Drawing the Ground

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Ground is a ground of multiple destructions, wrote Nietzsche. It is also a fundamental architectural concept. It encompasses the natural, social, and political histories of sites and buildings. This includes the history of rocks and soil themselves. This session is interested in papers that examine how architects and historians in different eras and regions have violently manipulated the earth, how they have captured, displaced, and damaged it in the name of tradition, progress, knowledge, and comfort. How has terrain been understood, represented, and forcefully transformed to become historical evidence, building materials, borders, monuments, etc.? While the ground is often associated with agricultural, funerary, and spiritual structures, we are interested in how the soil operates differently in historically specific civic, civil, commercial, and domestic contexts. Indeed, soil’s separation from agriculture and from the state was an important task in the disciplines of geology, geography, and history. Lucien Febvre, the founder of the Annales School of History, identified the task of geography with the soil and not the State. Geography, he wrote, “does not directly engage with human and political societies, but with the mark they leave on the surface of the earth, and by the imprint they leave there. [Geography] is their projection upon the soil.” Architecture is one of the permanent and expensive ways by which societies project upon the soil and make imprints on it. We are interested in what soil does to architecture just as much as what architecture does to soil. We are interested in work that address geological and mineralogical theories of architecture. From the rock cut architecture of Cappadocia and the limestone city of Caen to Viollet le Duc’s drawings of Mont Blanc and Semper’s references to crystals. From Loos’ search for stones in quarries to clay extraction sites of Vienna which lent their color to “Red Vienna.” From Roger Caillois to Lina Bo Bardi. How have geology and minerals shaped these and other examples of architectural thought? How, when, and where has the field thought and represented the relationship between biology, chemistry, and geology, between soil, atmosphere, and organisms? Further, how has the ground has been represented in images and texts? How has architecture conceived, presented, and deployed it in ways that overlap with, or diverge from how landscape architecture and art have? How has the ground historically been shown in sectional drawings in different disciplines? For example, how have Georges Cuvier’s sections of the ground of Paris and other French cities, showing layers of earth and its multi-species inhabitants, or Alexander Humboldt’s sections of earth been related to architectural representations of the ground? What is in a hatch or a texture? Finally, what artifacts, texts, and events reveal where, when, and why the “deep time” of geology and the slow speed of the soil are operative metaphors in architectural history? What happens when we think of subterranean as “exterranean,” a term coined by Philip Usher, the literary theorist, to refer to extraction that is at the heart of human use of the subterranean? What is at stake in making the ground “speak?” or in “treading lightly on the ground”? When we consider Bruno Latour’s question, “where do we land,” or Michelle Murphy’s “place-thought,” what are alternative conceptions of the ground and how are they represented, narrated, accounted for in architectural history?

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European Architecture Historians Network (EAHN) 2024 Conference Athens

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