Architectural History with(out) Theory: The Czech Professional Debate on Architecture after 1989 (original) (raw)

The conference paper analyzes some general aspects of the practice of architectural history in the Czech lands during the period 1989-2010. The situation in the architectural historiography resulted from the unbroken institutional and personal continuity with the previous (Communist) period, with all connected positives and negatives. The number of scholars has increased and several great academical projects have been finished, but the industrial and vernacular heritage has been thoroughly mapped mainly thanks to several former architects and etnographists. In the period of Communism, leading architectural historians learned working in a “quiet opposition“ against the regime, associating the regime with all “popular“ and grasping it with prevailing scepticism. So the Post-Modern Style was welcomed very mildly among historians and critics, and the vernacular had not been placed into the “high art“. After 1989, because the influential academical historians belonged to the most influential critics, the Minimalist contemporary architecture was preferred and awarded, while the Beaux-Arts, but sometimes also the Free-Form architecture was impeached with moral arguments (as a “populism“). The persisting confusion between aesthetics and ethics results from a reluctance against judging the Communist past – former Brutalists and today’s Minimalists are still presented as “moral“ heros of architectural historiography, as winners against three monsters: the Totalitarianism (connected with Stalin, not with Khrushchev and “the Golden Sixties“), the Historicism, and the Populism (that means the uneducated people’s taste). Also a fear of public discussing of ideas is still persisting, so almost no serious theory of architecture is practised, except for two types of private meditation: the Heideggerian Existentialism (among scholars who were in 1960’s young), and some kind of Deconstruction among members of the next generation. The heritage protection has gained many important victories since 1989, but the concern of historians have differed in place and time. While academical scholars are more engaging in effort for preserving traces of the Modern Movement and popularisation of the Minimalism, the regional heritage protectioners are more agile in civic societies, with open attitude to common ideas of harmony. Presented at the seminar "Art History on the Disciplinary Map in East-Central Europe", 18 -19 November 2010, Brno, Czech Republic. It was the second seminar in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s East-Central Europe Seminar Series, Unfolding Narratives: Art Histories in East-Central Europe after 1989, taking place in the region between 2010 and 2011. The series was an international initiative of the Research and Academic Program at The Clark, and was made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. Regional partners for the seminar were Masaryk University and the Moravian Gallery, Brno.