Mapping Architectural Criticism, 20th-21st centuries – MAPPING.CRIT.ARCH

Included in the category "Feasibility studies" of ANR 2014, this proposal aims at developing, out of a limited group of architectural historians - the present consortium – an international network of researchers on XXth and XXIth centuries architectural criticism.

Dealing with architectural criticism imposes first to clarify the term: not by fixing a definition a priori, rather by identifying various conceptions of architectural criticism. Thus, the main objective of this network is to structure a field of research on the criticism of architecture. Historical scholarship on architectural criticism encounters some epistemological difficulty: the plurality of its definitions and its mostly indistinct disciplinary boundaries with other forms of architectural writing. Thus an international network permits to compare several conceptions of architectural criticism and different ways of writing its history: these different narratives stem from historically and culturally different contexts. Far from setting a priori a normative or doctrinal definition, a historical analysis will establish a state of the research, which put these definitions in relation to historical and cultural contexts. It takes into consideration the international dimension of criticism, revealed by movements of critics and circulation of magazines, but also by cultural transfers of its fundamental notions from other disciplines. The project suggests examining the relationships between criticism and the making of architectural heritage from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, as well as the links between “crisis” of criticism, crisis of the architectural debate, and reception of contemporary architecture in the public realm.
Since the 1980s, the history of the architects’ visual culture, the history of cultural transfers, have renewed objects, topics and practices of architectural history. History of architectural criticism – as far as criticism is understood as practices, texts, protagonists and cultural transfers – may participate in developing an innovative research field in the realm of architectural history, at the intersection of history of architectural theories, architectural historiography and history of architectural publication.

Beyond this epistemological question ( a "intellectual" mapping), a second objective is "to map" the field, by identifying researches and publications on architectural criticism and its history ( a "material" mapping). We will extend the current consortium to a broader researchers' international network by considering the orientations that stem out of this current state of the researches. One of the goals of this network will be to answer a call for international collaborative research project on the theme, for example ERA-net (Horizon 2020 " Uses of the Past " or " Heritage " 3rd axis).
The network will lead a collective reflection on scientific and documentary priorities, on the corpuses, which are necessary or relevant for the history of architectural criticism. Stemming from this debate, the network will set up a strategy and a methodology to collect and organize corpuses (bibliographies, inventories of paper or on-line magazines). In a further stage of the network scientific activity, is will eventually lead to produce a research instrument intended for a wider community of scholars in architecture, in architectural history and history of art, in town planning and more widely in humanities and social sciences.
The network will take on the task of prospective reflection on the modes and places of preservation of the archives of the architecture critics, in France and abroad; this aspect of the project will be led in connection with the Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique Archives de la Critique d’art (Rennes).