In the Distance

*research-in-progress 2010
Edited by Ana María León and Alla Vronskaya

*research-in-progress is an annual graduate student confer-

ence organized by students of the History, Theory, and Criti-
cism of Architecture and Art Discipline Group in the De-
partment of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The 2010 conference was titled “In the Distance”
and took place on February 26 and 27, 2010. It was organized
by Ana María León, Ash James Lettow, and Alla Vronskaya.
Content
Preface
Ana Miljacki 2

Introduction
Ana María León, Alla Vronskaya 3

Peripheral Memory: New York’s Forgotten Landscape

Deborah Buelow 4

Archaeological Ambassadors-at-Large
and the Making of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago (1919)
Azra Dawood 8

Intimations of Order:
Banham, the University of Buffalo, and the Double Visions of Frontier Modernism
James D. Graham 12

Transmissions from Suburb to Center

Sara Stevens 18

Programmed Architecture on the Cold War’s Periphery:

Vjenceslav Richter, Synturbanism, and the New Tendencies
Ivan Rupnik 22

Not Far Now: Romanticization and the Search for a Polish Modern Architecture
Matthew Benjamin Matteson 28

Disobedient Bodies: Isidre Nonell’s Paintings of Spanish Gypsies

Delia Solomons 32

From Metropolitan Decadence to Provincial Success:

Raymond Q. Monvoisin and the Chilean Post-Independent Elite of the 1840s
Josefina de la Maza Chevesich 36

Outside Looking In: Francisco de Holanda and the Margins of Renaissance Art
Joanna Hecker-Silva 40
 Critical Distance
2
The conceptual collapse of space and time, of geography and
history, in the idiom that haunts nearly all definitions of a his-
torian’s work—critical distance—is enough of an alibi in itself
to attempt to reverse its operative meaning from time to space
again. Not in order to claim some form of objectivity provided
by geographic distance as is often the case with its temporal
equivalent, but instead to engage geographic and discursive
distance as an epistemological issue. It is a common, colloquial
truism that at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st
century geographical distances “shrunk” through digital and
media connectedness, cheap flights, smoothness of financial
flows, and other technological, economic and social phenomena
that together constitute globalization. But it is precisely by
granting geographical distance a privileged conceptual position,
by using it operatively to question its function in the construc-
tion of discourse as well as in the construction of political, social
and aesthetic realities, that the above truism begins to read as
itself geo-politically encoded.
The Spring 2010 MIT conference In The Distance that in-
vited research in progress involving a critical framing of the con-
cept of distance, relied on the type of analytical power for the
concept of distance that Walter Benjamin once granted to media
in their final stage of development. Just as a medium is about to
be replaced by a new one, Walter Benjamin thought, that same
medium would acquire its final critical capacity, as if in a final
deathly spasm of its technological and aesthetic dimensions: its
near-disappearance allowing its users and practitioners a new
perspective, in a sense removed, at a distance, from the immi-
nent novelty and blindness of the coming media. If we accepted
the truism invoked above, that distances are all but immaterial
Ana Miljacki
today, then indeed geographical distance may be the concept
that at the beginning of the 21st century has the descriptive
and explanatory capacity to render visible complex historical
entanglements that prefigured our supposedly flat world.
On the other hand, once we are past the sheer appeal of a
concept that might derive new precision from its contemporary
status, and thanks to the fact that the papers presented at this
conference conspired to both rewrite historical and discursive
links via the concept of distance, and equally to recast geo-
graphical distance within the more and less known historical
narratives ranging from 16th-century Portuguese drawings to
1960s cybernetic projects in Zagreb, the issue of geographical
distance emerges not only as a robust critical lens, but also,
more often than not, as one of the key determining histori-
cal factors. The geographic dynamics of uneven economic and
discursive development have been theorized in a variety of ways
throughout the papers collected in this volume: distance that in
the ex-Yugoslavian context allowed promiscuous and produc-
tive interpretation and appropriation of theories generated
elsewhere, distance that enabled a relatively small artist in Paris
to dominate in Chile, distance and exoticism (a common cor-
relative of distance between center and periphery of discourse)
as alibis for the constitution of scientific institutions. It will
surely emerge from the work that follows, and with palpable
urgency, that while definitions of centers and peripheries shift,
the dynamics of their relationship always have a powerful hand
in the production of discourse and reality. Thus, demanding of
these dynamics to perform an important role in the writing of
history as well, is the invaluable contribution of this collection
of essays.
Introduction
*research-in-progress 2010
The general perception is that intellectual and creative produc-
tion outside of major cultural centers necessarily defines itself
in relationship to these centers. Moreover, the relative paucity
of material resources and opportunities available in these
remote areas seem to aggravate cultural dependence. However,
this may not be the only possible perspective on the effects of
this geographical and psychological remoteness.
How and by whom are such notions as “periphery” and
“province” constructed? How does the acceptance or denial
of one’s own “provincialism” influence identity and culture in
general? How do the edges affect dominant discourses? These
were a few of the many questions posed by “In the Distance,”
the 2010 *research-in-progress (*rip) conference, an annual
graduate student conference organized by students of History,
Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT.
Nine of the presentations delivered at the conference
found their way to this publication, spanning different geo-
graphical regions and disciplinary boundaries. New York’s Hart
Island, a cemetery for those on the margins of capitalist social
structure, is the focus of Deborah Buelow’s research. Azra
Dawood finds a very different perspective on capitalism in the
United States, exposing the process by which it symbolically
appropriated Egyptian cultural heritage. Conversely, looking
at the peripheral qualities of early twentieth century American
architecture, James Graham uncovers notions of modernity
behind the neoclassical façade of E.B. Green’s Lockwood Li-
brary at the University of Buffalo. Sara Stevens examines how
real estate strategies deployed in suburbia found their way to
the post-war architectural discourse and Chicago’s urban core.
Another disciplinary shift—between technology and art—is
analyzed by Ivan Rupnik, who looks at the work of Zagreb
Ana María León, Alla Vronskaya
artist Vjenceslav Richter in the 1960s. The political situation in 3
Socialist Yugoslavia, mediating between two centers of power
and equally distant from both, enabled Richter to subvert
preconceived notions of art. More tragically, a political parti-
tioning of Poland among Russia, Austria, and Prussia during
the nineteenth century, provoked the consolidation of Polish
culture and the construction of national architectural styles
explored by Benjamin Matteson. In a double reversal, Mat-
teson recounts how a Polish painter was presented as Russian
while a Russian church was redressed as Polish. Considering
the same time period, Delia Solomons looks at Catalan artist
Isidre Nonell’s subversion of the Spanish gitana stereotype, in
relation to his own experience as a Spanish artist in Paris. In
contrast, Parisian clichés were translated abroad, as Josefina
de la Maza Chevesich demonstrates in her paper on academic
painter Raymond Q. Monvoisin, who in the mid-nineteenth
century moved from France to Chile and reversed his fortune
by becoming “the modernizer” of Chilean art. Finally, Joanna
Hecker-Silva complicates the idea of intellectual appropriation
by showing how the tropes of imperialist collecting on the one
hand, and admiring and emulation on the other, coexisted in
the work of a Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, who in
1537 was sent by King João III to Italy.
Together, this set of historic and geographic narratives
present a range of responses to the effects of colonial empires,
diasporas of war, exile, migration, and mistranslation, reposi-
tioning the dependence generated by remoteness as sometimes
stimulating, often productive, and at times even liberating.
 Peripheral Memory:
New York’s Forgotten Landscape
4
This paper explores how history and memory shape the spatial-
ity of human burial on Hart Island, an isolated island three-
quarters of a mile from New York City across the Long Island
Sound. For those who died in the city with no means of their
own, whose bodies are unidentified and unclaimed, Hart Island
acts as a final exit. The purpose of the paper is to reconnect
Hart Island and New York City, exposing factors that have given
rise to a perception of Hart Island as abject, disquieting, and
ultimately unworthy of attention.
I. The Geography of Contested Spaces
In a 1967 lecture entitled “Of Other Spaces,”1 Michel Foucault
introduced the notion of heterotopia, which is a space de-
fined negatively, by way of an opposition to another. Physical
properties do not describe Foucault’s heterotopias so much
as meanings derived through cultural description. In other
words, heterotopias are constituted metaphorically as much as
spatially. The graveyard is one of Foucault’s primary examples.
There, ideology and geographical space are inextricably linked.
From the initial settling of the American subcontinent
by European colonialists, graveyards or churchyards occupied
a central location within the new towns, as opposed to the
potter’s fields, located outside the town limits. In the early
nineteenth century, however, changing perceptions of death
and burial pushed churchyards into suburbs, separating the
dark city of the dead from the vibrant city of the living. This
kind of displacement, however, is different from the multiple
removals of the potter’s field. While both are geographic, the
latter includes a social element caused by prejudice against the
forlorn, abandoned, and indigent.
Deborah Buelow
The idiom “potter’s field” is often referenced back to ac-
counts of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus in the Book of Matthew. Re-
alizing his guilt, Judas refused the “thirty pieces of silver” given
him by the chief priests for helping them arrest Jesus, “so they
decided to use the money to buy the potter’s field as a burial
place for foreigners.”2 A potter’s field, says historian Thomas
Badhe, “referred to a place where potters dug for clay, and thus
a place conveniently full of trenches and holes for the burial of
strangers.”3 In 1852 New York City’s Aldermen decided officially
to rename the potter’s field “City Cemetery” in an effort to
remove stigma from the place.4 But it was not quite a “cem-
etery.” The word “cemetery” is derived from the Greek word for
“sleeping place,” its earliest use for a place of burial dating back
to the ancient Roman underground catacombs. In the mid-19th
century, “cemetery,” meaning a societal burial ground, became
the popular replacement for “churchyard” or “graveyard.” Yet for
the burial of indigents and unknown persons, “potter’s field”
remained—and remains—a commonly used term. Discuss-
ing how rapidly crowding antebellum New York City buried its
indigent dead, Badhe says, “The biblical veneer of the term was
perhaps an antidote to one of the distressing costs of life in the
chaotic new democratic city. At least in Potter’s Field they lay
under a vague biblical scope.”5
II. Contested Geographies of Death
A forlorn landscape on the outskirts of a thriving city, Hart
Island is New York City’s eighth recorded potter’s field. Roughly
one hundred acres in size and part of a small archipelago in
the Long Island Sound, it is one of the city’s northernmost
islands. From the neighboring City Island, Hart looks like a
ghost town: all the buildings that are immediately within view
Fig. 1: Department of Correction dock off City Island. Author’s photo.

5
 are abandoned. Here, the only access to the island is marked
by barbed wire and large billboards flanking either side of a
fenced boat landing. These postings say “Prison KEEP OFF” and
“New York City Correction Department RESTRICTED AREA,”
warning accidental visitors against proceeding further. Regular
and authorized travel to Hart Island comes from Riker’s Island,
the site of the city’s major penitentiary. Hart is connected to
Riker’s through the labor of inmates transported daily to bury
the city’s anonymous former inhabitants.6 Because it is run by
the Department of Correction and involves prison labor, the
island and its burial ground, the country’s largest tax-funded
cemetery—a potter’s field—are not publicly accessible.7
Potter’s fields have always dotted the margins of New
York’s history. Washington Square Park marks one of the ear-
liest.8 Recent park renovations unearthed skeletons, bringing a
fresh reminder of Washington Square’s early history. In 1776,
6 during the Revolutionary War, the city’s boundaries did not
stretch as far north as the location of the park. What became
the park was farmland surrounding a few wealthy New Yorker’s
country retreats, and a parcel acted as a place of interment
for slaves and the poor.9 Such was the pressure of population
growth and urban development that by the late 1790s the city’s
built-up area had grown to the present line of Houston Street.
By 1795 the Yellow Fever epidemics began their devastating
campaigns against the city. These epidemics contributed to a
misunderstanding of the infectiousness of diseased corpses,
and miasmatic theories frightened citizens into believing that
dead bodies spread noxious vapors, contaminating the city air.
Foucault explains this shift:
The dead, it is supposed, bring illness to the living, and it is the
presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to
the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that
propagates death itself. 10
The Washington Square potter’s field remained in place
until 1823. The city grew northward until this graveyard was
surrounded by urban life, forcing it to an area approximately
forty blocks north, a space now occupied by Bryant Park. Over
the next several decades a series of moves were undertaken,
from approximately 50th Street and 4th Avenue in 1836 (site
today of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel), to Randall’s and Ward’s
Islands in 1852, and finally to Hart Island in 1869.11
Newspaper articles partly reveal the reason behind the
multiple moves. “Is our city always to be disgraced by some
public exhibition?” asked a New York Times subscriber in 1858.
For the sake of decency, do call the attention of our City
authorities to the exhibition of coffins, skulls and decayed bodies
lying exposed on the corner of Fiftieth-street and Fourth-Avenue. I
learned this is the spot formerly called ‘Potter’s Field.’ Every Sunday
crowds can be seen idly gazing at the decayed remains, and at inter-
vals tossing the skulls and bones from one spot to another by way of
amusement.12
Displaying social delicacy, these words also reveal a social bias.
Responses like these identified the potter’s field as a marker of
social standing; it was (and is) a place that aided in the making
of moral judgment. In 1894, the New York Times published an
article entitled “Saved from Potter’s Field”, in which a woman
who was “neat and clean and ladylike,” but whose life was “[de-
based] from liquor,” was given a proper burial by a charitable
man. “No pauper’s or criminal’s grave is fit for her... and I won’t
see her remains put in Potter’s Field.”13
Potter’s Fields looked different from cemeteries. Some of
the perceptions that contributed to the physical appearance of
the potter’s field became factors that forced cemeteries to the
suburbs. Cemeteries like Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn
and Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx had mimicked European
attempts to conceal the ugly realities of death by placing burial
sites in secluded landscapes. Their rolling hills came as welcome
additions to the two cities as public spaces, and even inspired
the design of some major parks.14 As bucolic cemeteries became
city icons, Hart Island, antithetically, stood alone, defining
itself in 1869 via the burial of a single 24-year old orphan. In
the years since then, approximately 800,000 burials have taken
place there.15
III. Geographies of Deviation
The heterotopic nature of the potter’s field’s current location—
that is to say, the negative perception of the potter’s field—
carries a greater significance when viewed through the history
of the island itself. Hart Island was the site of other activities.
According to Foucault, “The heterotopia has the power to juxta-
pose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements
that are in themselves incompatible.” He considers these places
“heterotopias of deviation,” which are “those in which individu-
als are placed whose behavior is deviant in relation to the mean
or required norm.”16
During the Civil War, Hart Island was leased from the
State of New York by the U.S. Army for use as a training ground
for Union soldiers preparing for battle, but it became a prisoner
of war camp for Confederate soldiers.17 After the war, the city
utilized the island to ease pressure on Randall’s Island’s Indus-
trial School of Destitute Boys, and in 1895 the Department
of Welfare and Corrections introduced a reformatory and jail
workhouse to the island.18
These programs were supplemented by a variety of other
occupancies throughout the decades, including a lunatic asylum,
an almshouse, a school for traffic violators, and a city-funded
homeless shelter. The island came under federal authority again
in the 1950s with the Cold War as fears of air attack drove the
U.S. Army to establish Nike missile bases along the country’s
coastlines. Sitting opposite a concrete monument labeled
“Peace” built in 1949 by New York prison inmates, the Nike
missile silos are now abandoned concrete bunkers with no plans
for reuse.19
Conclusion: The Divergence of Function and Meaning
If, according to Foucault, the cemetery is an example of an
“other space” or a contestation of a space, then it could be
argued that the burial ground at Hart Island is a metacontesta-
tion of space. A heterotopia is by Foucault’s definition a place
that exists in the public domain, such as a cemetery. But what
Endnotes
1 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” in Heterotopia and the City: Public
Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. Michiel Dehaene, and Lieven de Cauter (London: Routledge,
2008).
2 Matthew 27: 7-8, New International Version.
3 Thomas Badhe, “The Common Dust of the Potter’s Field,” www.common-place.org.
4 N.A., “New-York City:... The Alms-House Department....” New York Daily Times,
21 April 1852.
5 Badhe, “The Common Dust of the Potter’s Field.”
6 Melinda Hunt and Joel Kleinfeld, Hart Island (New York City: Scalo, 1998), 23.
7 This is a remnant of an older system when the Department of Correction was linked
with the Department of Welfare, but that was disbanded in 1895 because of the notion
that poor people did not belong with prisoners. See N.A., “Mayor Strong Will Sign/He
Believes Unfortunates Should Not Be with Criminals. Hearing on Bill for Separation/Mrs.
Charles Russell Lowell, Charles S. Fairbanks, Carl Schurz, and Others Speak in Favor—No
Opposition,” New York Times, 8 May 1895. and Gale Silver, “Potter’s Field Hart Island: A
Historical Resume of Potter’s Field,” ed. Public Relations Unit (New York City: Depart-
ment of Correction, 1967), 1.
8 Prior to the use of Washington Square Park, potter’s fields existed on the site of present-
day Madison Square Park (1794-1797) and just north of City Hall. Emily Kies Folpe, It
Happened on Washington Square, Center Books on Space, Place, and Time (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 55-69.
9 Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of
New York City’s History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 57, 58.
10 Foucault, 19.
of the public cemetery that is not accessible to the public?
Would this not be a contestation of a heterotopia and thereby
a contestation of a contestation of a space? The cemetery and
the potter’s field are functionally the same. They are, however,
metaphorically opposite. For example, Greenwood Cemetery in
Brooklyn is familiar to most New York City dwellers, but only
few are aware of the existence the potter’s field on Hart Island.
A cemetery is built into the urban consciousness; the potter’s
field is outside it. A cemetery exists to embed the memories
of the dead in eternity; a potter’s field obliterates the possibil-
ity of this symbolic opportunity. Hart Island is not just a “real
space that shows reality to be an illusion”20 as a cemetery does,
it also is “several places that are in themselves incompatible.”21
Here reality is not just an illusion; for practical purposes, it is
obliterated. If society accepts the cemetery as a necessary and
vital piece of urban geography, how does it classify the potter’s
field? To keep the burial ground as unknown as its inhabitants 7
renders its function a disservice and furthers the symbolic
negations that keep it on the fringes of city geography and
social consciousness.
11 Folpe, It Happened on Washington Square (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2002), 55-69.
12 Letter to the Editor, “For Decency’s Sake,” New York Times, 21 April 1858, 4.
13 N.A., “Saved from Potter’s Field,” New York Times, 2 January 1894.
14 The design of Central Park by Frederick Law Olmsted was inspired by the rural cem-
etery movement. James Stevens Curl, A Celebration of Death : An Introduction to Some
of the Buildings, Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western Eu-
ropean Tradition (London: B.T. Batsford, 1993). 206-298. See also Blanche M. G. Linden
and Library of American Landscape History, Silent City on a Hill : Picturesque Landscapes of
Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press
in association with Library of American Landscape History, 2007).
15 Hunt and Kleinfeld, Hart Island, 27.
16 Foucault, 18.
17 Leslie Corn, “New York City’s Potter’s Field: A Visit to Hart Island’s City Cemetery in
Bronx County,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, <http://www.newyork-
familyhistory.org/modules.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=60>.
18 Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller, The Other Islands of New York City : A History and Guide,
2nd ed. (Woodstock, Vt.; New York City: Countryman Press ; Distributed by W.W. Norton,
2001), 127-134.
19 Ibid.
20 M. Christine Boyer, “The Many Mirrors of Foucault and their Architectural Reflec-
tions,” in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. Michiel Dehaene,
and Lieven de Cauter (London: Routledge, 2008), 54.
21 Foucault, 19.
 Archaeological Ambassadors-at-Large
and the Making of the Oriental Institute
at the University of Chicago (1919)
8 Between 1905 and 1907, James Henry Breasted—the United
States’ first Egyptologist—organized expeditions to Nubia
(southern Egypt and northern Sudan), using funds provided by
the industrialist and philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller, Sr.1
In the photograph (Fig. 1), Breasted is the man in the white hat
seated just above the uraeus of the Temple of Ramses II at Abu
Simbel and just below a local expedition member who is holding
him securely in place.
When the expeditions ended, Breasted outlined an ambi-
tious scheme for a floating, archaeological research laboratory
on the Nile that would further the University’s documentation
efforts, and presented his plans to Frederick T. Gates, Rock-
efeller Sr.’s philanthropic advisor and head of the Rockefeller-
endowed General Education Board (GEB). Gates rejected the
proposal arguing that the Egyptian government itself should
undertake a project of this scope.2 Near Eastern archaeology
was not yet considered an established science, worthy of such
private American philanthropic funding. But years later, one
of the Board’s former President would write that of all the
humanistic fields eventually funded by the GEB and other
Rockefeller foundations, and through personal endowments
by Rockefeller, Sr. and his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Near
Eastern archaeology received the most money, with the largest
share going towards the creation of the Oriental Institute at the
University of Chicago in 1919.3 Breasted founded this Institute,
organizing it as a two-pronged research facility for Near Eastern
studies that incorporated an existing home-based philology
department and a new archaeological field operations arm.4
The Institute, its expeditions, museum, and dedicated building,
absorbed the sizeable monetary contributions of the Rockefeller
philanthropic network. This extensive support can be attributed
Azra Dawood
to Breasted’s persuasiveness, and his reputation as a pioneer-
ing archaeologist, historian, and Orientalist. As Gates wrote,
“He is the Atlas that carries [the Institute] on his back.”5 With
Breasted’s death in 1935, funding for the Institute dwindled.
The following paper analyzes Breasted’s transformation
of the U.S. perception of Near Eastern archaeology in the early
twentieth century, from merely a curiosity and biblical pursuit,
to a scientific field with scientific techniques of research and
documentation, such as photography. The Oriental Institute was
a key component of this transformation. Breasted constructed
his campaign for Near Eastern studies and for the Institute on
both rational and ideological grounds. Although he presented
the field as a legitimate science by comparing it with established
sciences such as astronomy, he also appropriated the ancient
civilizations as part of the origins and identity of an emerging
U.S. power. Ultimately, he presented the ancient Near East as a
new U.S. frontier, worthy of research and funding.
I will situate these transformations and Breasted’s efforts
within the larger political and scientific context of the period.
What were the obstacles to Breasted’s mission? And what
changes took place in archaeology, in the U.S., and in the world
that finally led to U.S. support and recognition for Near Eastern
archaeology? Clues to these questions can be found in a decisive
letter written in January 1919, shortly after President Wood-
row Wilson’s departure for the Paris Peace Conference, which
marked the end of the First World War. Addressing the GEB and
Rockefeller, Jr., Breasted wrote of an unparalleled historic mo-
ment in the Near East:
As I realize that in these last few weeks … the opportunity of
the ages has come to us. … For the first time in history the birth-
lands of religion and civilization lie open to unrestricted research and
discovery. Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Assyria, and Babylonia have
suddenly become ours.6

In an accompanying document, he wrote:

The study of these lands is the birthright and the sacred legacy
of all civilized peoples. Their delivery from the Turk brings to us an
opportunity such as the world has never seen before … . Our allies in
Europe are financially too exhausted. … This makes both the oppor-
tunity and the obligation all the greater for us in America.7

To fully comprehend this “opportunity” and “obligation,”

we must first understand Breasted’s perception of the obstacles
in his path. I argue that Breasted’s larger letter assumes the
United States politically removed from the Near East, where
he believed lay the origins of civilization and where European 9
nations were engaged in imperial contests. Simultaneously,
Breasted saw U.S. involvement in Near Eastern archaeology
in a similarly peripheral position, due to conditions at home
and abroad.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the imperi-
ally motivated British and French dominated the field. They
presented themselves as responsible custodians of the ancient
ruins and, by extension, of the modern lands themselves. Just
prior to the First World War, the Germans commanded the
field, particularly in Mesopotamia in the Ottoman Empire.8
Fig. 1: University of Chicago Expedition at the Temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, Pho-
Europeans also had the advantage of physical proximity to the tographer unknown (1906). Charles Breasted, Pioneer to the Past: The Story of James Henry
Near East. In his letter, Breasted argued that the U.S. archaeolo- Breasted, Archaeologist, Told by His Son Charles Breasted (Chicago, IL: Oriental Institute of
the University of Chicago, 2009), public domain.
gist and ancient historian must visit these lands to make his
observations. Comparing the archaeologist with the astrono-
mer, he wrote: As Breasted’s letter suggests, 1919 was a pivotal year in
overcoming these obstacles. The United States’ participation in
The astronomer is sometimes required to visit distant regions the peace talks signaled the beginning of the country’s political
in order to make his observations. This is constantly true of the engagement with Europe and the Near East—something it had
orientalist and ancient historian. To secure his materials, he must previously avoided, using its geographical distance and a policy
be granted the time and the funds to become a kind of permanent of political isolationism. The U.S. emerged on the international
archaeological ambassador-at-large to the Near Orient.9 political scene at a time when the British and French Empires
were financially weak, and Germany had been politically and
But philanthropic organizations were more inclined to financially incapacitated. This was accompanied by the dis-
fund research in the natural sciences. Near Eastern archaeol- solution of the Ottoman Empire, with large parts of it falling
ogy was considered—as Breasted himself put it—“an oddity under Western control, rising nationalism in the Near East and
at a county fair,”10 on the outer fringes of science. Within the Egypt, the emergence of the U.S. as both an ally to the British
humanities itself, it was pushed aside by a strong Greco-Roman and French, and as a ‘benevolent’ power supporting Arab and
bias. The origins of ‘American’ civilization were not seen to lie Turkish nationhood and independence. It was an opportune
with the much earlier Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians. These time for a U.S. institution to access the Near East and establish
then were the obstacles. archaeological field expeditions.

Fig. 2: Photographing the Great Stela of Thutmose I at Tumbos. James Henry Breasted,
photographer (1907). http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/oimp24.pdf, public domain.
10
Fig. 3: Tympanum above the main entrance to the Oriental Institute building on the
University of Chicago campus. Sculptor: Ulric H. Ellerhusen, designed by James Henry
Breasted. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Copyright 1931,
renewed 1953.
Breasted argued that to assume its rightful place in this
new world, the U.S. must have a solid grasp and understand-
ing of its own origins. His research on ancient Near Eastern
civilizations convinced him that the values, justice, industrious-
ness, and religion of the West first sprung up in these ancient
civilizations. And he argued passionately to move the origins
of western civilization farther back from classical civilization.
Positioning the U.S. at the forefront of historical development
and of civilization, he argued that the ancient Near East was
the “keystone of the arch, with prehistoric man on one side and
civilized Europe on the other,”11 with Americans as the ultimate
heirs of this civilization.12 Significantly, he denied the Near
East’s modern-day inhabitants this heritage by describing them
as uninterested or unknowledgeable about the ancient civiliza-
tions. He compared U.S. scientific and scholarly work against
“alleged scientific excavators”13 and “illicit native diggings.”14 In
comparison, U.S. methods were precise, rational, and scientific.
As a leader in science and technology, the United States–and its
wealthy sons–was obligated to use scientific methods to protect,
document, and study ‘American’ origins in the Near East.
In his book, American Genesis, Thomas Hughes writes that
more than a democratic nation, the U.S. was “the modern tech-
nological nation.”15 He terms the century from 1870 to 1970 as
the “American Genesis,” describing it as a time of technologi-
cal achievement and invention in the U.S., when processes of
acquiring, archiving, and studying information were celebrated.
Cognizant of this scientific enthrallment in his country, Breast-
ed positioned himself as a new Orientalist–a man of science and
action. He believed that the philological pursuits of traditional
Orientalists were limited to the compilation of dictionaries,
which ignored the search for evidence with which to reconstruct
the story of man. However, the new Orientalist was concerned
with physical evidence of ancient civilizations. The task of such
a professional was to bridge the gap between:
… the paleontologist with his picture of the dawn-man,
enveloped in clouds of archaic savagery, and on the other hand the
historian with his reconstruction of the career of civilized man in
Europe.16
To construct such an Orientalist, Breasted looked to the
archaeologist, the Americanist, and the astronomer. He imag-
ined a free-lance historian not tethered by university protocol,
a man equipped with the tools of technology: the camera and
the airplane. And a man assisted by a team of specialists, fully
equipped and organized around a scientific laboratory and
archive. The Oriental Institute, in fact. Without such a facility,
he argued, the Orientalist would be akin to an astronomer
studying the skies without a telescope.
Breasted repeatedly references the astronomer, the
observatory, and the telescope. Between 1928 and 1948, the
Rockefeller Foundation funded George Ellery Hale–an astrono-
mer and Breasted’s friend–to build a 200-inch telescope and
observatory in California that could penetrate deeper into space
than ever before. Hale was the foreign secretary of the National
Academy of Sciences (NAS), which was created during the Civil
War to advise the government in its military efforts. He nomi-
nated Breasted to the NAS, making him the first archaeolo-
gist on the Academy. Breasted gained legitimacy as a scientist
through association with Hale, and promoted archaeology by
comparing its methods and techniques with astronomy – an
established and well-funded science. Using the model of obser-
vatories, Breasted set up field expedition houses in the Near
East. The houses dotted the ancient landscape, and the data and
material collected made its way to headquarters at the Oriental
Institute–a literal and figurative embodiment of the United
States as the new cultural and scientific center: inheritor of the
ancients, inheritor of the skies.
As U.S. astronomers used scientific technology to study
the skies and understand the place of the Earth in the galaxy,
Breasted used scientific technology to look at the Near East and
construct the story of the modern American man.17 If archaeol-
ogy and astronomy are imagined as disciplines that look into—
and study—deep time and distant space, then their technology
of looking and documenting becomes important. German
archaeologists had pioneered the use of scientific technology in
archaeology, such as photography (which was used to capture
monuments for rational study or for posterity) and stratigra-
phy. Following the Germans, Breasted used these techniques,
particularly photography, to construct the idea of scientific
archaeology and responsible custodianship.
The 1905-1907 expeditions (which preceded the cre-
ation of the Oriental Institute) resulted in over a thousand
photographs. Most photographs documented endangered
monuments, but the collection also included photographs
that documented the act of documenting itself. Breasted took
the photograph in Fig. 2, which shows the expedition’s official
photographer documenting a rock stela. By showing expedition
members engaged in the inarguably important task of docu-
menting ancient ruins, Breasted demonstrated U.S. scientific
contribution and capability but, significantly, he also presented
native expedition members as just helpers or by-standers.
Endnotes
1. Rockefeller, Sr. initially funded Breasted’s projects, but his son (Rockefeller, Jr.)
financed the Oriental Institute.
2. Charles Breasted, Pioneer to the Past: The Story of James Henry Breasted, Archaeologist,
Told by His Son Charles Breasted (Chicago, IL: Oriental Institute of the University of
Chicago, 2009), 209-12.
3. Raymond B. Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, 1st ed. (New York,: Harper & Row, 1962),
236-37.
4. James Henry Breasted, The Oriental Institute (Chicago, Ill.,: The University of Chicago
Press, 1933), 2.
5. Frederick T. Gates to John D. Rockefeller Jr., December 26, 1923, folder 802, box 111,
series 2G, Record Group (RG) III, Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller, Rockefeller Archive
Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (hereafter designated RAC).
6. James Henry Breasted to Wallace Buttrick, January 13, 1919, folder 6851, box 659,
sub-series 4, series 1, General Education Board Archives (hereafter designated GEB), RAC.
7. “Plan for the Organization of an Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago,” Janu-
ary 13, 1919, folder 6851, box 659, sub-series 4, series 1, GEB, RAC.
8. Ann C. Gunter and Stefan R. Hauser, “Introduction,” in Ernst Herzfeld and the Develop-
ment of Near Eastern Studies, 1900-1950, Eds., Ann C. Gunter and Stefan R. Hauser
(Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2005), 7, 13.
The scientific, political, and ideological consonance in
Near Eastern studies and archaeology that I have described is
embodied in Breasted’s design for the tympanum above the
entrance of the Oriental Institute building on the University of
Chicago campus (Fig. 3). An Egyptian scribe on the left, repre-
senting the East, presents a wall fragment from a temple to the
personification of the West on the right. Breasted described the
image as a suggestion of the “transition of civilization from the
ancient Orient to the West.”18 Elsewhere, the image is described
as the transference of the gift of writing from ancient Egypt
to the West.
The symbolism is reminiscent of the mural in the dome of
the U.S. Library of Congress, which shows the civilizations and
nations arranged in a circle, starting with the personification
of Egypt, which represents “Written Records,” and ending with
America (“Science”). America is shown facing Egypt.
If we imagine writing as an early innovation or technol- 11
ogy, then perhaps it is fitting that this gift of writing would
be presented to (or rather, appropriated by) the new leader in
innovation and science: the United States. The tympanum rep-
resents the significant contribution of James Henry Breasted to
the American public’s consciousness of Near Eastern civiliza-
tions as the fountainhead of all civilizations, but it also shows
U.S. appropriation of the ancient Near East. By simultaneously
positioning the United States at the front of all civilizations
and by denying the ancient Near Eastern civilizations to the
modern-day inhabitants of the Near East, Breasted created what
he called “the New Past,”19 for a new emerging power.
9. “Plan for the Organization of an Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago,” Janu-
ary 13, 1919, Folder 6851, Box 659, Series 1, GEB, RAC.
10. Breasted, Pioneer to the Past: The Story of James Henry Breasted, Archaeologist, Told by
His Son Charles Breasted, 96.
11. Breasted, The Oriental Institute, 11.
12 See, “Plan for the Organization of an Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago,”
January 13, 1919, RAC.
13. Ibid. Breasted is referring to Italian archaeologists and to items that mysteriously
found their way to the Museum in Turin.
14. Ibid.
15. Thomas Parke Hughes, American Genesis : A Century of Invention and Technological
Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1989), 2-3.
16. Breasted, The Oriental Institute, 1.
17. Breasted, The Oriental Institute.
18. Breasted, The Oriental Institute, 103.
19. Charles Breasted, Pioneer to the Past: The Story of James Henry Breasted, Archaeologist,
Told by his Son Charles Breasted, 316.
 Intimations of Order:
Banham, the University of Buffalo,
and the Double Visions of Frontier Modernism
James D. Graham

12 The first chapter of Reyner Banham’s survey of the historiographical reciprocities between American
industrial buildings and European modernism—A Concrete Atlantis—begins at the University of
Buffalo’s Bethune Hall, then home to the School of Architecture at which Banham taught in the
late 1970’s. The visual associations spurred by Bethune Hall were, for Banham, immediate upon
first arrival:

As the dean’s car turned into the potholed driveway that ran along the flank of the building, I found
myself looking at a structure that appeared to have escaped from the pages of the second “Rappel à MM. les
Architectes” in Le Corbusier’s best-known book, Vers une Architecture… Everything was neat, rectangular,
rational, and self-assured, as my readings in Le Corbusier had suggested it would be! But instead of looking at
a badly rescreened reproduction in his book, I was facing the real thing, and it was good.1

In fact, Bethune Hall, built for the Buffalo Meter Company in 1915, was not included among Le
Corbusier’s examples of what Banham termed “daylight factories.” But Banham’s interest lies less with
Le Corbusier’s selectivity than with the particular mode of textual and pictorial representation that
draws the Midwest’s silos and factories into dialogue with European interwar architecture—the dis-
cursive trajectories through which these “adoptive monuments of modernism,” as Banham calls them,
became the distant legitimation for “machine age” rationalism.2 His own impressions of Bethune Hall,
then, straddle the experiential and the textual, a sort of double vision in which his scholarly under-
standing of Buffalo’s built legacy, seen from a temporal and geographical remove, is superimposed on
his actual encounters.
But another sort of double vision complicates the modernist view of Buffalo’s institutional and
architectural history as framed by Le Corbusier, Gropius, and even Banham; alongside the Buffalo
on to which the modern movement projected its origin myths one finds a self-consciously cultivated
Buffalo, made visible through a very different sort of civic architecture that stands in stark contrast
to the “wild and primitive production,” as Erich Mendelsohn put it, of an eminently un-European
frontier city.3 If Banham’s Bethune Hall represents a kind of autodescriptive modernism, another
building on the University of Buffalo’s campus—E.B. Green’s Lockwood Library, now known as Ab-
bott Hall—serves as an example of this other architectural culture, hardly secondary in the eyes of
practicing architects of the moment. On first glance, Lockwood Library (begun in 1933) exhibits the
type of historically deferential vocabulary decried in Moisei Ginzburg’s Style and Epoch, to cite but one
Fig. 1: Lockwood Library at the University of Buffalo, under construction, April 4, 1934. All images courtesy of the University Archives of the State University of New York at Buffalo.

01
13
 example of anti-classical critique: “Wishing to be ‘as good as’ Europe, America continues to import Eu-
ropean aesthetics and romanticism as though they were commodities that had stood the test of time
and been ‘patented,’ as it were,” which, for Ginzburg, results in “a horrifyingly mechanical mixture of
new, organic, purely American elements with the superficial envelopes of an outlived classical system
‘made in Europe.’”4
The thesis of Banham’s A Concrete Atlantis, of course, is that Ginzburg’s trajectory of importation
can be reversed; just as the Buffalo campus takes Europe’s “outlived classicism” as its point of authen-
tic origin, European modernism likewise exhibits a “causal, cultural, and conscious connection” to the
engineered structures of American industry—which, as Banham is at pains to remind his reader, was
rarely firsthand.5 With that in mind, Lockwood Library, the centerpiece of Green’s several buildings at
the University of Buffalo’s “Main Street” campus, is of interest not for any particular originality but
for its relative lateness, and should thus be situated as much in reference to its American forebears
as to its classical origins. Designed well after the heyday of the American Greek Revival of the mid-
nineteenth century—when the evocation of Hellenistic aesthetics and ideals were a “medicine for
modernity,” as Caroline Winterer puts it—the University of Buffalo’s classical language might instead

14

Fig. 2: E.B. Green’s Lockwood Library (now Abbott Hall).

be seen as a purposeful expression, rather than an amelioration,
of the city’s self-confirming modernity.6 As a counterpoint to
the European aestheticization of the factories and silos of the
Midwest, Lockwood Library’s apparent anachronism, seen in
the context of modernism’s symbolic self-understanding, corre-
lates with another kind of “modernity,” one tied to the cultural
and typological evolution of the American university.
Although Buffalo’s early architectural heritage is well
known, the city’s iconic status in Europe was specifically
cemented by a set of fourteen photographs of grain silos and
elevators gathered by Walter Gropius and incessantly repub-
lished in a host of architectural periodicals.7 The apparently
straightforward purity of these industrial “volumes in light” was
a frequent justification for a modernist language of structural
honesty and formal clarity that, in its own way, recalls certain
ideals of classicism; as Adolf Loos concisely opined, “Engineers
are our Hellenes… from them we receive our culture.”8 For
Banham, it was precisely this type of rhetoric that called into
question the rationalist narrative of modernism; rather, he
argues, “the form of factories and grain elevators were an avail-
able iconography, a language of forms, whereby promises could
be made, adherence to the modernist credo could be asserted,
and the way pointed to some kind of technological utopia.”9
Erich Mendelsohn was especially fervid in his approbation of
these industrial forms, and he was among the few European
architects to make a pilgrimage to the American Midwest. He
spent an afternoon photographing Buffalo’s silos, writing in a
letter of “mountainous silos, incredibly space-conscious, but
creating space… I took photographs like mad. Everything else so
far now seemed to have been shaped interim to my silo dreams.
Everything else was merely a beginning.”10 In a similar vein, Le
Corbusier’s use of Gropius’ industrial imagery, first in L’Esprit
Nouveau and later in Vers une Architecture, appeals to a mystical
notion of abstraction, space-creation, and intellectual integrity
through the appearance of silos and elevators as artifacts of
engineering: “NB—Let us heed the advice of engineers. But let
us fear American architects.”11
The knowing irony of Le Corbusier’s statement is, of
course, that the aspects of American architecture to be “feared”
were precisely those that harkened back to its European origin,
if writ at a more expansively American scale. As Mendelsohn
would put it, “even a century of population explosion and
machine-based increase in production cannot completely break
the resistance of a thousand years of civilization… On top of
the remnants of ideas that they brought along with them, the
Americans have constructed the wild emblems of ‘enhanced
civilization.’”12 For Le Corbusier and Mendelsohn alike, the
inertial resistance that classical culture exerts on their pres-
ent, more so than the celebrated wilderness of the west, is the
backdrop against which the forms of industrial architecture
looked so appealing to European eyes; in keeping, authenticity
is associated with literal distance from America’s colonial resi-
due. Frederick Jackson Turner, in his seminal text on the idea
of the American frontier, puts it thus: “At first, the frontier was
the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real
sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more
American.”13 The European desire to evade its own architectural
influence is what leads the modern movement to sites like
Buffalo, more so than the actual buildings to be found there;
precedents much closer at hand were rejected in favor of finding
validation in the distant frontier.14
The University of Buffalo, then, is a complex reaction to
the frontier ideal and the assumed industrial modernity of its
urban and geographic milieu. After a dubious founding in 1836 15
(no degrees were granted and no academic work appears to have
been undertaken) the University was reconstituted as a medical
school in 1847 and slowly accreted professional programs.15 It
took some seventy-five years to fully realize its College of Arts
and Sciences, finally begun in 1919, which spurred the need for
its new campus. Unlike the cloistered ideal of the nineteenth-
century American university (Ralph Adam Cram’s monastic
graduate college at Princeton, completed six years prior, is one
contemporaneous echo of this tradition), Buffalo’s campus
was to be explicitly urban, with the intention of redefining the
commercial city’s identity. As Julian Park, the first dean of the
college as well as its most thorough historian, inveighed:
Bearing the name of the city rather than that of an individual,
the University links the city’s name with its own success or failure…
No city is great unless it rests the eye, feeds the intellect, and leads
its people out of the bondage of the commonplace… to do all three it
must be blessed with the moral reservoir of higher education.16
This elision of civic-mindedness and pedagogy parallels
Frederick Jackson Turner’s call (made in the same year) for “the
production of a self-determining, self-restrained, intelligent
democracy” through higher education in the former frontier
states. After all, asks Turner, whose prolificacy was most notable
in the field of collegiate commencements, “what more effective
agency is there for the cultivation of the seed wheat of ideals
than the university?”17
Buffalo’s first attempt at constructing this “seed wheat of
ideals” culminated in a little-known master plan by the office
of McKim, Mead, and White on the site of a former almshouse,
 three of whose buildings are still utilized by the university (in-
cluding Hayes Hall, whose centrally prominent siting and iconic
tower, added later, are reminiscent of Princeton’s Nassau Hall).
Out of this new masterplan, only one building—Foster Hall—
was ultimately constructed, and can be seen as a posthumous
homage to Stanford White’s work at the University of Virginia
of twenty years earlier; along with stylistic and volumetric simi-
larities, erasures on the firm’s drawings show that the original
plan included a semicircular auditorium that rather precisely
echoes White’s Old Cabell Hall. Shortly thereafter, however,
the University turned to the man who would become the chief
protagonist of the school’s building campaign—“Buffalo’s Grand
Old Man of Architecture,” E.B. Green, whose major monument
to the “university ideal” was his Lockwood Library.18
Descriptions of the library’s position of prominence in
Green’s master plan tend to cite Jefferson’s Rotunda at the
16 University of Virginia—a comparison borne out by the pedi-
ment and columnation—but the campus’ spatial planning
is substantially more akin to the work of McKim, Mead, and
White at Columbia University; Lockwood’s biaxial organization
and its four-side ionic-ordered porches likewise evoke a more
intimate version of Columbia’s Low Library. Indeed, the mixing
of pedimented and flat porticos at Lockwood can be read as a
play between the articulation of Jefferson’s and McKim, Mead,
and White’s façades. Jefferson’s Rotunda, a supposed half-scale
homage to the Pantheon in Rome, is explicit about its classi-
cal origins; after entering the American discourse, however, it
is transformed and reconfigured—MIT’s campus is a notable
example here—and it finds itself belonging more to a specific
lineage of inquiry. The fact that Lockwood Library bears the
influences of both McKim, Mead, and White’s rendition of
Jefferson’s library alongside the original points to a specific
idea of classicism that was being internally and continuously
developed as much as it was influenced by the antiquarian past.
Without eliding the usual stylistic distinctions conferred by
the word “modernism,” one might say that Green’s deliberately
progressive adaptation of the university library type—affiliating
Lockwood with an ongoing discourse of civic monumentality
appropriate to an enlightened America, instead of solely evok-
ing European precedent—remains an expression of a kind of
self-confirming modernity. Such a project neither courts nor
opposes external validation so much as it borrows an avail-
able symbolic language, to borrow Banham’s argument about
European modernism, rendered less constraining by the fact
of its distance. Indeed, Green (educated at Cornell) was of a
generation of architects who felt less obliged to undertake the
European Grand Tour; his own educational frame of reference
was specifically American, and his classicism, as with many
architects following the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago,
was a displaced one.
The untimeliness of Green’s work at the University of Buf-
falo was at the same moment being reciprocated by the Europe-
an emulation of Buffalo’s increasingly obsolete industrial build-
ings; as Banham observes, stacked factory floors were already
being replaced with vast single-story layouts, and buildings like
Bethune Hall evinced their own lateness with over-articulated
fussiness. “These great factories,” Banham writes, were “a
doomed building type… in abandonment and death they evoke
the majesties of a departed civilization.” The factory or the silo,
then, even at the start of the twentieth century, is recast as a
monument to a specific manner of outmoded production; and
as a monument, to borrow a Tafurian formulation, “it is free to
demonstrate continually and openly its own untimeliness”—
which is to say that its relevance is not in its contemporaneity
or even its functionality but rather its symbolic valences.19
Tafuri’s subject of inquiry in the above quotation was, in fact,
Washington DC, which, like the University of Buffalo, employs
neoclassical architecture to differentiate its cultural weight from
a more commercially-oriented context; each, in Tafuri’s words,
“tends to underscore in every way its own separation (not its
extraneousness) from development… they are symbols of the
American longing for something other than itself.”20 The American
university and the American capitol are alike in their self-
conscious counter-definition of ideals against context, intended
to confirm a progressive spirit of modernity and to appeal to a
distant projection of democracy’s origins.
Banham’s closing example in A Concrete Atlantis, Matté
Trucco’s charismatic Fiat Lingotto factory (begun the year
after Bethune Hall), offers a useful if oblique foil for Lockwood
Library. Banham, borrowing Amedée Ozenfant’s aphorism
that “those who profess to love machinery usually prove to be
collectors of antiques,” determines that Lingotto’s modernism
is, in fact, a historicizing one—a wild emblem of “enhanced
industrialization,” to reverse Mendelsohn’s phrase.21 Based on
a long-discredited typology, its modernity is confirmed not by
functionality—severely limited by its stacked organizational
scheme—or its over-determined material assembly but rather
by its referential echoes of Americanism. It is an architecture of
representation as much as Lockwood Library is; furthermore,
the building exhibits a number of almost classical ideals, as with
Loos’ vision of engineers as Hellenes. Banham describes how
the art critic Edoardo Persico sees in Lingotto “intimations of
order, even a divine order… compelling evidence of obedience
to the Laws.”22 These intimations address the parallel desires of
Lockwood and Lingotto—whether confronted with the rawness
of the American frontier or the chaos of the European city—to
exceed the ordinary through an appeal to a distant legitimating
other, whose idealization grounds the work in a tradition that is
always being remanufactured.
This view is, of course, a retrospective one; neither the
architects of European modernism nor the critics who cham-
pioned their work would abide the thought that their move-
ment could traffic in the same constructions of meaning that
informed a strand of American neoclassicism, nor, except in rare
cases, would they see that their abstraction was as representa-
tional as the classicizing architectural language of American in-
stitutional buildings. Banham, pondering the “cultural width of
the Atlantic,” wonders whether a visitor like Mendelsohn could
have perceived the difference between the constructed myth
Endnotes
1. Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern
Architecture 1900-1925 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 23-26. See also Reyner Banham,
“Buffalo Industrial,” Little Journal 3 (February 1979).
2. Ibid, 143.
3. Erich Mendelsohn, Russland, Europa, Amerika: Ein Architektonischer Querschnitt (Basel:
Birkhäuser, 1989), 18-19.
4. Moisei Ginzburg, Style and Epoch, trans. Anatole Senkevitch, Jr. (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1982), 70.
5. Banham, 3. “Insofar as the International Style was copied from American industrial
prototypes and models,” he writes, “it must be the first architectural movement in the
history of the art based almost exclusively on photographic evidence rather than on the
ancient and previously unavoidable techniques of personal inspection and measured
drawing.” Ibid, 18. Banham even blames the frequent failings of European “flat roof”
construction on its adoption from photographs rather than personal inspection: “The
magazine illustrations of such works seen by European modernists were usually too small
and too course-screened for details.” Ibid, 87.
6. Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intel-
lectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 117.
7. See Banham, 9-15. This selective dossier included images from Canada, Argentina, and
Brazil, which never undermined the prime importance granted to the American Midwest
and specifically Buffalo, an emblematic frontier junction.
8. Adolf Loos, Ins Leere gesprochen, quoted in Banham, 258 fn 19.
9. Banham, 7.
10. Mendelsohn was accompanied by a “fresh, athletic car driver” named Buckley, who
tells him that “the real city for silos is Chicago.” Again, Buffalo’s primacy is related more
to a sense frontier mythology than the actual artifacts found there. Eric Mendelsohn, Eric
Mendelsohn: Letters of an Architect, ed. Oskar Beyer (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1967), 69.
11. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute, 2007), 113.
12. Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika, trans. R. Mosse (New York: Dover Publications, 1993),
ix-xi.
13. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The
Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1921), 4.
of these industrial outposts and their actual presence. “Was
the vision double for him, as it was for me,” he asks, “or did he
see it with the single eye of faith, in the heyday of that idea of
modernism, now in decline, that we have wished upon these
our adoptive ancient monuments?”23 Even with this awareness,
though, Banham betrays his own “single eye of faith,” choos-
ing not to explore the possible reciprocities between a building
like Lockwood and Lingotto, not on the grounds of excellence
or originality but as participants in their respective lineages of
borrowed meaning. Both are self-consciously discursive objects,
staking out specifically local and avowedly progressive identities
through counter-definition, while legitimizing their aesthetics
through trans-Atlantic dialogue, an appeal across geographical
and cultural distance.
17
14. See Banham, 8-9.
15. For a complete if partisan account of the University of Buffalo’s history, see Julian
Park, “The Evolution of a College: A Century of Higher Education in Buffalo,” The
University of Buffalo Studies, vol. 15, no. 3 (May 1938), 42-52. Park’s institutional history
is of interest for more than its factual content; the University of Buffalo Studies journal,
which began publication in 1921 even as the university’s Main Street campus was being
constructed, affirms the presence of the school as a participant in the intellectual culture
of print — at its most critical moment of growth, the university grounded itself as much
in text as in a physical locale. As such, Park’s historical retracing is an active part of the
school’s self-realization; the physical fact of its architecture (“more than merely a paper
institution” is his phrase) legitimates its somewhat questionable date of origin. For an in-
stitutional history in the context of Buffalo’s current masterplan, see “The Path of a Great
University,” Building UB: The Comprehensive Physical Plan (Buffalo: University at Buffalo,
2009), http://www.buffalo.edu/ub2020/plan/final_pdf.html.
16. Julian Park, “The City and the University,” University of Buffalo Studies, vol. 1, no. 2
(June 1920), 203-206.
17. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” The Frontier in
American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1921), 282-288.
18. The phrase is from the 1926 Buffalo Artists’ Register, cited in E.B. Green: Buffalo’s Archi-
tect (Buffalo: Burchfield-Penney Art Center exhibition catalog, February 8-April 6, 1997),
7. For background on Green, see also The Gallery Architects: Edward B. Green and Gordon
Bunshaft (Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1987). See also Andy Olenick and Richard O.
Reisem, Classic Buffalo: A Heritage of Distinguished Architecture (Buffalo: Canisius College
Press, 1999), 138, which contains little on Green’s work at the University of Buffalo but
does indicate his stylistic versatility and presence in the city. A guidebook introduced by
Banham, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Charles Beveridge—Francis R. Kowsky et. al.,
Buffalo Architecture: A Guide (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981)—lists Lockwood Library only
marginally.
19. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1976), 34.
20. Ibid, 36-37.
21. Banham, 179.
22. Ibid, 21.
23. Ibid, 168.
 Transmissions from Suburb to Center
18
In an apparent fit of confessional apologetics, Kansas City
real estate developer J.C. Nichols published two articles in 1945:
“Mistakes We Have Made in Community Development” and
“Mistakes We Have Made in Developing Shopping Centers.”1
Both were well-received, oft-reprinted as bulletins from the
Urban Land Institute, and offered a list of best practices that
simultaneously contradicted conventional knowledge in the
field. Nichols, revered as a successful, upstanding professional,
publicly presented his errors of judgment as sacrifices on the
altar of professionalization—lessons that were then taken up
by other developers and applied to entirely different urban
contexts in the centers of American cities.
As urban land development shifted in scale during the
twentieth century, from streetcar suburbs of a few blocks to
Levittown-like subdivisions covering thousands of acres, real
estate developers gained new knowledge about where and how
to attain economies of scale and financial stability. Like other
subdividers, the experiments Nichols oversaw in greenfield de-
velopment—where the sites were outside city limits, untouched
by zoning restrictions, and tangential to existing urban fabric—
offered new methods for creating profitable, repeatable develop-
ments. Nichols and his colleagues working at the outskirts of
town invented strategies for dealing with encroaching land uses,
noxious neighbors, and falling market prices. Without the pres-
sures of a dense urban environment, developers could test new
street patterns and lot sizes, experiment with administrative
bodies like homeowners associations, and vertically integrate
their businesses to include financing, insurance, and engineer-
ing. At the scale of the tract and not the urban block, develop-
ers engaged in a spatial practice that was legally, formally, and
administratively geared toward investment protection.
Sara Stevens
In the postwar years, some real estate developers began
to apply these lessons from suburban subdividing to projects in
increasingly powerless central cities. A generation after Nichols,
the Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald worked with Mies
van der Rohe to do just that. Whereas Nichols had encouraged
the trend drawing population out of city centers, Greenwald
used some of Nichols’ techniques to control the impacts of
adjacent properties to retain middle class residents in the city
center. This case shows how the professional practices of real
estate developers found new advantages in applying greenfield/
periphery rules to downtown/central sites. Studying Nichols
and Greenwald will illustrate a story of a translation and trans-
mission from periphery to center that is grounded in the private
sector, in its historical context, and in spatial practices.
Nichols’ active professional period was from 1906 to his
death in 1950. Greenwald began working as a developer in 1946
and died in 1959. Nichols worked exclusively in Kansas City;
and Greenwald, in Chicago, Detroit, Newark, and New York.
They never met, they shared no close friends or colleagues,
they overlapped in no organizations, professional or otherwise.
Nichols lived to old age, wrote and gave speeches extensively,
and was actively involved in the national organization for the
field of real estate; Greenwald died quite young and wrote no
treatises on his profession. But there are many commonalities
between them. They had no formal training and little to no
background in real estate when they initiated their sizeable first
projects. They found the financing for their projects first from
people in their social circles and later from larger organizations
like insurance companies. They each had a strong vision for the
kind of environment they wanted to create with their projects,
and were willing to push aside conventional wisdom to find
Fig. 1: Photograph (date unknown) of a J. C. Nichols’ billboard advertising the
Country Club District. J.C. Nichols Company Records (KC0054-00017), State
Historical Society of Missouri Research Center - Kansas City. http://www.
umkc.edu/WHMCKC/
ways to achieve those dreams. As such, a comparison between
them, though broad, highlights changes in the professional
practices and the logic of real estate development, especially as
they relate to urban form.
Nichols’ vision was to create a high-class suburb southwest
of Kansas City that would attract the city’s elite and middle-
class residents and that would retain its value decade after
decade. His experimentations in land development allowed
him to improve upon techniques that appeared as paternalistic
advice to a younger generation of developers in articles like the
“Mistakes We Have Made” series. His active role in founding
the Urban Land Institute in 1940 as a non-profit, advice-giving
organization solidified the legacy of his techniques by offering
a platform for further dissemination. Nichols’ involvement in
writing guidelines for the Federal Housing Administration on
residential subdivisions again ensured a wide audience for his
preferred methods for controlling and profiting at residential
land development.2
Much of the innovation in Nichols’ residential work ap-
pears in the deed restrictions applied to all the properties he
developed in the Country Club District, the 4,000 acre agglom-
eration of subdivisions built over four decades on the southwest
side of Kansas City, Missouri. Through automatically-renewing
restrictions that he filed with the plats, Nichols could control
a host of conditions in his subdivisions—minimum building
costs, land use, building setbacks, and, until declared unenforce-
able by the Supreme Court in 1948, the race of occupants. But
Nichols found other ways to ensure the “high quality” develop-
ment he sought, and those practices had lasting effects on the
landscape as well.
Unlike typical subdividers of the time, Nichols always 19
worked with a landscape architect to design street layouts and
grading plans for his subdivisions, hiring Kansas City’s most
prominent, George Kessler. Nichols’ street plans avoided a rigid
gridiron for layouts with gently curving roads that respected the
gentle topography while nonetheless maintaining the frame-
work that the pre-existing grid pattern imposed. His street
plans connected and continued adjacent existing streets, linking
into and underscoring a hierarchy of arterial roads leading
downtown and along survey township lines. Though other sub-
dividers would limit access points to their subdivisions, quickly
disintegrating the grid, this was not Nichols’ approach.3
Nichols’ deployment of green space also set him apart
from other developers. His lot sizes were generous, and deed
restrictions established deep building setbacks, ensuring wide
areas of green space around the houses. Nichols believed the
setbacks and plantings contributed to his properties’ high valua-
tion and stability by creating a buffer around each building that
shielded inhabitants from unwanted intrusions. Nichols also
liked to preserve green spaces along major roads, deeding strips
of land to the city for tree-lined boulevards, or to screen out
inharmonious neighbors with parks or golf courses. Green space
was a buffer that Nichols often used to protect a property’s
value, but it also resulted in very low building density compared
with more urban and older residential developments.4
Nichols felt strongly that in order to maintain high prop-
erty values, a developer must retain control over the aesthetics
of a subdivision. Thus, he wrote into the sales contracts of all his
properties that building plans must be approved by the Nichols
Company. Another way that Nichols tried to increase and main-
tain property values was by providing public amenities to im-

20 Fig. 2: Aerial view of southwest edge of J. C. Nichols’ Country Club District, c.1925. J.C.
Nichols Company Records (KC0106-00136), State Historical Society of Missouri Research
Center - Kansas City. http://www.umkc.edu/WHMCKC/
prove the perception of quality while at the same time allowing
him to control the tone of activities in the District. Though it
came at a high cost to his company, Nichols scattered fountains,
sundials, colonnades, and sculpture around the Country Club
District at small parks and intersections.5 He planned sites for
parks, churches, and schools, and gave away those properties to
be developed as such.
Because he worked outside the city limits, Nichols was free
from municipal regulations—taxes, zoning, and planning board
approvals—but he was also outside the range of municipal
aid—water, sewers, electricity, and fire and police protection.
All were provided privately by the Nichols Company to his
subdivisions until the areas were annexed by the city (though
not all were). In testing out ways to provide and manage these
services, Nichols landed on the homeowners’ association as an
effective way to delegate management responsibilities away
from the developer and onto the homeowners. This particular
mechanism would become extremely popular with developers,
and like many of Nichols’ innovations, would not have come
about except at the urban periphery.
Despite the vast differences between Nichols’ and Green-
wald’s work, Greenwald imported many of the same techniques
on his urban projects. Studying the towers of apartments he
built in Chicago with Mies van der Rohe, we can see these
high-rises share many characteristics with Nichols’ residential
subdivisions in their comparative building density, in their
insistence on and definition of a vision of “high quality,” and in
their relation to the site and the surrounding context.
Greenwald and Mies built five high-rise apartment projects
in Chicago before Greenwald’s early death. Promontory Apart-
ments, near Hyde Park, was first, begun in 1946 and completed
in 1949. Then followed the Algonquin Apartments (1948-1951),
860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1949-1952), Esplanade
Apartments (1953-1956), and Commonwealth Promenade
Apartments (1953-1956). Unable to find enough funders for
Promontory, Greenwald opted for a mutual-ownership plan
through cooperative financing to raise construction funds.
Subsequent projects found funding more easily, with investors
having increasing stakes and opinions about project decisions,
on topics from air conditioning to finishes.6
Like Nichols, Greenwald believed that high quality residen-
tial developments would attract buyers and improve quality of
life for inhabitants and communities. Whereas Nichols saw Kan-
sas City as expanding southwest from downtown and believed
that this direction (and the pattern it entailed) needed his guid-
ing hand, Greenwald believed in keeping Chicago’s central core
strong. During a rare moment in Chicago’s history when the city
was building more single-family houses than apartments per
year, Greenwald opted to build high-rise multi-family housing
for middle class residents of Chicago’s core.7 After beginning
work on projects under Congress’ 1949 Title I Urban Redevelop-
ment Act, Greenwald was frequently noted to say, “The city is
damned but by no means doomed. Let’s rebuild it.”8 All of his
projects were in city centers, and as one of the earliest develop-
ers to embrace Title I programs, he showed a willingness to take
financial risks to preserve his vision for a vibrant city core.
Greenwald’s vision of “high quality” development focused
on modernist design, in promoting what he saw as a progressive
aesthetic that would contribute to the art and culture of the city.
Like Nichols’ work, a relatively high price point would select
middle and upper-middle class residents for the housing units,
leaving it to the developer to find ways to control surrounding
development. Greenwald saw to this in the site layout and in
some cases by building adjacent to other high-end properties or
parks. At 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, he bought the neighbor-
ing site to develop 900 Esplanade on it only a few years later,
ensuring at least one neighbor would be of comparable quality
(and financial stability). Mies’ designs held fast against value-
engineering in favor of expensive materials in public areas—the
marble lobbies and stone plazas—and instead performed cost-
cutting inside the apartments when needed.9
Greenwald’s site plans, when compared with the older
urban fabric of the surrounding neighborhoods, show a smaller
portion of the site is used for building footprint. More open
space surrounds the buildings than on small row house sites
or larger, but older, towers. For Greenwald, this trend grows
stronger over time, with Promontory Apartments exhibiting
zero-setbacks on side lot-lines, and later projects showing build-
ings floating like islands on a site.
The logic of setbacks that Nichols pursued in the suburban
subdivisions of Kansas City appear in the site plans of Green-
wald’s apartment towers. While the historiography of modern
architecture offers certain aesthetic or technological explana-
tions for this tendency in skyscrapers, an additional explanation
can be found along a developer-centric axis. In general terms,
real estate developers lobby for designs that can easily please
investors. Investors want to believe that their investment is
sound, that it will increase in value, and not be threatened by
externalities outside their control. Neighboring properties often
represent those externalities, and a spatial separation is insur-
ance that dilapidated, decaying neighbors will not negatively
impact property value. Nichols’ consistent, career-long advocacy
for this perspective in residential subdivisions and in real estate
more generally had fed into and bolstered this view in the
field, before Greenwald even began his career. Setbacks ensure
financial stability.
Both Nichols and Greenwald were committed to high-qual-
ity development, meaning they spent more money than most
developers on public spaces and amenities, attracted a middle-
Endnotes
1. J. C. Nichols, “Mistakes We Have Made in Developing Shopping Centers,” Technical
Bulletin No. 4 (Washington D.C.: Urban Land Institute, August 1945); ———, “Mistakes
We Have Made in Community Development,” Technical Bulletin No. 1 (Washington D.C.:
Urban Land Institute, 1945).
2. William S. Worley, J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned
Residential Communities (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1990). Richard
Longstreth, “J.C. Nichols, the Country Club Plaza, and Notions of Modernity,” Harvard
Architecture Review 5 (1986). Mark H. Rose, “’There Is Less Smoke in the District’: J.C.
Nichols, Urban Change, and Technological Systems,” Journal of the West 25, no. 1 (January
1986).
3. Nichols, “Mistakes We Have Made in Community Development,” 3.
4. Ibid., 4.
5. Ibid., 7.
and upper-middle class clientele, and worked with well-known
designers (Kessler and Mies). Neither abandoning the pattern of
the surrounding urban fabric, nor isolated from it, their projects
were integrated to a pre-existing street grid. In that way, their
shared bias was urban in its orientation. But both developers
also maintained setbacks that separated their buildings from
the street, often employing a green buffer between streets and
buildings that emphasized that separation. Compared to other
development techniques, especially in older, urban areas, this
technique was decidedly anti-urban or suburban in outlook.
The pressures calling for financial stability likely influenced both
developers, seeing the separation between sites and buildings
as a way to protect against neighboring land uses that would be
harmful to their property’s bottom line. Professional practices
in the field mixed urban and suburban techniques. Looking at
these two influential developers and what sets them apart
illustrates trends in the field. As real estate development be- 21
came a bona fide profession, its increasing ties to the financial
industry infiltrated site planning and urban form. Tracing fur-
ther these tricks-of-the-trade as they transmitted from suburb
to center illustrates their impact on urban form and destabilizes
the usual narrative of sprawl as a directional movement out
from the center.
6. Berger, “Glass and Steel: Herbert Greenwald” in They Built Chicago: Entrepreneurs Who
Shaped a Great City’s Architecture (Chicago: Bonus Books, 1992), 233-44. Eric Mumford,
“More Than Mies: Architecture of Chicago Multifamily Housing, 1935-65,” in Chicago
Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, ed. Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi
Ray (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), 85. Jean-Louis Cohen, Mies Van Der Rohe, 2nd
ed. (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007), 179-81. Phyllis Lambert, ed., Mies in America (New York:
H.N. Abrams, 2001).
7. “Table 3” in Carl W. Condit, Chicago, 1930-70; Building, Planning, and Urban Technology
(Chicago,: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 286-87.
8. Berger, “Glass and Steel: Herbert Greenwald,” 238.
9. See for example William S. Becker to Herbert Greenwald, 12 April 1955, “Common-
wealth/Esplanade Folder #2,” Mies van der Rohe Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
 Programmed Architecture
on the Cold War’s Periphery:
Vjenceslav Richter, Synturbanism, and the New Tendencies
22
Introduction
This paper will examine the work of Vjenceslav Richter (1917-
2003), the only architect to participate in the New Tendencies
(NT), a series of international exhibitions and conferences
that occurred in Zagreb, in what was then Socialist Yugoslavia,
between 1961 and 1973. The NT meetings brought together a
variety of artists and theoreticians, including Umberto Eco and
Abraham Moles, around a common interest in programmatic
(or optical) art, design, and—after 1965—cybernetics and
digital media. Richter’s primary creative contributions to these
meetings were a series of objects he called “reliefmeters” and
“systemic sculptures,” which were scale architectural models of
“Synturbanism”—Yugoslavia’s contribution to the “megastruc-
ture conversation.” His work provides a synthesis of such dispa-
rate discourses and practices as programmatic art, megastruc-
tural architecture, self-managing socialism, and cybernetics.
Richter’s synthesis can be understood within the frame-
work of the theories of Ljubo Karaman, a Croatian art historian
and Richter’s contemporary. Between 1930 and 1960 Kara-
man developed a methodological lens for examining work in
provincial and peripheral milieus, insisting on key differences
between the two: while a province received direct and regiment-
ed cultural influence from a single center, a periphery was open
to less regimented influences from multiple centers, creating
a condition Karaman called “the freedom of the periphery.”
This freedom allowed an artist access tovarious discourses
without any prescribed modes of operation. The political influ-
ence of multiple centers of authority also insured weak local
political authority thereby offering the artist, or in this case
the architect, a greater degree of agency. For these reasons,
Karaman felt that the “periphery is fertile ground for broad
Ivan Rupnik
creative synthesis.”1 While most of his own research focused on
Medieval and Renaissance architecture, his theories have slowly
become of interest in other contexts.2
The Cold War and the New Tendencies
The trickle of visits by various Western intellectuals and artists
searching for an alternative to the divided Cold War world in
Socialist Yugoslavia during the 1950s culminated in 1961, the
inaugural year of the New Tendencies exhibitions. This event
was initiated by Almir Mavignier, a French artist, Matko Me-
strovic, a Croatian art critic, and Bozo Bek, the director of Za-
greb’s recently founded Gallery of Contemporary Art, the host
institution for all of NT’s thirteen years of existence.3 The first
exhibition consisted of works which are generally associated
with Optical Art, although most NT’s participants preferred
the term “programmatic art.”4 In 1963 the scope expanded to
include kinesthetic works and environments. The 1965 meet-
ing expanded the ambitions of the movement: in addition to
exhibiting works, the organizers held a multi-day conference
and workshop, as part of which—and in response to what they
felt was the consumerization of optical art—they engaged the
aesthetic and political implications of the cybernetic discourse
and early digital technology. From 1965 until 1974 the NT con-
ferences would continue to investigate these issues, expanding
their activities to include a journal, BIT International, ten issues
of which came out between 1968 and 1973.
The post-ideological politics of the NT movement can best
be summarized by the writings of Karl Gestner, a Swiss artist
and editor of the 1965 New Tendencies Manifesto who stated
that the “movement is not revolutionary, nor does it develop
a front against anyone or anything.” Instead he would go on
 23

Fig. 1: Vjenceslav Richter, Synturbanism, axonometric of super-structure, 1963-64. Vera Horvat-Pintaric, Vjenceslav Richter (Zagreb: Graficki Zavod, 1970).
 Fig. 2: Vjenceslav Richter, Synturbanism, interior, showing housing units adjusted by users, 1963-64.
24 to describe it as “a cooperative/community which was never
officially founded… an organization without a statute… [and]
without a written program which nevertheless tied together 50
odd artists.”5 Like the theorists, if not always the practitioners,
of self-management—Yugoslavia’s form of Socialism—, many of
the New Tendencies members sought to replace the revolution-
ary ideology of the historic avant-garde with a more participa-
tory and indeterminate form of aesthetic practice, one in which
the political message (or any other meaning) emerged from
critical engagement with a work of art.
Vjenceslav Richter and the New Tendencies Movement ,
1963 – 1970
The unique synthesis of unlikely aesthetic discourses such as
optical art, cybernetics, and the “megastructure conversation,”
as well as the possible aesthetic implications of Worker’s self-
management, can best be studied through Richter’s work. The
majority of the work he exhibited there between 1963 and 1973
was actually architectural models or computational simula-
tions of his research into the development of self-managing
megastructural urbanism, Synturbanism. These models are
particularly relevant in terms of their political implications,
technological ambitions, as well their innovative representa-
tional approaches.
Richter’s architectural studies at the Department of
Architecture in Zagreb were cut short by World War II. Already
an active member of the Croatian Communist Party during his
studies, Richter joined the anti-fascist resistance in Croatia in
1941, and quickly shifted from active fighting to working in the
propaganda wing of the Resistance. Richter’s political pedigree
secured him a series of important commissions while he was
Vera Horvat-Pintaric, Vjenceslav Richter (Zagreb: Graficki Zavod, 1970).
still completing his studies in the immediate aftermath of the
war. Working in collaboration with a group of young architects
and artists, Richter designed Yugoslavia’s first international pa-
vilions in Trieste, Vienna, Paris, Stockholm, and Chicago, where
he also gained access to the late László Moholy-Nagy’s archive.
For reasons that are still not entirely clear (but possibly due to
the Modernist language of their work), somewhat later Richter
and his collaborators fell out of favor with the Federal Govern-
ment and Communist Party in Belgrade. By 1956, however,
Richter would return to favor, garnering the commission for the
Yugoslav Pavilion at the International Fair in Brussels in 1958.6
Richter continued to design Yugoslavia national pavilions for
a number of other important international fairs in Europe and
North America during the 1960s, but by then his focus shifted
to a different project, Synturbanism.
Synturbanism
Between 1957 and 1963, a team of architects and urbanists
in Zagreb worked on adapting the theories of Worker’s self-
management into planning practice.7 In essence the formal and
organizational logics of Zagreb’s General Urban Plan, or GUP as
it was commonly referred to, drew heavily from the principles of
CIAM as well as from the revisions proposed by Team X. Many
of the GUP’s authors had in fact been privy to the unveiling of
those revisions at the tenth CIAM congress held in Dubrovnik
in 1956.8 The familiar modernist morphological structures of
the plan were complemented by a few peculiarities such as an
emphasis on a general decentralization of the plan’s urban
units of 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants, known as “local self-
managing cooperatives,” which possessed a certain political
and economic autonomy.
Fig. 3: Vjenceslav Richter, Reliefmeter, sequence of different configurations of the same object, 1963-65. Courtesy Vjenceslav Richter Archive, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.
For Vjenceslav Richter these adapted familiar urban and
architectural elements did take enough advantage of the politi-
cal possibilities afforded by the theoretical principles of self-
management, which promised ever-increasing self-governance
and direct participation. Immediately following the unveiling
of the proposed GUP, Richter began to develop Synturbanism,
a project for a “city of 1,000,000 inhabitants, concentrated,
vertical, autonomous but interconnected.”9 Instead of using the
more established urban and architectural typologies of CIAM
and Team X, Richter decided to adapt a more experimental
international architectural strategy, the megastructure. In
Richter’s proposal, the smallest urban units, the local self-man-
aging cooperatives, took the form of gigantic ziggurats, whose
superstructures carried a skin of adjustable living containers
and cores that included space and infrastructure for all of the
current programmatic needs of the commune as well as space
and structure for the development of future uses.10
Despite of his own insistence on Synturbanism’s rela-
tion to the “the great ongoing international megastructure
conversation”11 Richter’s ziggurats differed from the majority of
megastructural proposals in several important aspects: they had
a clear political context, a logical client for their superstructure,
as well as a specific population for their containers. In other
words, the frame and containers would be provided by the Yugo-
slav State to be used by their inhabitants in order to replace
that same State with the architectural tool of self-management.
Instead of a “permanent and dominating frame containing
subordinate and transient accommodations,”12 the transient ac-
commodations, arranged in a loosely pyramidal volume, totally
covered the superstructure, suppressing its expression.
Richter’s preoccupation with the political feasibility of his 25
megastructures led him to systems theory and digital technol-
ogy. In a 1968 text titled “The Hypothesis of Systemic Architec-
ture,” Richter saw the direct applicability of these theories and
technologies for the resolution of what he called the “polyfunc-
tional” nature of contemporary urban life.13 The computer also
provided an objective surrogate for the State, potentially nego-
tiating individual inputs and the needs of the entire collective.
While cybernetics and computation were popular subjects in the
“megastructure conversation” throughout the 1960s, Richter’s
depth of investigation of these issues was only matched by
Cedric Price’s Generator—a project for a corporate retreat center
developed between 1976 and 1979.
Richter’s development of the initial Synturbanism project
and his direct access to systems theory and cybernetic discourse
were made possible by his participation in the New Tendencies
movement. Although Richter began his long term involvement
in NT in 1963, through the exhibition of a number of works,
from 1965 until 1973, Richter’s participation would directly
parallel the development of the Synturbanism project. This par-
ticipation took the form of a series of objects called “reliefme-
ters,” elastic surfaces composed of ten thousand interconnected
aluminum rods, with each rod capable of sliding 10 centimeters
forwards of backwards with respect to its neighbor. This micro-
scale flexibility had important consequences at the macro-scale:
the production of a five meter pyramidal surface at maximum
extension, a surface area increase of nearly ten times, as well as
10010000 possible surface combinations.14 Vera Horvat Pintaric,
one of the organizers of the NT events, was the first person to
identify these “systemic sculptures” as what they really were,

26
Fig. 4: Vjenceslav Richter, Reliefmeter, detail, 1963-65. Author’s photo, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Zagreb.
Fig. 5: Vjenceslav Richter, Self-managing Modulator, Yugoslav Pavilion, International
Exhibition of Labor, Turin, detail, 1961. K. M. “Jugoslavenski Paviljon u Torinu: Arhitekt
Vjenceslav Richter” in Arhitektura no. 5-6 (Zagreb, 1961), 29.
“small-scale model(s) of a system usable on the scale of architec-
tural and urban space”.15
The challenge of representing “various arrangements of
habitable containers beyond the control of the architect”
proved to be as difficult a problem for the proponents of me-
gastructures as the political one. In his recent autobiographical
account of this period, Yona Friedman recollected his critique
of Team X’s early designed frame and user-defined infill projects
as “an artistic thing,” “a picturesque jumble,” as opposed to his
proposals of “an order in which randomness is introduced by the
instinctive act.”16 Despite this critique, Friedman would go on to
describe his own projects as well as those of his contemporaries
as “habitable images,” and state that “the designer’s works clos-
est to these images are those of Piranesi, with his volumes, his
footbridges, his decks, which were suspended or held up by
a structure that does not seem real,”17 or, in other words, an
architect’s picturesque representation of informality. Following
this problem of representation, Mark Wigley describes Con-
stant’s “extremely well-crafted architectural models” of
New Babylon as if they were actually the results of a process and
not the design of an individual author, with their “occupants
continually (rearranging) their sensory environment, redefin-
ing every microspace within the sectors according to their latest
desires.”18
Richter’s political aspirations for his Synturbanism project
led him away from representation and towards simulation.
A 1959 text alludes to this attitude towards a new politics of
aesthetics where the primary role of the designer was not to
generate images of State power or indeterminacy, but “to give
the working man access to art in such a way that whether he is
producing or consuming, he participates in the making of art
and at the same time enjoys the benefits that it offers.”19 The
ziggurats of Synturbanism would not simply be the architecture
of self-management—they would provide the necessary frame-
works for its realization. In the meantime, reliefmeters would
not simply represent Synturbanism, they would help simulate
it, providing Richter with a tool of what the NT organizers
called “visual research,” an art object designed as a medium for
the production of user-generated messages.20 Horvat Pintaric
even suggested that interaction with reliefmeters would already
accomplish some of the goals of Synturbanism:
The on-looker who once, by viewing a work, observed the logic,
according to which it was created, now can become a participant in
the process of its creation… the range of effectiveness of systemic
plastics depends on the faculty for conceptual and logical visual
thinking of all who use them… allow(ing) its user to discover, learn,
and develop such thinking. It thus becomes a means for creation and
discovery, for developing spatial thinking and spatial imagination.21
Reliefmeters not only simulated Synturbanism, they
became pedagogical tools for teaching the politics of self
management. This abstract and elaborate capacity to simulate a
political system can be seen in one of Richter’s earlier proj-
ects, The Self-regulating Modulator, an object designed for the
Yugoslav Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Labor in
Turin in 1961. This object, exhibiting Richter’s familiarity with
the interwar work of László Moholy-Nagy, allowed visitors to
generate photogram-like political systems from the interlocking
glass cosmos of rings etched with the elements of self-managing
socialism provided by Richter.22
Richter’s reliefmeters provide a unique synthesis of self-
managing socialism, the megastructure conversation, as well
as the ideas of programming central to all of the work the New
Tendencies participants. As Richter himself described them,
they are a very early form of computational architecture, “’hand
computer(s) consisting of a repertoire of agreed signs by which
Endnotes
1. Ljubo Karaman, O Djelovanju Domace Sredine U Umjetnosti Hrvatskih Krajeva [On
the Work of the Local Scene in the Production of Art in Croatian Lands] (Zagreb: The
Institute for Art History, 1963), 77.
2. Karaman’s theories on the periphery have received attention from Latin American art
historians. For more information see Thomas De Costa Kaufmann, Towards a Geography
of Art, 2004.
3. “In the year 1960 I was in Zagreb. My first contact with local artists and art critics was
exciting due to the openness of a surprisingly well informed group .The subject of one of
our discussions at the Gallery (MSU) turned to a report from the 1960 Venetian Biennial.
To the question as to which new art directions could be seen at that Biennial I replied:
none, and that for the simple reason that the structure of the Biennial itself favored a pre-
sentation of art which was already familiar in terms of the art market and in terms of the
representation of specific countries. In order to discover new directions for art it would
be necessary to enter ateliers and learn about the work of artists who are experimenting
with new ideas and new materials, and I believe some of those artists are: Morellet, Grupa
N, Castellani, Mack, Wilding, Gerstner, Pohl, Adrian, Zahringer and others, who are
searching for new directions and a new conception of art. In order to affirm my presup-
positions I proposed an exhibition of these artists… A little later preparation actually
began.” Almir Mavignier quoted in Jesko Denegri, EXAT 51 – Nove Tendencije: Umjetnost
Kunstuktivnog Pristupa. [EXAT 51 – New Tendencies: Art of the Constructivist Approach].
(Zagreb: Horetzky Press, 2000), 214-215.
4. Optical Art was a term first used by William Seitz in 1965, in relation to the MoMA
exhibition, The Responsive Eye. Programmed or Programmatic Art, frequently used in its
Italian form, arte programmata, was first used by Umberto Eco in a 1962 catalog for an
exhibition of the same name. Eco described this work as “a dialectic between a chance
occurrence and a program, between mathematics and hazard, between a planed concept
and the acceptance of whatever might occur.” (No pagination)
5. Quoted in Denegri, EXAT 51 – Nove Tendencije, 221.
6. The Brussels Pavilion was Yugoslavia’s first attempt to present Worker’s Self-manage-
ment to an international audience. For a detailed account of this pavilion and the fair see:
Jasna Galjer, The Brussels Fair and the Yugoslav Pavilion, (Zagreb: Horetzky, 2010).
7. For more information on this plan see: Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik, Project Zagreb: Tran-
sition as Condition, Strategy, Practice. (Barcelona: Actar, 2007), 246-260.
I program certain compositions enabling my team to work
with great precision and well… programmed in the entirely
non-machinelike way just described….” and thereby “avoid[ing]
the … relationship of superiority of executor towards the
author.”23 Richter’s interest in interactivity and eventually in
systems theory and computation was driven and determined
not by technology but by political and architectural concerns;
the computer was simply a productive parallel and possibly an
efficient tool for the realization of other aspirations. The relief-
meters directly influenced the work of younger NT participants,
particularly Vladimir Bonacic, an electrical engineer turned new
media artist who produced a number of architectural and urban
scale environments utilizing digital technology while Richter’s
ideas and those of his collaborators, particularly the architect
and pedagogue Zvonimir Radic, seem to have influenced the
emerging Conceptual and Performance Art scenes in Yugoslavia.
For this reason, Richter’s work provides an important parallel 27
to the standard narrative of the relationship of architecture
and computation.
8. For a detailed account see: Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism: 1928-1960.
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), 255.
9. Vjenceslav Richter quoted in Vera Horvat-Pintaric, Vjenceslav Richter. (Zagreb: Graficki
Zavod, 1970), 10.
10. Vjenceslav Richter, Synturbanism (Zagreb: Mladost, 1964).
11. Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1976), 6.
12. Ibid, 9.
13. Vjenceslav Richter, Hipoteza Sistemske Arhitekture [The Hypothesis of Systemic Archi-
tecture] (Zagreb: The Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1968). No pagination.
14. Vjenceslav Richter, Odnosi mogucnosti i stvarnosti u Sistematskoj skulpturi [The relation
between possibilities and achievements in systemic sculpture], (Zagreb: The Gallery of
Contemporary Art, 1969). No pagination.
15. Horvat-Pintaric, Vjenceslav Richter, 17.
16. Yona Friedman, Pro Domo (Barcelona: Actar, 2006), 30.
17. Ibid, 31.
18. Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley, eds. The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist
Architecture from Constant’s New Babylon and Beyond. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2001), 27.
19. Vjenceslav Richter, “Formalni Regulator Industrijske Produkcije” (Formal Regulator of
Industrial Production) in Covjek i Prostor no. 86, (Zagreb, 1959).
20. See: Bit International no. 2: Computers and Visual Research, (Zagreb: The Gallery of
Contemporary Art, 1968).
21. Horvat-Pintaric, Vjenceslav Richter, 16.
22. K. M. “Jugoslavenski Paviljon u Torinu: Arhitekt Vjenceslav Richter” in Arhitektura no.
5-6 (Zagreb, 1961), 28-30.
23. Vjenceslav Richter, “Dilema” in Bit International no. 2: Computer and Visual Research,
(Zagreb: The Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1968), 25-29.
 Not Far Now:
Romanticization and the Search for a Polish Modern Architecture
28
In his ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Ben-
jamin famously describes the Angel of History looking back
upon the accumulating wreckage of the past while being swept
into the future by the inexorable storm of progress.1 The Angel
would stop to interrogate the past if the wind of progress had
not pinned back its wings, transforming them into sails carrying
the backward-facing angel powerlessly into the future. Benjamin
asks us to imagine that the Angel of History looks like the angel
depicted in Paul Klee’s 1920 painting ‘Angelus Novus.’ However,
his description of the two angels also differentiates them in at
least one crucial respect. While the Angel of History is “caught
up” by the storm of progress, Klee’s angel is on the verge of tak-
ing flight—“about to distance itself from something.” The Angel
of History is constrained to look upon the past, while Klee’s
angel retains freedom of motion and control over the direction
of its gaze. The historiographic imagination that motivated
efforts to found a national style in Polish architecture in the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries can be pictured as
an unstable amalgam of the characteristics of these angels.
This paper addresses the transformation of romanticiza-
tion as a historiographic model in the development of Polish
architecture from the 1880s through the mid-1920s. Early in
this period, this model contributed to the search for a Polish na-
tional style in architecture by allowing Polish architects to locate
their work at a distance from both their traumatic recent his-
tory and contemporary foreign influences negatively associated
with past injuries. However, romanticization also came to rep-
resent an obstacle to those Polish architects who were desirous
to develop an architecture embodying the cultural modernity, to
which the independent twentieth-century nation-state aspired.
After outlining the shifting political and cultural contexts in this
Matthew Benjamin Matteson
period, I will present two examples of romanticization in the
search for a national style in Polish architecture, arguing that
their contrasting approaches suggest that by the 1920s this late-
nineteenth century historiographic model had largely ceased to
be an overt operation, but that the architectural practices that
replaced it are unthinkable without its earlier manifestations.
Struggling throughout the long nineteenth century against
the occupation by partitioning powers—Russia, Prussia, and
Austria—and unable to see in their immediate past anything
but ruin and destruction, many Poles turned instead to their
distant history. Their mode of historical engagement entailed
looking backwards while caught up in a present storm, yet,
through romanticization, they controlled their view to find
in the past not “one single catastrophe” (as Benjamin had de-
scribed) but rather the most flattering of the possible perspec-
tives. Some chose, for example, to look back to the sixteenth
century ‘Golden Age’, when the Polish-Lithuanian Union was
one of the largest states in Europe with a powerful military and
economic leverage and a large, proud gentry.They overlooked
the ignominious present in order to ground the path to the
future in an attractive, if grotesquely anachronistic, legacy. The
motive force behind this brand of romanticization in Polish
art and architecture diminished with the post-WWI renewal of
independence, although analogous historicisms persisted along-
side subsequent, arguably more sober, interwar approaches that
referred to contemporary practice and the immediate past.
Late-partition-era exploitation of romanticization as a
means of overcoming historical distance and reframing the
future is illustrated by the story of academic history painter Jan
Matejko’s Wernyhora at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibi-
tion. This monumental canvas depicts a popular legend—the
fortune-teller Wernyhora prophesying the partition and resur-
rection of the Polish state. Matejko portrays Wernyhora staring
into the distance with eyes wide and arms outstretched as if
overcome by the vision he relates. While for the Polish audience
still awaiting the resurrection of their state in 1893, there was
surely no ambiguity about the messianic political message
of Matejko’s work, its display in Chicago aptly illustrates the
ambiguities inherent in Polish participation in international
Exhibitions under the partitions.
Throughout the long period during which Poland was not
an internationally recognized state, Polish artists could not
participate directly in international exhibitions. Instead, they
had to apply for inclusion in the national exhibition of the local
partitioning power. The only available mode of participation
entailed the labeling of one’s work as not Polish but rather Rus-
sian, Prussian, or Austrian—in any case dislocated and foreign;
the alternative being marginalization through the invisibility of 29
non-participation. To escape this hateful dilemma, a coalition
of Polish artists, with support from the large Polish expatriate
community in the United States,2 secured the right for Polish
artworks to be shown in the 1893 Exhibition in the name of a
newly created organization, the Society of Polish Artists. Gain-
ing the right to mount an independent exhibit was a signifi- Fig. 1: Polemical 1918 “Map of Unified Poland” (Mapa Zjednoczonej Polski), public domain.
cant achievement, exploited to maximum patriotic effect in
Polish-language media, even though the group still did not have could hardly be considered a satisfactory form of validation
equal status with the participating nation-states. According to for Polish art. Nevertheless, in 1893 Poles took heart both from
the official catalog of the Department of Fine Arts, the Society their direct mode of participation in the exhibition and from
of Polish Artists’ exhibit of paintings (in one Gallery, #62) was the recognition of their work in the distribution of prizes,
awkwardly sandwiched between parts of the Italian exhibition. for these suggested that the veil obscuring Poland could yet
It was also hung in the following spaces: “Staircase Landing at be pulled back. In this context, Matejko’s Grand Prix repre-
Third Floor; Around the Top of the Northwest Staircase; Around sented progress won through a combination of contemporary
the Top of the South-West Staircase; Staircase Between the diplomacy and the romanticizing appeal of the seer of
Second and Third Floors; On Screen Next to Spanish Art Exhibit Polish resurrection.
Alcove 95.”3 Polish artworks remained difficult to locate in these Once Poland in fact reappeared as a sovereign nation-state
interstitial spaces, just as Poland remained officially outside the in the wake of WWI, romanticization had to be reassessed.
geopolitical system of the exhibition. What, for example, had romanticizing historiography con-
Even so, Matejko won a Grand Prix for Wernyhora, though tributed to Polish independence? Could it remain a powerful
his award certificate—presented to “John Mateyko, Russia”— guide for intervention in the complex challenges presented
reiterates the contortions and compromises the marginal condi- by independence, many of which arose from very immediate,
tions imposed even on this highest form of validation. Since the contemporary states of affairs? Historian of Poland Norman
Exhibition’s organizational structure did not permit granting Davies notes that while the political independence of inter-
a prize to a representative either of Poland or of the Society of war Poland fulfilled the dream that oppressed Poles had clung
Polish Artists, some appropriate substitute affiliation had to be to for over a century, it was hardly self-determined as Poles
found. In this case, however, Russia is a fundamentally incoher- themselves were largely passive bystanders to post-war political
ent alternative as Matejko came from the partition territory transformations.5 Furthermore, skeptical participants in the
which fell under the control of Austria.4 Presenting this prize to diplomatic process emphasized that any conceivable configura-
“John Matejko, Russia”—at best a doubly displaced person— tion of a Polish state would face various economic, military, and

Fig. 2: Aerial view, from the West, of Saxon Square (present day Piłsudski Square) shortly
after construction of the Russian Orthodox Aleksander Nevsky Cathedral. Wikimedia
Commons, Marek Tuszyński’s collection of old prints, public domain.
30 political vulnerabilities and predicted that an emergent Poland
would fail to withstand renewed challenges from its historically
antagonistic neighboring states. John Maynard Keynes, for ex-
ample, referred to Poland as “an economic impossibility whose
only industry is Jew-baiting” and David Lloyd George is said to
have remarked that it made no more sense to give the industrial
region of Upper Silesia to Poland than it would to “give a clock
to a monkey.”6 Clearly, romanticization had not brought about
an entirely triumphant return to autonomy and independence.
Although Poland entered the interwar period with an
internationally recognized government, achieving political, eco-
nomic, social, and cultural unification and sustaining a stable
statehood proved to be a difficult and protracted endeavor. In
many respects, the Second Polish Republic consisted of three
individually weakened areas still divided by disconnected logis-
tical networks tying them to their former partitioning powers
as well as internal differences in language and national identi-
fication. In his history of the major groups of artists active in
Poland in the first years of the Second Republic, Marek Bartelik
notes that the multiethnic and multilingual composition of the
still de facto partitioned interwar Poland was a source both of
cultural richness and conflict.7 Finding a national model for new
works of architecture that could contribute to mending, or even
merely overcoming, these internal divisions and doubts was a
lengthy process of trial and error. This process had begun in the
mid-nineteenth century with strictly historicist approaches that
offered formal and decorative recipes for architectural expres-
sion of former unity ostensibly discovered through romanticiz-
ing historiography.
Historicist architects laying the foundations of a new Pol-
ish national style in the late nineteenth century experimented
with the architecture of various periods—Romanesque, Gothic,
Renaissance, and Baroque. Gothic, however, was the most
popular referential period style due to Poles’ perception that
their culture, and its architecture, formed the eastern limit of
the Gothic. Catholic churches such as Józef Pius Dziekoński’s
St. Florian Church in Warsaw (1886) constituted the majority
of significant works in the earliest Polish neo-Gothic style, Styl
Wislansko-Baltycki (Vistula-Baltic Style). Dziekoński’s competi-
tion-winning design displays the style’s typical characteristics—
brick masonry, dual tower front, stepped pinnacles, friezes,
and battlements. As a sign differentiating western, Catholic
Poland from eastern, Orthodox Russia, the Vistula-Baltic Style
confirmed Poland’s historical orientation to the West in the
struggle to retain autonomous cultural identity under the
pressures of aggressive russification policies in the Russian
zone of partitioned Poland. However, the historical narrative
on which this differentiation depended was highly selective:
conveniently neglecting, for example, the considerable influence
of the German traditions of the Teutonic Order which exerted a
decisive impact on the development of Gothic in northern
Polish territory.
Naming this ostensibly Polish Gothic after the Vistula
river and Baltic sea—the key waterway through historically
Polish territory—is a romantic nationalist ploy born of the
sentiment expressed in Johann Gottfried von Herder’s remark
that, “If otherwise mountains had arisen, rivers flowed, or
coasts trended, then how very different would mankind have
scattered over this tilting place of nations…”8 A 1918 map,
contribution to the tense polemic over the borders of the new
Polish state, highlighting the Vistula river system at the center
of Polish territory and prominently bearing the motto, “We do
not want that which belongs to another, but we will not give up
that which is ours,” echoes Herder’s ideology (Fig. 1). The
proposition that geological order conditions the rise of nations
and that national identity depends upon a priori natural forces
is characteristic of the pre-modern, ethnicity-driven nation-
alism that predominated in late nineteenth century Polish
romantic culture.9
As the challenges of independence replaced the struggle for
independence in the early 1920s, complex and direct engage-
ment with the immediate past increasingly replaced romantic
appeals to a bygone era in the search for a satisfactorily ‘Polish’
expression in architecture. This shift is apparent in the debate
over what should become of Warsaw’s Alexander Nevsky Cathe-
dral (Fig. 2). From the start of its construction in the 1890s, the
Poles saw the massive Russian Orthodox Cathedral designed
by a Russian architect and placed on a prominent site in central
Warsaw as an aggressive political act. Its presence became all
the more bothersome—politically and aesthetically—once Po-
land regained its freedom, at which point a lively debate ensued
regarding what to do with the Cathedral. The principal options
consisted of either accepting the substantial economic costs of
demolishing the artifact of Russian authority for the sake of
spiritual catharsis or, more pragmatically, leaving the Russian
monstrosity, with its “horrific belltower” and “gargantuan onion
domes,” standing in the Polish capital despite the continuing
insult to Polish national pride and aesthetic sensibility.
Rather than accept either of these options in its extreme
form, the prominent Warsaw historicist architect Stefan Szyller
proposed to renovate the church, putting Polish resources
to work to transform the remains of Russian rule into an an
exemplar of Polish artistic traditions and sensibilities.10 Szyller,
himself trained in St. Petersburg,11 was as sensitive as anyone
to the foreignness of the Cathedral’s Muscovian features, and,
under the right circumstances, would no doubt have been more
than happy to rid Warsaw of such an offensive eyesore. On the
other hand, he was just as receptive to the architectural value
and potential of certain aspects of the cathedral: its monumen-
tality, the underlying “Western” Byzantine plan, the artistry
of its extensive interior mosaic work, and the economic and
artistic value of the fine finish materials. Moreover, given the
continuing importance of the Catholic Church to Polish identity,
Szyller realized that anticipated levels of migration to Warsaw
would only exacerbate the existing shortage of churches in the
capital city. For these reasons, he argued that, “this cathedral,
which the Muscovites built as a powerful monument to their
force over us, should remain as a strong, lasting memorial to
our triumph, the triumph of Poland over Russia. A monument
to our freedom.”12 To show how this radical transformation of
the cultural valence of the monument could be achieved, Szyller
offered a drawing of a neoclassical renovation, emphasizing that
his proposal was only one possibility among many (Fig. 3).
Endnotes
1. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Gesammelte Schriften, I:2, Abhandlun-
gen, unter Mitwirkung von Theodor W. Adorno und Gershom Scholem, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and
Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974).
2. The large Polish expatriate community was commonly known as ‘Polonia’, or, in solidar-
ity with the then divided homeland, the Fourth Partition.
3. World’s Columbian Exposition. Revised catalogue, Department of Fine Arts, with index of
exhibitors ... Department of Publicity and Promotion (Chicago: W.B. Conkey, 1893), 428-431.
4. The Austrian delegation protested granting prizes to works in the Society’s exhibit, and
the Russian delegation did not submit its art exhibition for judging—rendering Matejko’s
award both more bizarre and rather ironic.
5. Norman Davies, God’s playground: a history of Poland in two volumes, Vol. 2, 1795 to the
present (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1981), 289-90.
6. Davies, God’s playground, V.2, 291.
7. See Marek Bartelik, Early Polish modern art: unity in multiplicity (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 2005).
Fig. 3: Architect Stefan Szyller’s 1920 drawing of a renovated church on Saxon Square.
The caption reads, “One of the possible transformations of the Byzantine edifice into a
sanctuary along Western European lines.” Published in Tygodnik Ilustrowany of May 1920,
public domain.
Szyller’s vision for the Cathedral remains historicizing;
it is certainly not compatible with contemporary approaches
that we would now label modernist, then only nascent in Polish
architecture. In positioning his proposal as calculated according
31
to immediate material and sociological concerns, his histori-
cism is, however, not simply an extension of the historicism
of the 1880s predicated on romanticizing appeals to distant
Polish pasts. Furthermore, presenting the design of a monu-
ment to interwar Poland as an open problem of architectural
style suggested that the romanticizing search for an absolute,
authoritative font of historical Polishness could be abandoned.
More positively, it implied the confidence that some genuinely
Polish contemporary architecture was possible, and such a
belief certainly owed something to romanticization, which had
previously sustained Polish culture against the injuries and
obstacles of the partition era. To extend the earlier analogy
to Benjamin’s angels, in Szyller’s approach we see emerging
the prospect of taking flight—of actively projecting a strong
architectural future for the Polish nation and state, albeit one in
which cultural artifacts were still expected first and foremost to
assert Polishness.
8. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Reflections on the philosophy of the history of mankind,
1784. Translated excerpt included in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook at http://
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1784herder-mankind.html.
9. Anthony D. Smith labels such nationalism ‘primordialism’ which he notes, in contrast
with modernist theories of nationalism, implies “nations before, and without, modernity.”
See Anthony D. Smith, “Nationalism and modernity,” in Central European avant-gardes:
exchange and transformation, 1910-1930, ed. Timothy O. Benson (Cambridge, MA; Los
Angeles: MIT Press; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002).
10. Szyller’s project is described and illustrated in „O Swiatynie na Placu Saskim,” Tygodnik
ilustrowany, May 1, 1920, 356-7.
11. For a comprehensive account of the work of Stefan Szyller, see the recent monograph
by Małgorzata Omilanowska, Architekt Stefan Szyller, 1857-1933 (Warsaw: Liber Pro Arte,
2008).
12. “… ten sobór, który Moskale zbudowali, by był potężnym pomnikiem ich przemocy
nad nami, powinien pozostać potężnym i wiecznym pomnikiem naszego tryumfu,
tryumfu Polski nad Rosyą. pomnikiem naszej wolności.” From „O Swiatynie,” Tygodnik
Ilustrowany, 357 (my translation).
 Disobedient Bodies:
Isidre Nonell’s Paintings of Spanish Gypsies
32 In 1901, Catalan artist Isidre Nonell (1872-1911) began to de-
pict the Spanish female gypsy. Canvas after canvas, he portrayed
hunched figures wrapped in vast mantles, hermetic women
who eschew the spectator and seem to fold in upon themselves
physically and psychologically (Figs. 1 and 2). The lively freneti-
cism of Nonell’s brushstrokes contrasts with the heavy stasis
of the figures, who appear as rooted in economic hardship as in
the dense materiality of the artist’s muddied palette of browns,
ochres, reds and greens. The Spanish female gypsy, or gitana,
subject matter almost exclusively occupied Nonell’s artistic pro-
duction for seven years, a substantial portion of the career of an
artist who succumbed to typhus at the age of thirty-eight. Non-
ell’s name has become synonymous with this gitana imagery.
Nonell initiated this new body of work upon his return to
Barcelona from Paris, and quickly set out to exhibit these paint-
ings at the Sala Parés, one of the only galleries that showed con-
temporary art in the artistically conservative city of Barcelona.
His 1902 and 1903 exhibitions, which should have heralded the
artist’s triumphant return from Paris, met with scathing opposi-
tion from their Catalan audiences. One journalist, Juan de Dos,
described the vitriolic reaction as follows:
The public, critics, aficionados and painters themselves all
joined together in a chorus and spoke out against poor Nonell. ...
There are those who have true hate to the point of rage for the artist.
The most impulsive demand the gallows or jail, the more passive sug-
gest an insane asylum, and the most benevolent are content to shut
all doors to him and burn all of his works.1
Another critic echoed that the works “incited true repulsion,”2 a
testimony further evidenced by the artist’s inability to secure a
Delia Solomons
solo exhibition for over seven years.3 The public outrage reached
such a frenzy that it even stimulated several literary works by
Nonell’s contemporaries. In “The Death of Isidre Nonell”, writer
Eugeni d’Ors imagined the grotesque murder of the artist by a
mob of the social outcasts mercilessly depicted in his paintings.4
Now, over a century since the maligned Sala Parés exhibi-
tions, the precise nature of the offenses issued by these paint-
ings and the logic behind the artist’s tenacious dedication to the
gitana subject matter remain elusive.5 In this paper, I reposition
Nonell’s work, and examine the central roles of cultural alterity
and romanticization in the creation and fin-de-siècle reception of
the Catalan artist’s gitana paintings.
Past scholars of Nonell’s work have failed to consider that
the imagery of the Spanish gypsy comprised a highly codified
representation that flooded first French and then Spanish
nineteenth-century visual culture. Typified as a sexually avail-
able dancing girl (Fig. 3), the gitana as subject matter must be
understood within the context of French exoticization of Spain,
Spanish participation in this exoticization, and the imagined
coalescence of Spanish and gypsy identities. Nonell was un-
doubtedly familiar with this common trope, and his paintings
of sullen withdrawn figures enveloped in their shawls markedly
depart from the types that titillated the popular imagination in
nineteenth-century Europe. Viewers would likely not have even
identified his subjects as gypsies had the artist not specifically
used models from the Roma community in Barcelona and fre-
quently (but not invariably) titled these paintings as gitanas. By
eliminating the conventions ascribed to his subject’s representa-
tion, Nonell defamiliarized a markedly familiar figure. His work
should not be interpreted as an artist’s benevolent advocacy for
an oppressed people or entirely apolitical pure painting,6 but
instead as a complex, provocative commentary on the construc-
tion of visual tropes. After all, Nonell began to concentrate on
this quintessential Spanish stereotype directly following his
experience of his own exoticization as a Spanish artist in Paris.
The pilgrimage to Paris, which Nonell undertook in 1897
and again in 1899, was an almost obligatory rite of passage
for any Catalan artist of his generation.7 Nonell developed
artistically in Barcelona in the 1890s within a close-knit circle
of avant-garde artists and intellectuals who endeavored to
transform their native city into a modern European metropolis.

Fig. 1: Isidre Nonell, Young gitana, 1903. Oil on canvas, 81 x 65.5 cm.
Viewing Paris as the conveniently nearby prototype, this artistic
community primed the young artist’s high expectations of his
trip to the French capital.
While Nonell achieved moderate success in Paris, showing
works at the salons, Le Barc de Boutteville and Ambroise Vol-

Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.

lard’s gallery, he above all aspired to exhibit at the gallery of Paul
Durand-Ruel.8 However, when Durand-Ruel finally approached 33
Nonell, he requested “typically Spanish” works, which Nonell re-
fused to provide, insisting that the gallerist merely “wanted me
to paint tuppenny works.”9 This interaction reveals Nonell’s keen
awareness of the French demand for essentializing images of a
violent, passionate Spain, epitomized by bullfights, Andalusian
garb and, of course, dancing Spanish gypsies.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the sexualized gitana
had become deeply ensconced in the French popular imagina-
tion. Travel writers like Théophile Gautier, Pierre Loti and
André Gide flocked to Spain seeking remnants of the exotic they
deemed absent from their own excessively cultivated France.10
Romantic fictional characters like Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen,
and George Sand’s Morena further promoted the consolidation
of Spanish and gypsy identities that would culminate in the late
nineteenth century.11 Illustrations by artists like Gustave Doré
and Jules Rougeron widely disseminated the gypsy as a sexually
Fig. 2: Isidre Nonell, Two gitanas, 1903. Oil on canvas, 136 x 136 cm.

available figure sensuously displaying her body in the midst of a

flamenco dance (Fig. 3). Folkloric images of gypsies appeared in
every Parisian salon from 1831-1881,12 and became ubiquitous
as products for bourgeois consumption in the 1880s and 1890s.
The consistency and popularity of the gitana image served to
Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.

domesticate the subject’s potentially inflammatory, schismatic

message as the paradigmatic societal dissident. It was instead
put to use as the highly saleable controlled exotic foil to main-
stream French identity and interests.
French demand for stereotypically Spanish images pro-
vided a lucrative but prescriptive market for Spanish artists
of Nonell’s generation. Two of his Catalan contemporaries
particularly fulfilled these romantic predilections. Hermen An-
glada Camarasa created vibrant, dramatic paintings of gypsies
 dancing the flamenco (Danza gitana, c. 1901, Pedro Masaveu
Collection) and even a series of provocative gestural drawings
revealing nude gypsies in sensuous contorted poses (c. 1908-
12). Ricard Canals, with whom Nonell shared an apartment in
Paris, eagerly took advantage of the French taste for colorful
images of Andalusian dancers in works like Café cantante (1901,
private collection). Through these works, Canals established
a fruitful relationship with Durand-Ruel. French collectors
sought out Spanish artists as authentic native voices who could
articulate these stereotypes in a modern visual language that
originated in France. On a more grandiose scale, even the Span-
ish government made spectacle of this exoticism by including
flamenco dancers and musicians in the country’s pavilion at the
1889 World’s Fair in Paris. In an 1889 illustration “Les Belles au
Monde” by Lucien Métivet, the Spanish gypsy appears alongside
her orientalist and africanist counterparts, as one of several
34 varieties of “beauties of the world” available for visitors to the
World’s Fair.13
While in France the gitana iconography furthered the
fusion of Spanish and gypsy identity, in Barcelona the very
same imagery often served to drive a wedge between the two
populations. In Catalan magazines like La Ilustración Artística,
Fig. 3: Gustave Doré, Gypsy Dancing the Vito Sevillano, 1862-73. Illustrated in Baron Charles Davillier, Spain, 1874.
both Andalusian and Eastern gypsies played an important
discursive role as “the Other” to bolster moralistic prescriptions
regarding proper women’s roles and behavior, classist attitudes,
Catholic piety and other conservative ideologies. Although
utilized toward different ends (the polarization or consolidation
of Spanish and gypsy identities), the same sexualized exotic
gitana fulfilled significant functions in both Spanish and French
nineteenth-century visual culture.14
Therefore, when Nonell began to depict his gitanas in 1901,
the subject was already delimited by a stereotype widely dis-
seminated in both Paris and Barcelona. However, his treatment
of the subject departed so dramatically from the established
prototype, having eradicated the prescriptive markers of the
gitana’s idealized pictorial identity, that his work was inassimila-
ble within the traditional visual idiom. Nonell’s slumped figures
hermetically turn away from the viewer instead of performing
for the spectator’s delight. He used a dull, muddied palette
lacking the bold, vibrant coloring of works by Anglada Camarasa
and Canals. Nonell’s figures resist not only incorporation
into the familiar gitana trope, but also, through the vigorous
gestural facture, traditional visual possession and consumption
by the viewer. Nonell’s figures seem on the verge of dissipa-
tion beneath the volatile overlaid hatchings of brushstroke
that tenuously hold them together; they refuse to provide the
smooth illusionism of nineteenth-century academic paintings.15
Although art historians have characterized such gestural ap-
plication of paint as sensual, based on the visual equation of
facture with tactile caress, Nonell’s hasty, careless brushstrokes
deny such access. This kinetic gestural language used by the Im-
pressionists to depict the fleeting nature of such phenomena as
light and movement is here employed to depict a figure entirely
sapped of light and movement. And this painterly assertion of
the artist’s authorial gestural freedom cruelly contrasts with his
subject’s own motionless and powerless state.
In these paintings, Nonell presented gitanas culled from
the quotidian urban experience of both Paris and Barcelona,
rather than from pictorial precedents. While typical illustrations
supplied crisp delineations of prettified, sanitized dancing girls
(Fig. 3), Nonell embedded his collapsed figures within sooty, un-
hygienic contexts that remain ambiguous: either decrepit bare
interiors or urban alleyways. In the nineteenth century, major
urban restructuring in both cities—the Haussmanization of
Paris and Ildefons Cerdà’s gridded expansion of Barcelona—in-
troduced wide promenades with increased visibility of the beg-
gars populating the public sphere at a time when homelessness
and poverty reached tragically high numbers. In his paintings,
Nonell endows the gallery visitor with the raised, controlling
vantage point of the flâneur, who, as Georg Simmel observed,
is conditioned to adopt a blasé attitude as he consumes and
commodifies the sites of his urban environs.16 Nonell even
brought his viewers into potentially injurious proximity with his
insalubrious subjects. He piqued the bourgeoisie’s fear of con-
tamination of their physical, social and moral health through
contact with the masses of the great unwashed. That gypsies
were emblematic societal outcasts would have exacerbated
such threats. This flâneur perspective aggregates the complex
ambiguous attitude Nonell assumed before his downtrodden
subjects, people he used for his own economic and aesthetic
purposes.17 Although today we likely view these sympathetically
as heart-rending images, reviews demonstrate that the fin-de-
siècle Catalan audience saw only threatening, offensive dirtiness.
Nonell countered the widely accepted representation of
the gitana with cruelly realist images from city life, thereby
laying bare the falsity of the romantic construction. Nonell’s
Endnotes
1. “El público, los críticos, los aficionados, los pintores mismos se juntan todos y, a coro, emp-
iezan a vociferar contra el pobre Nonell…hay gentes que tienen verdadero odio y sienten hasta
ira contra el personal artista. Los más impulsivos piden para él la horca o la cárcel, los pacíficos
extrañan que no se le haya recluido en una casa de salud y los más benévolos se contentan con
que se le cierren todas las puertas y se quemen sus obras.” Juan de Dos, “Crónicas rápidas.
Isidre Nonell,” La Publicidad, Barcelona, November 12, 1903. Translations are mine unless
otherwise noted.
2. “…causan veritable repulsió…” C. [Raimon Casellas], “Saló Parés,” La Veu de Catalunya,
Barcelona, November 12, 1903.
3. By the time Nonell mounted his next solo exhibition at the Sala Dalmau in Barcelona in
1909, he was creating more classically impressionistic paintings of reclining white women
(sometimes semi-nude) in pale blues, pinks and whites.
4. Eugeni d’Ors, “La fí de l’Isidre Nonell,” Pèl & Ploma 84 (Barcelona, January, 1902),
248-253.
5. For past treatment of these issues see: Isidre A. Nonell: 1872-1911, ed. Cristina
Mendoza and Mercé Doñate (Barcelona/Madrid: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya/
Fundación Cultural Mapfre Vida, 2000). Francesc Fontbona, Nonell (Barcelona: Ediciones
de Nou Art Thor, 1987). Josep Pla, Dalí, Gaudí, Nonell, tres artistas catalanes (Barcelona:
Alianza Editorial, 1986). Enric Jardí, Nonell (New York: Tudor Publisher Co, 1969). Rafael
Benet, Isidro Nonell y su época (Barcelona: Editorial Iberia, 1947).
6. Valeriano Bozal, Robert Lubar and Cristina Mendoza have each convincingly discussed
the lack of clear social commentary and sentimentality in Nonell’s paintings and draw-
ings. Valeriano Bozal, Arte del Siglo XX en España: Pintura y Escultura 1900-1990 (Madrid:
Espasa Calpe, 1995), 74. Robert Lubar, “Barcelona Blues,” in Picasso: The Early Years, ed.
Marilyn McCully (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1997), 97-9. Cristina Mendoza
and Francesc M. Quílez i Corella, “Nonell and Mani: Two Artists against the Current,” in
Barcelona and Modernity (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), 125.
7. For more on the relationship between Paris and Barcelona, see Paris-Barcelone: De Gaudí
à Miró (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001).
gitanas were neither saccharine moralistic paradigms of poverty
nor the exotic Other, yet they were emphatically familiar,
gleaned from the image bank of the streets rather than salons
and illustrated magazines. I would argue that the bitter taste
of Nonell’s own recent interactions with Durand-Ruel in Paris
may have prompted his selection of this emblem of stereotypi-
cal Spanishness as his central and exclusive motif for the seven
years following his return to Barcelona. And it was his interven-
tion into this conventional subject matter deeply anchored in
an exoticist discourse that incited the antagonistic rejection
of his paintings. By selecting an essentialized subject and yet
refusing to supply the expected codes that define it, Nonell
reveals to viewers the fabricated, false nature of the exotic idiom
tout-court. In this way, Nonell destabilizes the well-worn topoi
of colonial discourse, revealing the gitana, and the avant-garde
artist himself, as mercurial beings on the margins of bourgeois
society and its dominant languages of representation. 35
8. Cristina Mendoza, “Isidre Nonell,” in Isidre A. Nonell: 1872-1911, 23. Durand-Ruel
represented preeminent impressionists like Edgar Degas, whose influence on Nonell
merits more emphasis and analysis than it has received in the past. Degas’s bather pastels,
which Nonell almost certainly saw at Durand-Ruel’s gallery, offer a rich comparison to
Nonell’s gypsies given their vigorous gestural facture, irregular cropping and allusions to
voyeurism and hygiene.
9. Quoted in Jardí, 120.
10. Lou Charnon-Deutsch, The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession (Univer-
sity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 133.
11. Ibid, 45-56.
12. Marilyn Ruth Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians (Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI Research
Press, 1985), 4.
13. Charnon-Deutsch, 129-30.
14. Charnon-Deutsch discusses this phenomenon in Spanish illustrated magazines as a
manifestation of self-exoticization in The Spanish Gypsy, 183-4 and Fictions of the Feminine
in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2004), 148-51.
15. Carol Armstrong interpreted Degas’s bathers in this manner in “Edgar Degas and
the Representation of the Female Body,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan
Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 223-42.
16. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Classic Essays on the Culture of
Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 47-60.
17. Several scholars including Bozal (74) and Jardí (128) explain that Nonell took advan-
tage of the fact that gypsies would have been less expensive models. While such financial
concerns are pertinent, they do not fully account for his seven-year preoccupation with
the gitana subject matter, particularly since the work rarely sold.
 From Metropolitan Decadence
to Provincial Success:
Raymond Q. Monvoisin and the Chilean
Post-Independent Elite of the 1840s
Josefina de la Maza Chevesich

36 In 1843, Raymond Quinsac Monvoisin (1790-1870), an obscure and unknown academic painter
trained in Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts, traveled to Chile. Escaping from the “cultural metropolis”—
after a series of ineffective attempts to succeed in the French art establishment—Monvoisin ended
up landing on the “periphery,” a Spanish ex-colony that had obtained its independence in 1810. His
objectives in what he called “a still virgin country” were to reverse fortune using his academic training
to revolutionize Chile’s scant and limited cultural milieu. Viewing in anything French the model of an
artistic modern nation, Chile’s elite, intellectuals, and bureaucrats embraced the most conservative
and decadent aspects of French art embodied in Monvoisin’s figure to become “modern.”

Most of the scholarship devoted to Chilean nineteenth-century art agrees that the 1843 exhibi-
tion of Raymond Q. Monvoisin in the hall of the ex-St. Felipe Royal University was the moment in
which Chile left behind its colonial past.1 The significance of this event can be grasped from differ-
ent angles: the displacement of an artist from the “center” to the “periphery,” the first encounter of
Chilean society with history paintings and genre scenes, the introduction of French taste, and the
novelty caused by a “well-connected” professional artist are some of them. Although all these features
are accurate, Chilean Art History has usually interpreted this episode uncritically.
Indeed, Monvoisin’s arrival to Chile is usually examined as a “foundational fiction” that allowed
Chilean society to establish a deep connection with France through arts and culture.2 Within this con-
text the painter was the first and most important artistic ambassador of his time, and Chilean society
operated as an open, well-versed, and receptive public. However, “in each of these ‘foundational fic-
tions’ the origins of national traditions turn out to be as much acts of affiliation and establishment as
they are moments of disavowal, displacement, exclusion, and cultural contestation,” as Homi Bhabha
stated it.3 In this case, instead of analyzing what is at stake in Monvoisin’s arrival to Chile—in artistic,
cultural, and social terms—there has been a simplistic praise that has considered his relationship with
Chilean audience as face value. Let’s unravel, then, the different threads that inform this narrative.
When the political, social, and administrative turmoil provoked by the independence wars came
to an end, Chile, as well as many other Latin American countries, begun to define the institutional
apparatus that would fulfill the republic’s needs. Within the state-building period, the 1840s are
representative: a series of educational, scientific, and cultural institutions were founded acknowledg-
ing the relevance of science and humanities.4 Despite the new state’s agenda, however, Santiago was
in many respects a colonial city. Indeed, the capital and its elite were still experiencing the remaining
of colonial life while longing for modernity. This was the setting
that welcomed Raymond Q. Monvoisin, who was invited by
the administration of President Manuel Bulnes (1841-1851) to
organize a state Academy of Fine Arts.
In France, Monvoisin was an artist as any other in the
midst of the Academy, the salons, and state and private patron-

Fig. 1: Raymond Monvoisin. Alí Pacha y Vasiliki, 1832, oil on canvas, 345 x 272 cm.,
age. Trained in Pierre-Narcise Guerin’s atelier in the 1810s, he
had the opportunity to benefit himself from the privileges of
the Prix de Rome without ever obtaining the prize—Guerin, his

Pinacoteca Palacio Cousiño collection. Photography: Origo Ediciones.

master, was dear to his pupil and influential enough to secure
his way while he assumed the direction of the Academy in
Rome. After four years in Italy, Monvoisin opened his way back
to Paris in 1825 thanks to the protection and connections of his
mentor. Throughout the last years of the Restoration and the
July Monarchy he was at the service of the monarchy and some
private clients. But this was not enough. Not for an ambitious
artist like Monvoisin. 37
When his former peers at Guerin’s atelier, Eugène Delacro-
ix and Ary Scheffer, started changing the groundings of French
art in the 1830s (from the standpoints of Romanticism and
the aesthetics of the juste milieu, respectively) he realized that
success in the salons was difficult to achieve without impressive
artistic and social skills. And when he failed in getting impor-
tant commissions due to a notorious argument with Alphonse
de Cailleux, Louis-Phillipe’s curator for the soon-to-be-opened-
Musée de Versailles, and was infamously mocked by Paul de
Fig. 2: Raymond Monvoisin. Retrato de José Manuel Ramírez Rosales, 1820s, oil on canvas, 100 x 75 cm,

Kock’s novel Mon voisin Raymond, Monvoisin recognized that he

had to leave Paris. And while explaining his desire to “improve
his health”—traveling to a warmer country—to some of the old
Chilean clients he had portrayed during the previous decade,
he accepted the offer of the diplomat Francisco Javier Rosales
to introduce French taste in Chilean society.5 In January 1843,
Monvoisin was already in the country following a seven-month
journey. The press greeted him with laudatory words: “his ar-
rival is a new step in progress; we can say with pride that today
Chile inaugurates a new artistic era.”6
After spending a couple of months in the capital city of
private collection. Photography: Origo Ediciones.

Santiago, the artist and the administration of President Bulnes

agreed in the suspension of the Academy’s project due to finan-
cial problems. But far from being disappointed, Monvoisin un-
derstood what a great opportunity he had in his hands. Indeed,
the growing desire of the Chilean elite to become cosmopolitan
and modern through arts and culture transformed the artist’s
presence in Santiago into one of the few cultural highlights of
the first half of the 1840s.
In order to introduce himself to Chilean society and
promote his artistic skills Monvoisin organized an exhibition of
 his work with the government’s support. The show—opened on
March 4th 1843—was a success. The exhibition included nine
paintings: Alí Pasha, Blanca de Beaulieu, Nine Thermidor, Eloise
in Abelard’s Tomb, Joan of Arc, The Spanish Beggar, Parisian Boy
Fishing, Aristomenes, and a sketch of a Catholic mass. Four out
of the nine paintings on display are nowadays lost; however, we
can have an idea of Monvoisin’s style and technique from the
remaining group. Following typical features of Guerin’s oeuvre,
Monvoisin’s paintings are overtly academized, his composition-
al solutions are simple and predictive, and they rely on standard
dramatic strategies—for example, the gaze of all the main char-
acters. The artist privileges the representation of dramatic love
stories drawn from literature, Blanca de Beaulieu, medieval his-
tory, Eloise in Abelard’s Tomb, or recent ‘orientalist’ scenes, like
Alí Pasha (Fig. 1). The subject matter of his works is determined
by the flexibility of genres’ boundaries in nineteenth century
38 painting. Their evident sentimentality and theatricality—that
defocuses painting’s analysis for the sake of drama—reinforces
this position: they make these works closer to the new historical
genre that was merging at the time than history painting.7
Despite its compositional and expressive common places,
the Chilean elite considered these paintings as the obvious proof
of French supremacy. However, among the visitors of Monvoi-
sin’s exhibition, there was a critical voice that raised an inquiry
about how Chileans were “seeing” art. Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento, a prominent Argentinean intellectual exiled in Chile
during Juan Manuel de Rosas’s dictatorship, observed that the
Chilean elite did not understand what they were seeing: they
did not understand “Art.” For Sarmiento there were no doubts
about Monvoisin’s work—the reduced knowledge and exposure
to art made impossible to critically analyze the show—but his
interest in artistic matters helped him out to put into words
part of the problem. According to Sarmiento, the show’s public
did not appreciate the relationships between the hierarchies of
genres, between history and painting, and between the stories’
pregnant moments and compositional choices—Sarmiento was
scandalized, for example, by the success of a small genre paint-
ing, Parisian Boy Fishing, in comparison to the little attention
paid by the Chilean public to works such as Nine Thermidor.8
Indeed, Chilean society was more concerned—and seduced by—
material aspects like the translation into the canvas of flesh,
draperies, silk, and jewelry. Curiously enough, the same features
that called the attention of the Chilean elite presented—besides
the artist’s skill—the materialization of wealth.
After the show, Monvoisin immediately started portray-
ing Santiago’s elite. The demand for portraits soon outgrew the
capabilities of the artist, although he did not reject any com-
mission. Rapidly, he found himself producing portraits whose
main common features were a sketchy-like character and lack of
artistic decorum. The fame he had achieved in Chilean diplomat
circles in Paris during the early years of his career due to his
elaborate portraits—and highlighted by the large historical
genre paintings exhibited in the show—was gone. Monvoisin
was not anymore in France; he was in Chile, far away of royal
commissions and dreams of grandeur. Nevertheless, it was this
“past fame” that had brought him to Chile and the portrait of
the young José Manuel Ramírez Rosales is a good example of
that “ideal” epoch (Fig. 2).
In this portrait, Ramírez Rosales has been portrayed as
a young cosmopolitan that romantically directs his gaze to a
dream-like space. With a loose and relaxed posture and a rich
but sober suit, the sitter does not engage with the beholder. He
has been represented by Monvoisin to be admired. His well-to-
do and carefree condition has been reinforced by the portrait’s
background: the Roman Coliseum, site that could indicate the
travels made by the sitter to cultivate himself through arts
and culture, as a “grand tour” a la chilena. Indeed, he is not a
young Chilean anymore: he is a “citizen of the world.” José
Manuel Ramírez Rosales’s likeness was the paradigm of Chilean
portraiture because it left behind the geographical confinement
and provincialism of Chilean culture. However, as we can infer,
the portraits produced by Monvoisin in Santiago were far from
that model.
In fact, most of his Chilean portraits are minor works,
rigid and hastilyproduced sketches. Among those paintings,
perhaps the most reproachable aspect is the technical license he
took in order to paint faster (license he used earlier in France,
being severely punished by French art criticism): the direct
print of “real” laces into the canvas to save time when painting
the elaborate details of female dress. This procedure helped him
saving time, benefiting even more in relation to the high prices
he was charging per painting: six ounces of gold per picture. De-
spite these high fares, his customers did not seem to matter at
all spending large sums of money for works that, in most cases,
did not meet the minimum requirements of good academic por-
traiture. Monvoisin knew what he was doing, and scholars usu-
ally agree that the existence in Chile of portraits of “good qual-
ity” obeys to the fact that Monvoisin would occasionally find
“people of some intelligence” that were aware of the decay of his
art, or “beautiful women” who “inspired” him to paint a portrait
of quality. Reflecting on his travels through Latin America and
close to death (he also traveled through Peru, Argentina, and
Brazil with similar objectives), the artist did not acknowledge
his faults, but the little artistic and intellectual incentive which
he claimed had received during his Chilean and American years:
“I usually had ups and downs. I had bad company, I worked with
people that did not understand me, [but] I won a lot of money
with portraits and some large paintings.”9
Less than thirty years after independence, Chilean elite
was embracing the most decadent visual aspects of French art
to become “cosmopolitan” and “modern.” If we follow Mary
Louis Pratt’s notion of “auto-ethnography,” Chilean society
was trying to recognize the formal codes of the “metropolis”
in order to produce a new and different (empowered) self-rep-
resentation.10 However, if Pratt’s concept also implies a desire
of being different from the metropolis (in this case, a cultural
metropolis embodied by France), we observe here an impossibil-
ity to draw the line of difference. That basic distinction (between
an ex-colony-turned-into a republic and the metropolis) was,
therefore, symbolically and visually imposed from the outside.
In the 1840s, there was little left of the visual schema that cel-
ebrated patriotism and civic virtue from a vernacular perspec-
tive in-between colonial and republican times. From now on, a
new representational paradigm emerged. And it most important
features were those that did not acknowledge “Chileanness”
Endnotes
1. See, for example, Eugenio Pereira Salas, Historia del arte en Chile republicano (Santiago:
Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1992); Antonio Romera, Historia de la pintura
chilena (Santiago: Editorial del Pacífico, 1951) and Asedio a la pintura chilena (Santiago:
Editorial Nascimento, 1969); Gaspar Galaz and Milan Ivelic, La pintura en Chile: desde la
colonia hasta 1981 (Valparaíso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, 1981); Isabel Cruz,
Arte: lo mejor en la historia de la pintura y escultura en Chile (Santiago: Editorial Antártica,
1984); and Ricardo Bindis, Pintura chilena 200 años (Santiago: Origo, 2006).
2. “Foundational fiction:” concept coined by Doris Summer in Foundational Fictions: The
National Romances of Latin America. California: University of California Press, 1993.
3. Homi Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 5.
4. Among the institutions founded in this period: Escuela Nacional de Preceptores (1842),
Universidad de Chile (1843), Conservatorio de Música (1850), Escuela de Artes y Oficios
at all. What was expected was a European “air” that only a
French artist like Monvoisin could give to the Chilean elite. The
imposed difference, in this case, was determined by Chilean
society’s lack of artistic knowledge.
Chile’s geographical peripheral location, the burden of a
recent colonial past, and the more common news from France
can help us understand why Santiago’s elite aspired to mimic
a “cultural metropolis.” However, those reasons do not shed
light on the particular circumstances from which mimicry
took form. What is interesting of these circumstances is their
peculiarity: a painter that loosing his place in the metropolis
re-fashions himself in the province, and a large clientele that
being not quite sure about its own image longs to be fashioned
by a metropolitan painter. In this context, the province built
an imaginary and idealized “cultural metropolis,” France, using
Monvoisin as the base for that construction. Metamorphos-
ing an average painter—who was seeking fortune in foreign 39
lands—in the symbol of French taste and elegancy, the Chilean
elite transformed, without realizing it, metropolitan decadence
into provincial success.
(1849), and the Academia de Pintura de Santiago (1849).
5. See National Archives of Chile, Legación de Chile en Francia y Gran Bretaña, vol. 4
(1842-1846).
6. El Progreso, Santiago, February 3rd, 1843.
7. Paul Duro, “Giving Up on History? Challenges to the Hierarchy of the Genres in Early
Nineteenth-Century France. Art History, vol. 28, n. 5, (Nov. 2005): 689-711.
8. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, “Cuadros de Monvoisin,” in Obras de D.F. Sarmiento,
vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Librería La Facultad, 1913). All of Sarmiento’s notes come from the
same text.
9. Quoted in Miguel Solá, Raymond Quinsac Monvoisin su vida y obra en America (Buenos
Aires: Publicaciones de la Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1948).
10. Mary Louise Pratt, Ojos imperiales. Literatura de viaje y transculturación (Buenos Aires:
Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1997) [Routledge, 1992].
 Outside Looking In:
Francisco de Holanda and the Margins of Renaissance Art
40
Some critics have concluded that Francisco de Holanda was
an adequate sketch artist, capable of rough documentation of
things he saw in the world, but little more.1 Indeed, given his
familiarity with the great artists of the movements we now
know as Italian High Renaissance and Mannerism, his drawings
of Italian women in regional costume show a comparative lack
of refinement (Fig. 1). There is little variation among their faces,
despite his insistence upon the importance of physiognomic
variety and specificity.2 Showing no signs of interaction, the
women are grouped awkwardly in an indeterminate space. Their
gowns fall in stiff folds, giving little indication of the shape or
volume of real bodies beneath and no suggestion of movement.
Holanda’s famous portrait of Michelangelo, widely known as
one of the few portraits likely made of the great artist from life,
is less expressive still (Fig. 2). Rendered in an uncompromising
profile, Michelangelo’s face is utterly devoid of detail or any
rendering of shadows.
On the other hand, we must consider Holanda’s powerful
allegorical image of the fall of the Roman Empire (Fig. 3), com-
plex and subtle in both subject matter and style. This drawing
demonstrates Holanda’s capacity to render the human face in
three-quarters as opposed to strict profile, in accordance with
his theoretical and practical discussion of portraiture. Bod-
ies are massive: careful modeling gives volume to the torso of
the figure of Rome, and foreshortening increases the sense of
dynamic movement of the angel in flight. The extreme torsion
of the angel recalls some of the twisted figures of the ignudi in
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, which Holanda almost
certainly saw while he was in Rome.
These drawings only begin to demonstrate the inconsis-
tent quality and style--as well as the great diversity of subject
Joanna Hecker-Silva
matter--contained within Holanda’s Album dos Desenhos dos
Antigualhas. The album contains over 112 drawings character-
ized by what we might call a persistent inconsistency. Some are
carefully modeled using both cross-hatching and ink or water-
color washes. Others are more strictly linear and less insistent
on the illusion of three dimensions. Holanda constructed a
sense of space and distance in some drawings of landscapes, city
scenes or buildings, through which human figures move freely;
in others, he drew monuments in a flattened pictorial space
wherein static figures serve to provide a sense of scale, but little
dynamism. The question emerges: why would an artist capable
of refined detail, modeling and perspective submit to his patron
such an uneven and variable album of drawings?
King João III of Portugal sent Holanda to Italy in 1537
with the responsibility of documenting the great monuments
of Roman antiquity and modern fortification architecture.
Holanda dedicated the album to the king after his return to
Portugal in 1541. Past scholarship has assumed that Holanda’s
project, and the king’s, represented an attempt to disseminate
Italian Renaissance art and culture to the European periphery.3
While gathering Italian models may have been one recorded
goal of Holanda’s journey, the variability of his drawings
suggests that the task may have been informed by a “collectiv-
ist” impulse. During Holanda’s lifetime, the complex theory
and practice of collection—works of art, or precious exotic
objects, or both—may have played a crucial role not only in his
conception of art-making, but also in early-modern Portuguese
self-perception and identity construction. Holanda’s century
was certainly not the first in which wealthy patrons collected
works of art and exotic, precious objects from distant lands.
The unprecedented expansion of European engagement with
the rest of the world in the decades around 1500, however, had
consequences for collection—and collection practices had con-
sequences for art patronage and art theory.4 A consideration of
motivations more complex than the simple Italophilia assumed
by previous scholars can allow space for such themes as inver-

Fig. 1: Francisco de Holanda. Study of Costumes of Ladies and their Attendants: Sienese, Roman, Neapolitan
sion and multivalence as a part of artistic intent, whether from
the patron, the artist, or both.
After his sojourn to Italy and the completion of his album

and Venetian. From Das Antigualhas, ca. 1540, folio 3 recto. All images are in public domain.
of drawings, Holanda also produced an extensive treatise on
art theory. In the second book of Holanda’s treatise, comprised
of a series of dialogues, the interlocutor Michelangelo notes
that Iberian patrons are “the strangest nobility” because of the
high praise they will offer to paintings on the one hand, but
the low wages they offer to their own painters on the other.5
While Italian and Northern patrons seem to have displayed
preferences for the stylistic attributes of their own countrymen,
investing consciously in the development of regional or local 41
styles, Iberian patrons alone seem to have felt an interest in the
artistic production of other parts of the world, to the exclusion of
anything that we might consider “their own.” Documents sug-
gest that they even requested their own local artists to produce
works in foreign styles—a highly unusual predilection.6 It seems
as though some Iberian patrons of art, in their patterns of
purchase and commission, were gathering examples of different
regional styles—that is, amassing a collection of different
styles that were seen as representative of their respective
cultural origins.
The Iberian patrons who collected artworks from Italy
and from the north also sent artists along with navigators on
voyages to the New World, Africa and the East, and gathered im-
ages, objects and artifacts from those distant lands.7 Therefore
prints and copies of artworks by Raphael and Dürer, and leaves
Fig. 2: Holanda. Portrait of Michelangelo. Watercolor on paper. From Album

from Serlio and translations of Vitruvius, moved in the same

circles as did prints depicting the customs of the Brazilian Tupi-
namba. Ancient Greek and Roman sculptural fragments passed
through the same hands as did carved statuettes from Africa
and the Americas. Flemish tapestries and Persian carpets hung
side-by-side, and Aztec goldwork was admired alongside silver
reliquaries of the European middle ages.8 A single surface within
a collection might juxtapose objects from nature, objects from
dos Desenhos das Antigualhas, folio 2r.

antiquity, and objects designed by artists of the present day.

The wife of João III, Catherine of Austria was an avid col-
lector of both natural and man-made objects from around the
world.9 She had a taste for northern paintings and tapestries,
perhaps in homage to her familial background, but – taking full
advantage of the profusion of exotic artifacts and materials that
flooded into Lisbon from the worldwide Portuguese colonies
 during her husband’s reign—she also amassed one of the largest
“encyclopedic” collections of Renaissance Europe. Catherine
seems to have had little interest in Italian things—but perhaps
this is because the responsibility for acquisition of Italian
objects was passed to her husband. The king’s decision to send
Holanda to Italy may take on a more complex meaning in light
of the queen’s collection.
It seems possible that collectors like Catherine gathered
exotic objects as a function of imperialist self-identification and
identity construction—in effect, as an expression of domi-
Fig. 3: Holanda. Allegorical Composition: Fallen Rome. From Album dos Desenhos das nance over the “collected” cultures. On the other hand, we have
Antigualhas (c. 1540), folio 4r.
assumed that her husband collected classicizing architectural
elements as a function of aspirational imitation—as an expres-
sion of the desire to emulate Italian culture, and therefore an ac-
knowledgment of a certain degree of inferiority to it. If we recall
the simple fact that these two collectors were husband and wife
42 within the same royal household, however, we must consider
the possibility that these two seemingly opposite motivations
might operate very much in concert with one another. We can
imagine Holanda’s detailed drawings of Roman statues among
Indian statuettes in gold and crystal, and inlaid ivory gaming
boards; we might consider his studies of classical architectural
ornament alongside Japanese lacquers and paper folding fans,
animal bones and skins, and objects wrought of parrot feathers.
Collections included representations of humans as well as
their cultural products, and despite particular fascination with
the legendary “savagery” of natives of the Americas and Africa,
collectors’ interest was not limited to people of the New World.
The first ethnographic compendium was published in 1520,
presenting the diverse peoples of Europe in some detail.10 In
this context, Holanda’s drawings of Italian women and their cos-
tume begin to look rather like a taxonomic exploration of Italian
female culture, as though these people were as inscrutable and
fascinating as Burgkmair’s drawings of American Indians or
Dürer’s “Orientals”.11 Such images were used in the process of
examining, understanding and interpreting the great variety
of human cultures, including European cultures themselves,
around the world.
Holanda’s writings, as well as his drawings, push us to
think about these opposing motivations—the desire to collect
artifacts of “inferior” cultures, and the desire to collect aesthetic
models from “superior” cultures—in concert with one another.
In his treatise he defended the value of different artistic styles
in different contexts, and to serve different purposes.12 Holanda
was the first art theorist to attempt to bring the arts of Asia,
Africa and the new world into the scope of his theory. For him,
each of these foreign and exotic art forms had its own value, in
its context, but all were united by their manifestation of tran-
scendent ideal form. Holanda and his patron may have admired
much about Renaissance Italian art and culture, but when we
take Catherine of Austria’s collection into account we can see
that the early and mid-sixteenth-century Portuguese court also
“admired” the contemporary arts and culture of many other
regions of the world.
Gathering Italian models was, in fact, the stated goal of
Holanda’s sojourn, and the purpose of his drawings—but this
need not be interpreted as a manifestation of simple Italophilia.
If indeed this emulative collection was the basis for active
re-interpretation, the identity that served the Portuguese best
would have been not Renaissance Italian, but imperial Roman.
For Holanda and João III the concept of Ancient Rome as a
far-reaching military and mercantile empire encapsulated very
present and practical concerns, rather than being a distant
historical prototype for theoretical and philosophical emulation.
One way to experience and express an imperial identity was to
gather the symbolic cultural capital of the entire world into one
place, the seat of the Empire, the center of the Lusitanian world
thus conceived.
We can begin to understand Holanda’s variable style as
an expression of this “collectionist” paradigm: in this single
Endnotes
1. John Bury’s work is exemplary of this trend. See particularly Two Notes on Francisco de
Holanda (London: Warburg Institute, 1981); “Francisco de Holanda and his illustration of
the creation,” Portuguese Studies 2 (1985-1986).
2. All references to Holanda’s theoretical statements indicate his three-part treatise, Da
Pintura Antiga / Do Tirar Polo Natural, completed between 1548 and 1549. I have here
relied upon the Portuguese version edited by Angel Gonzales Garcia (Lisbon: Imprensa
Nacional – Casa de Moeda, 1984). Holanda’s discussion of the theory and practice of
portraiture occurs in the third book, Do Tirar Polo Natural, published separately with in-
troduction, notes and commentary by Jose da Felicidade Alves (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte,
1984).
3. For examples of discussion of the Italophilia of João III’s court, see George Kubler’s
Portuguese Plain Architecture: From Spices to Diamonds, 1521-1706 (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 1972); A.H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, Volume 1: From
Lusitania to Empire, 2nd edition, most particularly chapters 4 and 5 “The Renaissance
State” and “Rise of the Monarchy” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Luis
Filipe Barreto, Descobrimentos e renascimento: formas de ser e pensar nos seculos XV e XVI
(Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional – Casa de Moeda, 1983); Jose V. De Pina Martins, ed. O Ho-
manismo portugues 1500-1600 (Lisbon: Academia das Ciências, 1988). The degree to which
Holanda’s work represents his own agency, his patron’s expectations, or a combination of
both requires further consideration.
4. For an effective discussion of recent literature on the phenomenon of collection in the
sixteenth century – albeit with a focus on the Italian context – see Lia Markey, The New
World in Renaissance Italy: A Vicarious Conquest of Art and Nature at the Medici Court. PhD
Dissertation submitted to the University of Chigago, 2008.
Álbum, the artist self-consciously demonstrated his familiarity
with multiple modes of graphic representation. The drawings
seem like a collection in and of themselves, compiled from the
hands of different artists in different places, brought together
by Holanda to serve a single purpose for his king—and yet they
are all by his hand. Holanda’s “inconsistent”, eclectic style was
thus an expression of a pointed engagement with practices of
collection. Aesthetic purists see inconsistency as a weakness,
but for an artist and a patron deeply invested in the gathering
and display of disparate elements of distant cultures, it was an
expression of strength.
In this way, the simple desire to imitate Italy and adopt its
culture does not explain the complexity of the art and art theo-
ry that Holanda dedicated to his embattled patron. This tangle
of ideas and themes doesn’t help us to simplify Holanda’s work,
but his art-theoretical treatise and his drawings—and the works
of art and architecture commissioned by his patron—seem infi- 43
nitely richer when we allow for the possibility that such tangles
may have been precisely the point. His work serves as a case
study that challenges the idea that retrospectively-imposed and
oppositional categories of behavior—such as imperialist collect-
ing on the one hand, and admiring emulation on the other—can
be so neatly differentiated from one another.
5. Holanda, Da Pintura Antiga, Book 2, Dialogue 3.
6. For this section I have relied primarily upon Jonathan Brown’s seminal text, Painting in
Spain 1500-1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
7. Modes of relationship between art patronage and collection have been explored in
several volumes, particularly through the 1990s, including Circa 1492: Art in the Age of
Exploration, edited by Jay Levenson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); The Age of
the Marvelous, edited by Joy Kenseth (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, 1991); First Images
of America: Iconography of America through 1800, edited by Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976).
8. Joy Kenseth, “Introduction” and “A World of Wonders in One Closet Shut,” The Age of
the Marvelous, edited by Joy Kenseth (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, 1991).
9. Annemarie Jordan, “Portuguese royal collecting after 1521: the choice between Italy
and Flanders,” Cultural Links between Portugal and Italy in the Renaissance, edited by K.J.P.
Lowe (Oxford University Press, 2000).
10. Marvin Harris, The rise of anthropological theory: a history of theories of culture (New
York: Crowell, 1968), 399.
11. Many examples of such works can be found in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration,
edited by Jay Levenson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
12. Laura Camille Agoston has explicated the internal contradictions between the first
and second dialogues in Book 2 of Da Pintura Antiga, in which Michelangelo and Vittoria
Colonna argue for the relative value of Italian and Flemish devotional painting styles.
See Agoston, “Male/Female, Italy/Flanders, Michelangelo/Vittoria Colonna.” Renaissance
Quarterly 58/4 (2005): 1175-1219.
 Contributors
44
Ana Miljacki is Assistant Professor of Architecture at MIT. She
has previously taught studios and seminars at Columbia Univer-
sity, City College in New York, and the Harvard Graduate School
of Design. She has a B.A. from Bennington College, an M.Arch.
from Rice University, and a Ph.D. in the History and Theory of
Architecture from the Harvard GSD.
Deborah Buelow recently completed her Master of Science in
Architecture Studies with a focus on Architecture and Urbanism
at MIT. She has a B.Arch. from Iowa State University.
Azra Dawood is currently an SOM Travel / Research fellow.
She has a B.Arch. from the University of Texas at Austin and a
Master of Science in Architecture Studies from the Aga Khan
Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT.
James D. Graham is a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of
Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia Univer-
sity. He has a B.S.Arch. from the University of Virginia, an M.A.
from the New School, and an M.Arch. from MIT.
Sara Stevens is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Architecture
at Princeton University. She has a B.Arch. from Rice University
and a M.E.D. from Yale University.
Ivan Rupnik is a Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design and Assistant Professor of Architecture at
Northeastern University. He has a B.Arch. from Louisiana State
University and an M.Arch. from the same institution.
Matthew Benjamin Matteson is a Ph.D. candidate at the His-
tory, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Group at
MIT. He has a B.Arch. from the University of Tennessee and
an M.Arch. in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School
of Design.
Delia Solomons is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Fine Arts
at NYU. She has a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis
and an M.A. from NYU.
Josefina de la Maza Chevesich is a Ph.D. candidate in the Pro-
gram in Art History and Criticism at SUNY – Stony Brook, NY.
Joanna Hecker-Silva is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine
Arts at New York University. She has a B.A. from Michigan State
University and an M.A. from the University of Toronto.
Ana María León is a Ph.D. student in the History, Theory, and
Criticism of Architecture and Art Group at MIT. She has an Ar-
chitecture Diploma from the Universidad Católica de Guayaquil,
an M.Arch. from Georgia Tech, and an M.Des.S. with distinction
from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Alla Vronskaya is a Ph.D. candidate in the History, Theory, and
Criticism of Architecture and Art Group at MIT. She has a spe-
cialist degree in Philosophy from Moscow State University, and
a candidate of science degree in Art History from the Russian
Academy of Science, Moscow.
Funded by the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Graduate Student Life Grants, the Department of Architecture, and the
History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Special Thanks to:

Mark Jarzombek for his continual guidance and advocacy. Kathaleen Brearley and Anne Deveau
for their help and support. Michael Ames, Victor Park, and Minerva Tirado for their guidance in
the publication process. Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Ajantha Subramanian, Elizabeth Wood, and Ana
Miljacki for their valuable comments on the conference papers. Ash Lettow for his input in preparing
the conference, and all our HTC colleagues for their support.

Editorial Policy
*research-in-progress is an annual graduate student conference organized by students in the History,
Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Group, in the Department of Architecture at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Opinions in this publication are those of the authors alone
and do not represent the views of the editors, the Department of Architecture, nor MIT.

No part of this publication may be copied or distributed without written authorization.

Correspondence
History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art
Department of Architecture, Rooms 10-303/3-303
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

rip@mit.edu
research-in-progress.mit.edu
Copyright 2011
PSB 10.04.0189

Printed by Puritan Press, Hollis, NH

Text set in Chaparral Pro and Rockwell
Cover Image: Alla Vronskaya
Graphic Layout: Ana María León
 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Non-Profit Organization
History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Group US Postage Paid
Department of Architecture, Rooms 10-303/3-303 Cambridge, MA
77 Massachusetts Avenue Permit No.: 54016
Cambridge, MA 02139

Edited by
Ivan Rupnik
Ana Miljacki

Sara Stevens
Azra Dawood

Alla Vronskaya
Delia Solomons

Ana María León

Deborah Buelow

James D. Graham
Joanna Hecker-Silva
Matthew Benjamin Matteson
Josefina de la Maza Chevesich