History

Definition

History, in the hermeneutic and critical traditions informing this wiki, is not a neutral record of past facts but an active, effective medium — what Gadamer calls "effective history" (Wirkungsgeschichte), the history of effects that shapes how we understand in the present. Benjamin radicalizes this: history is the object of a "genealogy of urbanization," and the past becomes legible only through the dialectical image — the constellation in which "what has been" flashes up in a moment of danger. For architecture, history names both the discipline (architectural historiography) and the effective weight of built precedents, types, and traditions through which the present builds. It is the medium through which architecture acquires meaning that is never merely present but always transmitted and reinterpreted.

Key Thinkers

• Hans-Georg Gadamer — history as effective history; the past's power over the present.
• Walter Benjamin — history as genealogy of urbanization; the dialectical image and the "moment of danger."
• Brian Elliott — Benjamin's historiography of the city and its relevance for architecture.
• Edward Hollis — history as "a (re)construction of preexisting structures," cognate with the practice of altering existing buildings; judged by Ricoeur's eikon problem.
• Michel Foucault — the concept's critical variant: traditional history ("the dull constancy of instinctual life… exert[ing] its force indiscriminately in the present as it did in the past") against effective history — "a history of discontinuity, for the sake of breaking tendencies for recognition and 'rediscovery of ourselves'" ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," quoted by Rice). See effective-history.

Related Concepts

• Tradition — history's living, transmitted dimension.
• Hermeneutics — the theory of understanding that takes history as its medium.
• Dialectical Image — Benjamin's mode of grasping history's constellation.
• Historiography of the Interior — history's architectural counterpart: how the interior's past was (re)constructed, with what evidence and narrative.
• Memory — Ricoeur's pairing: the representation of the past is "exposed to the dangers of forgetting, but is also entrusted to its protection."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — history's interior deployment, in Foucault's terms: traditional history's "dull constancy" diagnosed in the essentialist interior histories (Praz, Thornton, Gere) — a "post-nineteenth-century way of seeing… which is itself not appreciated within an historical context"; effective history as the alternative ("a knowledge of history easily disintegrates this unity, depicts its wavering course, locates its moments of strength and weakness, and defines its oscillating reign"); the interior's emergence "cast as an event in the schema of effective history, an event that, when perceived as such, enables a 'reversal of a relationship of forces'"; and the verdict: essentialised histories "have produced a sleep of historical consciousness." See effective-history, historiography-of-the-interior.
• Gadamer for Architects — the influence of the past upon the present.
• Benjamin for Architects — genealogy of urbanization and the city's history.
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — history as "(re)construction of preexisting structures," mirrored by interior architecture's alteration of buildings; Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting: history constructs images of the past — Plato's eikon, "the presence of an absent thing stamped with the seal of the anterior" that is yet "a thing in its own right" — and owes the past "protective trust"; history-writing shares with the "herstories" the problem of evidence for suppressed practices.
• Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — history as navigational instrument: "In earlier eras, understanding the relationship between past and present was essential to navigating a path to the future. This strategy offers a valuable historical reference for addressing the dynamic conditions of today"; via Daniel Bell, "lessons may be learned from history that can be applied to the future" — the design-disciplinary counterpart to Gadamer's effective history and Hollis's reconstructive history (see spatial-therapy).
• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the methodological register: history written from a single drawing and its obsolete room — "This chapter is not an attempt to restage history as it was, but rather, it explores historical knowledge as an ongoing reconstruction in the present located somewhere between fact and fiction." The reconstruction is done through fragments that time has chewed (Frascari, quoted: "The best part begins when the plan is torn to pieces by history, defeated by events, chewed by time; when it reaches us as an incomprehensible collage of forgotten memories… as pure decoration") and through waiting's counter-temporality — "boredom and waiting are figures of resistance to the empty recurrence of history." The interior-historiographic counterpart to Hollis: history as the room and the sheet, jointly read. See waiting-room, historiography-of-the-interior.
• Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — history's media-collapse: the book as the medium that fused fragmented histories. "In many ways, the rise of the book and its ease of dissemination can be seen as a collapsing together of previously fragmented histories. In other words, cultures and ideas that were previously disjointed by space and/or time were now being connected through books and book learning. In some ways, it seems that the introduction of the book as a mass medium is a point in history at which all cultural production becomes, at least in part, referential." The historiographic corollary: "it would take the benefit of four hundred years of hindsight before anyone was able to understand (or at least 'put into words') that the changes that occurred in the built environment over that period of time were in large part a result of the arrival of the book and its succession of buildings as humankind's primary cultural register." Where Gadamer's effective history weights the present with the past, Jacobus's referential culture is effective history industrialized — a culture that "learned to do by reading," its building-forms borrowing "their ideas from a former age." See cultural-registers, dematerialization.
• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — history as experience and the historicity of the observer: alltagsgeschichte treats historical change as the outcome of "action by concrete groups and individuals" rather than as a process "occurring behind their backs" (p. 6); it calls for "the historical self-enlightenment of the seemingly ahistorical social sciences, insight into their historicity" (p. 9); and it insists that existing concepts of the past "remain nonetheless constructions; they are provisional and fragile" (p. 8). See historicity, alltagsgeschichte, historical-experience.
• source-notes/baudrillard-1983-fatal-strategies
• source-notes/baudrillard-1994-simulacra-and-simulation