History, Theory, Architecture

The Hellenic Institute of Architecture invites you to the fifth series of its monthly events for the 1999–2000 season.

The Hellenic Institute of Architecture is establishing a series of monthly lectures and events in various formats, to be hosted at the Auditorium of the French Institute of Athens. These events focus on current issues, broadly defined, concerning architecture and contemporary developments in Greece and abroad. They will also address topics related to the history and theory of architecture.

Savvas Kontaratos, Yannis Peponis, and Dimitris Filippidis engaged in a discussion with Panagiotis Tournikiotis, prompted by the publication of the book “The Historiography of Modern Architecture”.

Now that the 20th century has ended, how will we look at the past? And what kinds of thoughts will occupy our minds when we “do” architecture?

You may recall the fervent rejection of history by most Modernists of the interwar period, and the passionate “return of the past” to the drawing boards of the Postmodernists. You might also remember the “theories” that arrived with much fanfare and quietly disappeared overnight. All of this, of course, “will be written into history.” But for whom is history written? For the past—or for the future of architecture? Panagiotis Tournikiotis argues in The Historiography of Modern Architecture that the historian’s gaze is never “innocent.” Beyond and above even their best intentions, this scholar is a product of their time, and their writings reflect a specific architectural theory. What appears as history, he tells us, is in fact a theory functioning as a manifesto. But is Tournikiotis right to attribute to photographs and texts the power to change the course of architecture? Or to claim that history is written in reverse, starting from the present and projecting its ideas back onto the past? Might the relationship between architecture, theory, and history still be… “dangerous”?