A Critical Review on the Historiography of Modern Architecture

This study is on historiography of Modern Architecture since its beginning to present. As a critical review of the history of the writing history of Modern Architecture, this study tends to be a meta-history and criticism of historical text. This study try to analyse historiographical project of Modern architecture at specific phase since the beginning of modern architecture. The historiography of Modern architecture shows that writing a history is making a discourse of Modern architecture as a imaginative representation to define and justify Modernism in architecture. The analysis of canonic text since early 20th century proves that the history of writing history of Modern architecture played a critical role not only to shape of our ideal but the practice of architecture with a ideology construction in retrospect. With a name of truth or morality they made myths about the modernity in architecture. So we can find deep 'Hagelean Unconscious' in writing history of Modern architecture not even the first generation of historians but the second generation who were influenced by earlier writer in spite of their intention of revision and overcoming, which is in itself the key concept of Hegel's philosophy of History. Under this kind of 'operative' discourse our view point of Modern architecture were confined and the historiography of Modern architecture itself was narrowly defined as a kind of melodrama that a few architect and work of art matters. The rise of critical history fundamentally has changed the way of seeing and writing the history of Modern architecture. but it has also a new kind of dilemma as regard to writing history and involving practice. This review of historiography traces the texts of historians as like Pevsner, Giedion, Banham, Rowe, Tafuri, Frampton, and Curtis relating to different discours making. When we consider Benjamin's famous concept of constellation, writing history necessarily is a kind of montage making in time and we always need to recognize the historicity of historiography.

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