An Anthropology of Architecture

Victor Buchli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781845207830
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Architecture General
• Index: Social Sciences

Ever since anthropology has existed as a discipline, anthropologists have thought about architectural forms. This book provides the first overview of how anthropologists have studied architecture and the extraordinarily rich thought and data this has produced.With a focus on domestic space - that intimate context in which anthropologists traditionally work - the book explains how anthropologists think about public and private boundaries, gender, sex and the body, the materiality of architectural forms and materials, building technologies and architectural representations. Each chapter uses a broad range of case studies from around the world to examine from within anthropology what architecture 'does' - how it makes people and shapes, sustains and unravels social relations.An Anthropology of Architecture is key reading for students of anthropology, material culture, geography, sociology, architectural theory, design and city planning.

1
THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY

1

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century European preoccupation with the origins of architecture and the role played by prehistoric and non-European forms that can be said to date back to the writings of the ancient Roman architectural writer and theoretician Vitruvius. His Ten Books on Architecture speculates on origins and concludes that they are derived from “primitive” archetypal forms born out of the processual assembly of disparate elements into the conditions that produce the social and the human (consider Viollet le Duc’s version of the first “hut”; Figure 2):

The men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves and groves, and lived on savage fare. As time went on, the thickly crowded trees in a certain place … caught fire … and the inhabitants of the place were put to flight. … After it subsided, they drew near and … brought up other people to it, showing them by signs how much comfort they got from it. In that gathering of men, at a time when utterance of sound was purely individual, from daily habits they fixed upon articulate words just as these happen to come; then, from indicating by name things in common use, the result was that … they began to talk, and thus originate conversation with one another. (Vitruvius 1914: 38)

Figure 2 Viollet le Duc’s first hut. Source: Viollet le Duc, The Habitations of Man (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1876).

Thus, as Hvatuum (2004: 30) observes apropos Vitruvius, investigations into the origins of these forms were inseparable from investigations into the origin of human society and what it means to be human—signaling an enduring interpretative problem surrounding the nature of this relation between humans and nature, the status of built forms, and their relation to the production of social life and human life in general. In addition, the major themes of language, human social organization, and morality are seen early in Vitruvius as being intimately implicated and constitutive of one another within an architectural nexus (Hvatuum 2004). In these respects, architectural forms assume the status of the artifact par excellence for understanding the nature and structure of human society. As one enters the debates of the nineteenth century, architectural form itself becomes the most significant analytical category with which to consider the questions of origins and ideal forms of human society and human habitation both in the past and the future. In fact, the two idealizations are really opposite sides of the same analytical coin. The result of this, of course, is that architecture established itself in the nineteenth century as a particular analytical form that was foundational to the discipline of anthropology and one that has remained in various guises to this day. However, this nineteenth-century category emerged within specific conditions to meet specific intellectual needs—needs that have changed considerably through the development of anthropology and, though related and similar to those in the present, are distinctly different from contemporary concerns. At stake here is the idea of the universalism of human being in its various guises, from the nineteenth-century concern with the “psychic unity of man” (Stocking 1995) to notions of universalism in the twentieth century. This analytical category thus needs to be reconsidered more directly in terms of its origins so that one might make better sense of it and its use in the present. Although the uses of this analytical category have changed considerably, the commitment to it remains strong.

By way of an earlier example, Joseph Rykwert (1981) notes how European commentators such as the seventeenth-century Bishop de Lobkowitz reaffirmed Vitruvius in the wake of explorers’ observations. De Lobkowitz described the indigenous architecture in Hispaniola (Haiti) and the palace of the cacique of Hispaniola in classical terms. Rykwert notes that the bishop might have been aware of the stone traditions in other parts of the Americas but probably chose to ignore them. Instead, de Lobkowitz’s purpose was to describe the universalism of the analytical trope of the “primitive hut” within the Vitruvian tradition, which evolved into the classical orders (Rykwert 1981: 137). By cataloging the evidence of these recurrent (if not at times imperfect) manifestations of the “primitive hut” of timbers, de Lobkowitz argued for the universalism of the classical orders for all of humanity from a distinctly ethnocentric European perspective as being the most evolved manifestation of these eternal principles that are in evidence everywhere, as the anthropological evidence would indicate—as could at once be seen in Haiti as well as within the European past and present.

It is later in the eighteenth century with the writings of the Abbé Laugier that speculation on the origins of architecture and the significance of the Vitruvian “primitive hut” regains increased significance (Figure 3). In the wake of European exploration and colonization and its encounters with other peoples and building traditions, the position of European forms was not so self-evident (Hvatuum 2004: 37). Only by peering beyond the surfaces, into the ethnographic “other” and the archaeological “other” of antiquity could the significance of forms be discerned. The question of the origin of architectural form was inseparable from the question of the origin of human social formations. Language, social order, and architecture were seen in this

Figure 3 Laugier’s “primitive hut.” Source: British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects.

Vitruvian tradition as inextricably linked. In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment-era thought was founded on the quest for origins to establish the foundations of rational thought. As Hvatuum notes, this is the tradition of rational certitude that we associate with Cartesianism: to find the fundamental unassailable principle upon which one can secure and found our reason and actions (Hvatuum 2004: 30–4). This preoccupation with form and its origins, however, was more importantly linked to early modern European concerns in relation to the emergence of new technologies—especially the printing press, which, as Carpo (2001) argues, emphasized visual form over other concerns. As Carpo notes, visual form through line drawing as advanced by the printing press and the radical spread of books proved the most effective means for the development, spread, and understanding of architectonic ideas, as opposed to the notoriously nonvisual and literary means by which Vitruvius’s ideas were spread through handwritten manuscripts (Carpo 2001). The new technology enabled a powerful and stable form of understanding in visual and formal terms that could rise above the idiosyncrasies of local understanding and, through their visualized printed forms, achieve a stability and reproducibility that would transcend local contingencies, traditions, and space and produce a more universalizing form of knowledge (Carpo 2001).

Such Enlightenment-era preoccupations with the underlying principles behind superficial form are at the heart of the project of Rousseau and his search for the homme naturel as Hvatuum (2004: 31) notes. As with Rousseau, the Abbé Laugier, as Hvatuum observes, attempted to find the foundations of architecture, which were so intimately linked with social order and morality: “It is the same in architecture as in all other arts; its principles are founded on simple nature, and nature’s process clearly indicates its rules” (Laugier 1977: 11 quoted in Hvatuum 2004: 31). Laugier notes further, “Such is the course of simple nature; by imitating the natural process, art was born. All the splendours of architecture ever conceived have been modelled on this little rustic hut I have just described. It is by approaching the simplicity of the first model that fundamental mistakes are avoided and true perfection is achieved” (Laugier 1977: 12 quoted in Hvatuum 2004: 31). Thus, the “primitive hut” was closest to God’s divine creation and order. By human mimesis, the hut was reproduced and was a means of harnessing the power and authority of the divine through what can be described as sympathetic magic—that is, the reiteration of certain forms to reproduce and re-present and harness the power of the original form.

Laugier’s project was clearly to establish these origins. Hvattum (2004: 34) notes how Laugier wanted to follow in Descartes’s footsteps (a century earlier) in formulating a foundation for architectural reasoning—“an axiom for architecture.” As Hvattum observes, “The domain of architecture, obscured by the relativity of taste and sensation, was now to be brought into the daylight of reason” (Hvattum 2004: 34), thereby “to save architecture from eccentric opinions by disclosing its fixed and unchangeable laws” (Laugier quoted in Hvattum 2004: 34). Thus, rather than being the point of an obscure origin, as in Vitruvius, the “primitive hut” of Laugier, according to Hvattum, was a “Cartesian axiom” (2004: 34).

Hvattum notes how the mid-nineteenth-century theorist Gottfried Semper, though rejecting the idea of an original “primitive hut,” did not see one direct prototype. Nonetheless, Semper still shared the project of finding an axiom, but in relation to a specific tradition: “[r]ather the origin and principle of architecture was to be found in the historical particularity of its inception” (Hvattum 2004: 35). Thus, anthropology provided numerous examples for how this might work across the world. Hvattum notes how Semper’s supreme example was another architectural form, albeit a recent one, the “Carib hut” from the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Figure 4). Hvatuum notes this was not an obscure abstraction like Laugier’s example “but a real building”—“no phantom of the imagination, but a highly realistic exemplar of wooden construction, borrowed from ethnology” (Semper quoted in Hvattum 2004: 36). Semper went on to describe the hut thus: “all elements of ancient architecture appear in their most original and unadulterated form: the hearth as center, the mound surrounded by a framework of poles as terrace, the roof carried by columns, and mats as space enclosure or wall” (Semper quoted in Vuyosevich 1991: 6). In so doing, Semper could be seen to echo the Crystal Palace itself with its columns/“poles” framing glass/“mats” (Figure 5).

Figure 4 Semper’s Carib hut. Source: The University of Edinburgh.

Figure 5 The Crystal Palace, 1851. Source: Mary Evans Picture Library.

However, Semper’s discussions of ornament—and, in particular, wall decoration—emerge as centrally relevant for the consideration of architectural forms. Unlike Viollet-Le-Duc, Pugin, and Ruskin (Mallgrave 1989: 40), who were preoccupied with the honesty of materials and architectural form, Semper turned the focus away from built structure to the surface of interior ornamentation. Surface and decoration were anterior to architectural form. Architectural elements such as walls were seen as merely inconsequential material supports for the decorative surface of walls. Semper argues this position from an investigation of nomadic and tent forms, arguing that woven partitions, textiles, and so on were primarily for the creation of enclosures and that walls per se as permanent architectural elements exist merely to support the surface (Semper 1989: 103–4). The veracity of the claim regarding the primal nature of textile partitioning over architectural form is not what is significant to note. What is noteworthy in Semper’s analysis is a shift from form to surface as the key site for analysis. Semper posits an intriguing and productive reversal of concerns that at once opens out a more phenomenological engagement with the significance it attaches to surface. It suggests a more nuanced understanding of surface as the key site of social engagement in terms of use and maintenance of architectural forms, particularly in terms of quotidian activities that serve to reproduce social relations over the long term as opposed to the more infrequent interactions associated with the creation and maintenance of built forms per se.

Regarding Semper, Hvattum (2004: 37) argues that the possibility of a single unitary origin thesis was challenged by the proliferation of travel accounts by missionaries and others since the eighteenth century. These accounts began to contradict the notion of timelessness through their descriptions of encounters with the extraordinary diversity of built forms influenced by local conditions and circumstances. This indicated a shift to geographic particularism that Hvattum argues would later inform the notion of a Volksgeist and the subsequent role that notion would play in the creation of nationhood, national forms, and autochthonous national/ethnic and material culture origins. Later, these environmental concerns would be at the core of investigations into sustainability and environmental impact that dominate more recent explorations into vernacular and non-European and nonsedentary architectural forms (Amerlinck 2001; Prussin 1995; Rapoport 1969; Vellinga 2009).

Semper, Hvattum notes (2004: 42), thus rejected the idea of a unitary origin thesis and the idea of an actual originary “primitive hut”—and, along with it, the tripartite scheme of Quatremère, which described “three types of human communities: hunters and gatherers, nomadic herdsmen, and, finally agricultural peoples” (Hvatuum 2004: 39). True architecture within this scheme only emerged with the built forms of agricultural sedentary peoples (Neolithic revolution), and each architectural type referred to a particular kind of social organization and climatic condition (Hvattum 2004: 39–43).

Hvattum observes that Semper instead argued for the “poetic ideal” of architecture emerging from his study of the diverse and burgeoning anthropological sources of the nineteenth century. Hvattum notes the influence of Gustav Klemm, who was influential in exploring this diversity, which he investigated at heroic length in his Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit (2004: 43). He argued for the “human desire for representation,” which resulted in the different types (Kunsttrieb). These forms echoed beliefs in origins through their mimesis of mythic understanding; basically, differences in material culture were differences in available techniques in effective representation (culminating in writing) (Hvattum 2004: 43–6). Keeping in mind this point of different techniques for instantiating mythic understanding, architecture and other arts represented “the urge to appropriate a world through playful imitation” (Hvattum 2004: 46). Eventually, Semper’s response to the “primitive hut” was: “the constituent parts of form that are not form itself, but the idea, the force, the task and the means” (Semper quoted in Hvattum 2004: 65). As Hvattum notes, “It was Semper’s lifelong ambition to find and define these ‘constituent parts’—and he found them, not as archaeological facts but as a creative principle” (Hvattum 2004: 65). Semper argued that architecture, walls derived from woven panels, and the weaving and knots therein derived from ritual expression and dance: “The beginnings of building coincide with those of weaving” (Semper quoted in Hvattum 2004: 70). Hvattum observes that, for Semper, clothing, Bekleidung, was “intrinsically linked to spatial enclosure” and “preceded even the clothing of the human body” (Hvatuum 2004: 70–1), reiterating the common theme of the imbrication of body and built form and the wider phenomenological frame of this engagement.

Semper thus displaced the notion of the originary “primitive hut,” as Hvatuum notes, and proposed “a composite structure composed of the four primary motifs, or elements, of architecture” (Hvatuum 200...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 The Long Nineteenth Century
• 2 Architecture and Archaeology
• 3 Social Anthropology and the House Societies of Lévi-Strauss
• 4 Institutions and Community
• 5 Consumption Studies and the Home
• 6 Embodiment and Architectural Form
• 7 Iconoclasm, Decay, and the Destruction of Architectural Forms
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index