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4. Photo[historio]graphy: Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Demotion of Textual History
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CHAPTER FOUR Photo[historio]graphy Christian Norberg-Schultz’s Demotion of Textual History Christian Norberg-Schulz was one of the most influential architecture theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a key interpreter of phenomenology in general and of Martin Heidegger in particular for architectural audiences. His popular definition of architecture as a meaningful expression of the genius loci, or the spirit of place, was animated by a peculiar understanding of historiography , which he developed over the course of his career. In three pivotal texts, Intentions in Architecture (1965), Existence, Space and Architecture (1971), and Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1979), Norberg-Schulz set out to reformulate how architects looked at and conceived of architecture. Specifically , he did not want them to understand modernism as a historic style. Instead, he proposed a return to the roots of modernism by visualizing the self-renewing origin of architecture. This undertaking required both rewriting the history of modern architecture and rethinking how modern architects engaged history. Acknowledging that architects were “visual thinkers” who worked mostly with images, Norberg-Schulz put forth the polemical idea that architectural history was grasped more truthfully in images than in words. To prove this, he developed a new type of history book in which the pictures were not mere illustrations to the text, but alternate narratives. Through his carefully staged photo-essays, Norberg-Schulz theorized the history of architecture as the recurrence of visual patterns. My claim is that his photo[historio]graphy was fundamentally antihistorical; it attempted to ward off critical reflection by concealing its own historical construction. Norberg-Schulz passed off his photographs as universally valid visions of a timeless natural order that modern architects were invited to return to, in order to escape history. Norberg-Schulz used photography to depict visual patterns from which he thought all original architecture emerged. During the course of his career, he used different names to refer to these visual patterns: first he called them “topological figures,” then “genius loci,” and finally “aletheic images.” The term 146 aletheic made reference to Heidegger’s description of truthful experience, which Norberg-Schulz construed as synonymous with the visual experience of photographs . His hypostatization of photographs as revealing architectural truths signals a fundamental misunderstanding of Heidegger, whose hermeneutic ontology articulated one of the most powerful twentieth-century critiques of representation as the dominant intellectual paradigm of modernity. My intention in pointing out the instrumental misuse of Heidegger is not to give primacy to philosophy over architectural phenomenology, the discourse that Norberg-Schulz helped shape. Rather, my goal is to understand Norberg-Schulz’s brand of architectural phenomenology in its own terms and in the wider historical and intellectual context that made it so influential among architects. The Historian’s Charisma Norberg-Schulz’s visual education began at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, where he studied architecture between 1945 and 1949. His intellectual aptitude was quickly recognized by his professor, Sigfried Giedion, the noted architectural historian and first secretary general of CIAM, who took a special interest in mentoring the young pupil.1 At the ETH, NorbergSchulz encountered Giedion’s view of modernity as an age of crisis in which humanity could either satisfy its material needs through science or its emotional needs through art but was unable to meet both demands holistically. Giedion discussed the historical relationship between science and art as two sine curves with “split paths.”2 The points when the two curves crossed represented times of harmony, the “high period” and perfected end of an era, when all human expression was a perfect mixture of both science and art. Giedion’s diagram suggested that no matter what the current distance between science and art might be, the two would eventually come together (even if only to diverge again). In other words, he understood architectural history teleologically. Its telos, or final cause, was immanent in its origin as the impending synthesis of science and art. The young Norberg-Schulz assimilated Giedion’s teleological historiography and emulated his habit of expressing it visually. In his personal journal entry of 5 April 1950, Norberg-Schulz diagrammed the conceptual framework derived from Giedion. The horizontal axis represented time, and the vertical axis plotted the distance between scientific thinking and artistic feeling at any one moment. The result was a series of rhombuses strung in a line, each bound by 147 PHOTO[HISTORIO]GRAPHY [3.235.199.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:05 GMT) Christian Norberg-Schulz...