The annual journal Opus Incertum dedicates the 2025 issue to architectural history and the challenges of interdisciplinarity. It is nearly impossible to define the discipline of architectural history in simple terms today. The field has become pluralistic and fragmented, marked by multi-, trans-, inter-, and even anti-disciplinarity (Mowitt, 1997). The adoption of various methods from the humanities and social sciences and the introduction of cultural approaches (e.g., visual studies, literary studies, intermediality, etc.) have resulted in extraordinary diversity in the writing of architectural history. Consequently, scholars from various disciplines now operating under the banner of architectural history often have little in common (Timbert, 2021). There also seems to be a discrepancy between how architectural history is taught in professional schools of architecture versus how it is studied in more traditional university settings, where it is often the domain of the departments of art history. Moreover, the different national contexts, some more and others less invested in interdisciplinarity, have created further fragmentation within the field on a more global scale. How have diverse academic formations shaped the range of architectural historians’ approaches to the discipline? What has happened to the relationship between the history of art and the history of architecture over the past twenty or so years (cfr. Payne, 1999 vs. Payne, 2016)? Where do we locate the “difficult dialogue” (Bardati and Rolfi, 2005) between these fields today, also in light of the different national developments? How has the discipline changed since the publication of the 2002 monographic issue of the Cahiers de la recherche architectural et urbaine (which focused on research methods specific to architectural history) and the special issue of the JSAH, “Learning from Interdisciplinarity” (Carpo, 2005)? What is the actual definition of the field today (cfr. Leach, 2010)?
This monographic issue of Opus incertum seeks to address a wide range of issues around the question of interdisciplinarity in architectural history. It attempts to deepen our understanding of how the encounters between architectural history and other fields in the humanities, social sciences, and engineering have opened up its research methods and transformed its narrative criteria, creating an expansive discipline whose contours are flexible, permeable, and increasingly wide-ranging. Its goal is not to take a position for or against interdisciplinarity, but rather to provide a broad “snapshot” of the field through diverse critical and methodological contributions.
Some of the general guiding questions for this volume include:
• What—if anything—still provides a sense of coherence in the field of architectural history given the current diversity of its approaches and its increasingly interdisciplinary character?
• What has been the contribution of critical theory to the writing of architectural history? Have post-colonial and feminist approaches affected architectural history as much as they have art history?
• If digital technologies have become one of the tools used by architectural and urban historians (cfr. Huffman Lanzoni, 2018), how have they redefined the discipline and transformed historical writing? Are they capable of creating new types of multi-disciplinary physical and virtual spaces of collaboration?
• How and to what extent has the ever-increasing interest in building technologies and construction history (cfr. Nègre, 2018), as well as maintenance and conservation (cfr. Edgerton, 2006; Davoine, d’Harcourt, L’Héritier, 2019), contributed to the development of interdisciplinary approaches in architectural history?
• In light of recent studies and reflections (cfr. Calder, 2021), how can architectural history benefit from a methodological and interdisciplinary dialogue with the field of environmental history?
• Have we reached a point where we must distinguish between material and “immaterial” architecture (e.g., design, planning, representation, architecture as an image, etc., where the scholar is not necessarily concerned with the physical structure itself)? How urgent is it to reconcile these two approaches, which in some cases require very different types of expertise?
• Has the monographic (i.e., focused on individual architects and/or architectural monuments) and/or single-author model become outdated? To what extent has collaboration become a desirable research and publication model and what does collaborative research in architectural history actually look like today?
• How and to what extent have the various scholarly traditions shaped the different countries’ engagement (or not) with interdisciplinarity in architectural history? (cfr. Karge, Frommel, and Walter, 2022).
• How is the meaning of interdisciplinarity different for scholars working on different time periods (e.g., early modern vs. modern or contemporary) and different architectural traditions (e.g., Asian vs. European)?
• Is the growing interest in hyper-contemporaneity a problem or an opportunity for the architectural historian? Are there chronological limits that should not be crossed to preserve the necessary critical distance or is the study of hyper-contemporaneity a stimulating challenge that could lead to methodological innovations and open up new interdisciplinary horizons in the field?
The editors invite innovative and thought-provoking scholarly contributions that investigate these and other related questions (the list is by no means exhaustive and submissions that fall outside the parameters outlined above will also be considered). We are interested in papers that engage the existing conceptual frameworks of the discipline and seek to bring in new theoretical perspectives, as well as papers that reflect on the very concept of interdisciplinarity by considering the complexity of this idea. We welcome essays – in Italian, English, French– which must not exceed 40,000 characters, including notes, with a set of 10 images (free of fees). There will also be short papers of 15,000 characters maximum, including notes, with 3-4 images (free of fees).
Proposals should be sent to: naksamija@wesleyan.edu; antonio.brucculeri@paris-lavillette.archi.fr; denis.ribouillault@umontreal.ca; emanuela.ferretti@unifi.it
Deadlines
30 May 2024: deadline for submission of abstract (max 2000 characters) and a short CV (max 1000 characters)
15 June 2024: notification of acceptance
1 October 2024: essay submission
