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Abstract
A conversation between Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Amanda Reeser Lawrence recorded on November 13, 2023 at the Yale School of Architecture. The conversation focuses on their shared interest in twentieth-century American architecture culture, including architectural pedagogy marked by the use of architectural precedents as a generative design tool and the rise of art historical formalism as a dominant method of teaching architectural history. During the discussions the authors unpacked the key concepts and intellectual roots of their respective projects, “untimeliness” and the “usable past” (Pelkonen) and “influence” and “anachronism” (Lawrence) and shared notes on how they approach history teaching in a design school setting so as to make it an integral part of architectural thought.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023); Amanda Reeser Lawrence, The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023).
2 Amanda Reeser Lawrence, James Stirling: Revolutionary Modernist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
3 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 60, quoted in Pelkonen, Untimely Moderns, 13. The quotation in the original German reads: “So viel muss ich mir aber selbst von Berufs wegen als classischer Philologe zugestehen dürfen: denn ich wüsste nicht, was die classische Philologie in unserer Zeit für einen Sinn hätte, wenn nicht den, in ihr unzeitgemäss—das heisst gegen die Zeit und dadurch auf die Zeit und hoffentlich zu Gunsten einer kommenden Zeit—zu wirken.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben,” in Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Leipzig: E.W. Fritzsch, 1874).
5 The quotation in full: “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.” T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960 [1921]), 31.
6 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 60.
7 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” North American Review (April 1, 1868): 543–57.
8 Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, “Reviving the Idea of a ‘Usable Past’,” Yale University Press, July 25, 2023, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2023/07/25/reviving-the-idea-of-a-usable-past/.
9 Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, “Reading Aalto through Baroque,” AA Files 65 (2012): 72–75.
10 J.M. Richards, “In Defence of the Cliché,” Architectural Review 114, no. 680 (August 1953): 75–77.
11 See James Ackerman, “Imitation,” in Antiquity and Its Interpreters, ed. Alina Alexandra Payne, Ann L. Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13.
12 Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 11.
13 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
14 Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht, eds., Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
15 We are both referring, if elliptically, to George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962).
16 Eero Saarinen, “Saarinen Tells How ‘Gateway’ Was Conceived,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (March 7, 1948), 1.
17 As told by Mari Lending in her book Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), the collection had been demoted to the Yale Art Gallery basement around 1950. Cited in Pelkonen, Untimely Moderns, 167.
18 Jill Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).
19 James Gamble Rogers, “Notes by the Architect,” Yale University Library Gazette 3, no. 1 (July 1928): 3.
20 Aaron Betsky, James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), cited in Pelkonen, Untimely Moderns, 59.
21 Wilson, in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 1902, as quoted in “Collegiate Gothic Style,” Princetoniana Museum, https://www.princetonianamuseum.org/reference/7f2b7714-89c3-44e3-90cb-c8224020c269. See also Robinson Meyer, “How Gothic Architecture Took over the American College Campus,” Atlantic, September 11, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/how-gothic-architecture-took-over-the-american-college-campus/279287/.
22 Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe, “The Migration of the Aura or How to Explore the Original through its Facsimiles,” in Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, ed. Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 275–97.
23 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, “The Future of the Past,” Perspecta 7 (1961): 65–76.
24 “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” was installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on November 5, 2021 in Gallery 508. The project involved a collaboration among the Met’s curatorial team, led by Hannah Beacher, and consulting curator Michelle Commander. Participating artists include Ini Archibong, Andile Dyalvane, Fabiola Jean-Louis, John Jennings, Cyrus Kabiru, Roberto Lugo, Chuma Maweni, Zizipho Poswa, Jomo Tariku, Tourmaline, Atang Tshikare. See https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/afrofuturist-period-room.
25 Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: The New York Times, 2019). The book offers a new timeline of American history, starting with a year when the first enslaved Africans were brought to what was then the British colony of Virginia.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen is an assistant dean and professor at Yale School of Architecture, where she teaches architectural design and history-theory subjects. She received her MArch from Tampere University of Technology, MED from Yale University, and PhD from Columbia University. Her scholarly interests include twentieth-century European and American architecture culture, aesthetic theory, and history of ideas. She has authored and edited several prize-winning books, among them Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2009), which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize from the Society of Architectural Historians and Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale University Press, 2006), which won both the Philip Johnson Award, also from SAH, and the Bannister Fletcher Award from the London Authors Club. Her latest book Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past was published by Yale University Press in 2023. Her curatorial work also includes Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment, and Le Carré Bleu: The Little Magazine of Architecture and Urbanism. Her scholarly and curatorial work has been supported by Getty, the Graham Foundation, the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research. She was the first recipient of the King-Lui Wu Teaching Award at Yale School of Architecture in 2010.
Amanda Reeser Lawrence
Amanda Reeser Lawrence is a tenured associate professor in the School of Architecture at Northeastern University. She received her PhD in architectural history and theory from Harvard University, her Master of Architecture from Columbia University and her BA (summa cum laude) from Princeton University. Lawrence is founding co-editor of the architectural journal Praxis: A Journal of Writing + Building, an award-winning journal of contemporary architecture of the Americas. Her published books include The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century (University of Virginia Press, 2023), James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist (Yale University Press, 2013), and Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange (Routledge 2017), co-edited with Ana Miljacki. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the New York State Council on the Arts.