In short, it is not the architect or somehow the building itself that determines meaning, but the audience or users of the building. This is where things get really interesting. For if the meaning of architecture is now displaced in part away from the realm of the architect, client, and construction company, away from the material substance of bricks, mortar, concrete, glass, and timber, and instead is moved into the realm of experiencing subjects and what they might think of a building, then how can an architectural history begin to recover that world of perceptions? What are the thoughts, ideas, associations, pleasures, events, uses, and misuses of architecture that are constantly being recreated by those who encounter architecture? It is into this rich yet somewhat murky realm that Conjuring the Real treads. Moreover, it does so in a manner that, I think, offers some highly insightful suggestions as to how this realm might be x Foreword illuminated, charted, and explored. First, it considers the question of how architecture is represented in ways that are often quite separate from the world of professional design and construction. How are buildings and architects depicted in works of art, in film, in novels? What forms do they take, and how are they described? Such enquiries help us realize that architecture is not always a matter of plan, section, and elevation, but also an affair of impression, psychology, reaction, smell, listening, emotion, and bodily movement. Second, the essays here often explore the minds of the creators of these other—or perhaps it would be better to say “supplementary”—architectures. In showing how architecture is represented in painting, movies, and novels, for example, the question is necessarily raised as to who might also enter the creative process of imagining what architecture is and might be. The architect here is displaced from being the sole owner or controller of architectural meaning and is joined by other, equally imaginative instigators of architectural resonance and implication. Third, and most radically of all, the book also then raises the question —sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly—of what the reader or...