Colloque : « Modernités pittoresques / Picturesque Modernities. Architectural Regionalism as a Global Process (1890-1950) » (Paris, 30 novembre-2 décembre 2016)

In the last twenty years, architectural historiography approached regionalism as a pan-European movement between 1890 and 1950 which, as a flipside of the International Modern Movement with its rationalist and cosmopolitan agenda, helped to reinforce regional identities through the language of regionalist building styles. When European nation states such as France, Great Britain, Netherlands, Germany etc. entered a late-modern phase of political saturation and a stronger need of cultural self-definition, architectural regionalism emerged as a polymorphic set of artistic strategies: fostered either by centralist regimes to stabilize the national project through a higher (however controlled) valorisation of its peripheral elements, or by centrifugal forces towards provincial independence. In France, for example, this regionalist movement was particularly developed through a whole range identity-building structures in neo-Basque, neo-Breton etc. styles, but also in a kind of regionalist eclecticism for seaside architecture.

Latest projects to write a ‘global history of architecture’ or a canon of ‘world architecture’ comprised of rather additive architectural case-studies around the globe with an ordering system along geographic and political entities (Europe or Non-Europe), but did not yet transpose the above-mentioned scenario to the global arena: in comparing the strategies of political and cultural stabilization, negotiation and/or resistance through architectural regionalism, a structural analogy of the centre-periphery model can also be detected between the European metropole and its overseas colonies, resp. between those colonies’ capitals and their own provinces. If ‘area studies’ identified similar regionalist policy changes from cultural assimilation (direct transfer) to association (regional adaptation) for European colonies in Asia and Africa during the same period (1890-1950), then the emerging ‘neo-vernacular styles’ in the colonies (such as the Style indochinois in French Indochina or the ‘neo-Mauresque’ style in French North Africa, the Indo-Saracenic Style in British India, or the Indische Stijl in the Dutch East Indies etc.) – can be read as Non-European variants of ‘regionalist styles’ in the European nation states. This ‘trans-cultural’ approach frames the diverse regionalist formations of architectural styles and forms as one globally connected process.

Transnational approaches to set the different European colonial contexts within the first half of the 20th century in relation to each other can also help to conceptualise the recent inter-related effects between globalisation and decentralisation (like in France) where the notions of the global and the local are often enmeshed simultaneously in contemporary architecture.

Programme en PDF : « Picturesque-modernities »

Colloque international
30 novembre – 2 décembre 2016

Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art
Hôtel Lully, 45, rue des Petits-Champs
75001 Paris/France