The fourth workshop of the "How Well Do 'Facts' Travel?" project was held on Monday 17 and Tuesday 18 December 2007. The main focus was on material objects as vehicles for 'facts'.
The development, uptake, and transmission of aesthetic styles and figurative elements is well documented in the history of architecture - but much less has been said about the technical skills related to the architectural language - hence, how technical knowledge is transferred between different actors and through time and space is the main focus in research officer Simona Valeriani's project. Invited participants spoke about how technical knowledge in the field of architecture and buildings has travelled, both across space and through time.
About the Workshop
How well do "facts" travel in material objects? Does a manufactured product also carry information about its history and usage, or instructions for its (re)production? Different objects carry different facts in different ways. What is also carried by a ceramic vessel, an architectural style, a tool? This workshop will look at what it might mean for facts to travel in things, and will ask if facts carried from place to place in this manner travel better or worse than facts written, spoken, or codified diagrammatically.
The first day of the workshop will focus on the ways in which technical knowledge in the field of architecture and buildings has travelled, both across space and through time. The development, uptake, and transmission of aesthetic styles and figurative elements is well documented in the history of architecture - but much less has been said about the technical skills related to the architectural language.
Were solutions found using existing building methods, or is the new aesthetic style inseparable from the methods of construction required to achieve it? In asking what type of relations hold between architectural form and construction techniques, we aim to investigate how facts about construction methods travel, what type of information is embodied within travelling artefacts, and what such artefacts can tell us about the technical culture needed for their production. Does the way in which the architecture travels influence how well the facts travel?
The second day of the workshop will look more broadly at the particular status of material objects as carriers of facts in different disciplines. From art, architecture, and archaeology to the natural sciences: what conditions facilitate or impair the transit and receipt of migrant facts embedded within material objects?
What kinds of information are carried in bones, in ritual objects, in model organisms? It is clear that neither the value nor the function of a given artefact are always stable across time and space. How well do embodied facts travel into a different context? Within our broad disciplinary span is a tight and controlled focus on how - and as importantly, how well - facts travel within material objects. (Programme available here.)
Abstracts and Speakers
- Simona Valeriani - Architectural Facts under the Skin: Travelling Objects and Travelling People in 17th Century
This paper will describe some cases in which technical knowledge related to architecture has been travelling through Europe in the 17th century. The focus will be in particular on the spread of carpentry techniques between Italy, England, Germany and France. The cases are taken as examples in order to analyse in detail some problems underlying the project question (How Well Do 'Facts' Travel?) as well as the specific workshop topic (Facts and Artefacts. What Travels in Material Objects?). In each case the focus will be on the kind of 'facts' that are travelling and the 'vehicles' involved. The paper will also analyse what happens to technical facts in different settings while they travel and how intact they reach their destination. Attention will also be given to the impact "travelling facts" have on the receiving community, either influencing the local building trade, or being used as a "one-off" quote, or remaining isolated and even having to cross hard boundaries. David Yeomans - Mistakes in transmission This paper argues that there are two aspects to the transmission of technological knowledge: the form of the object, and the understanding of the principles underlying that form. When the principles are not understood we may see modifications of the form that are deficient in principle, as seen in the roof designs of Inigo Jones. However, when the principles are understood, the normal process of design development may result in modifications of the basic form that parallel the development of advanced forms in the place of origin but without any knowledge of those advanced forms. Examples are provided from the history of roof carpentry. It also discusses twentieth century examples, demonstrating first the effect of a lack of principle in the use of reinforced concrete. This is an example of a complex technology that appears to be simpler than it is in fact. The case is then made that a failure to understand the principles of a technology can occur because it is adapted to fit a pre-existing technology in the receiving country. In such instances significant differences might not be recognized leading to failures. The example is the adoption of trussed rafter roofs in Britain.
- Nicola Navone - Building for the tsars: Swiss-Italian architects and craftsmen in Russia
From the eighteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century and longer, Russia was reached by numerous architects and craftsmen migrating from what is actually called Cantone Ticino (Southern Switzerland). Their spreading was such, that the presence of "Luganese Stone Masons" is documented in almost every State building site of this period. The paper aims to point out the technological contribution offered by these builders. Moreover, it will try to highlight the interplay between the different construction methods (and traditions) on the major building sites of Saint-Petersburg. Werner Oechslin - Idea Materialis Kant states that our imagination is necessarily related to our experience. He therefore, on the one hand, advises against (free-floating) chimera and, on the other stipulates that reason should coerce nature. His position results from his insight about the opportunities as well as the risks associated with intellectual activity. According to Kant, one has to limit the applicability of the principles of aesthetics: extending them to all things would be tantamount to converting everything into mere appearance. Therefore, the principles of aesthetics hold only for objects of possible experience. Be that as it may, even when unobserved, the aesthetic understanding still adds to the "house of experience" a much larger "wing". As this suggests, Kant's frequent use of architectural metaphors is striking. Emblematically, the architectural becomes a medium for the mental and the abstract. This has a longstanding tradition and shall be elucidated with regard to three very different examples: first, the "idea materialis," that oxymoronically represents the "ideally-abstract" and, at the same time, stands for the physical presence of the architectural model (in the tradition of Leonbattista Alberti); second, the "et visui et usui;" the spatial-sensual means of ordering and systematizing used by libraries in order to facilitate the mediation of intellectual insights about sensual experience; finally, the very idea of "architectonic" itself by which Kant, in the tradition of J. H. Lambert, means an "art of systems."
- Vaughan Hart - 'Letting passe all superstition': On the Role of Euclidean Geometry in Early Seventeenth Century English Architecture
This paper will illustrate the role of Euclidean geometry as an agent of change in early seventeenth century English architectural practice. It will argue that whilst the acceptance of the architectural Orders was problematic in the context of Puritan sentiments towards decoration and foreign style, geometry provided the Early English architectural theorists (most notably John Dee and Robert Peake) a more neutral field for the advancement of the virtues of the new all'antica style and the reform of Elisabethan craft practices. Whilst certain aspects of the imported architectural style 'travelled' well, 'letting passe all superstition,' other aspects did not.
- Edward Chaney - Lord Arundel and the Obelisk of Domitian
This paper explores the way in which obelisks have been used, represented and read through the millennia. Covering cases from Mussolini's looting, following the precedent of Roman Emperors from August to Constantine, looting of dozens of obelisks from Egypt to re-erect in Rome and even Constantinople, to the French, British and American following of this Roman precedent. Each country conferred their own particular meaning on the transaction. The tallest obelisk is now the Washington Monument which is not a trophy of another culture and has no inscription but symbolizes something more autonomous. During the Renaissance there was a growing interest in the Egyptian obelisks which lay broken or buried in Rome, only one, behind the Vatican, having remained standing. After attempts by many other Popes it was Sixtus V who stunned the world by reerecting four Egyptian obelisks, christianizing each with a crucifix but also using them as part of the secular city planning reform. English tombs adopted the motif and Lord Arundel remarkably tried to acquire an obelisk for his garden on the Thames, the subject of this lecture. Urban VIII forbad its export and Innocent X got Bernini to erect it in the Piazza Navona.
- Alison Wylie - Travelling Facts and the Epistemology of Ignorance: Archaeological Facts of the 'Eminent Mounds' of Central North America
Archaeological facts routinely travel in ways that are consequential for their constitution as evidence of the cultural past. My focus here is on how archaeologists who study the earthen mound sites located in the central river valleys of North America, Hopewell and Mississippian sites, grapple with the effects of continuous trade in and dispersal of the material with which they work. I examine how the literal transit of archaeological facts-from in situ depositional contexts to archaeological repositories, across institutional contexts and legal jurisdictions, in and out of the public domain-shapes archaeological inquiry and, more specifically, shapes the adjudication of interpretive claims and of the putative facts on which they are based. Some archaeological facts are recognized to travel better than others, in a number of senses; all require considerable material and conceptual scaffolding to function as facts. My aim is to identify the conditions that make a difference to the integrity and persistence of archaeological facts.
- Marta Ajmar-Wollheim - 'Kept like sacred things': shifting perceptions and questions of transmission of knowledge in Italian Renaissance pottery
Treated like rare things, ancient classical vases (known today as Arretine wares) were in fact among the earliest examples of massproduced pottery. Arretine wares were also especially renowned for their highly erotic scenes, and yet, ironically, while describing how these vases became the object of early collecting, they were also perceived as holy. As the complex story of Italian pottery unfolded during the course of the early modern period - from imitating Islamic ceramics to attempting to replicate Chinese porcelain, from looking at metalwork for inspiration to camouflaging as painting - the distance between its perceived and its actual identity kept shifting, raising interesting questions as to the ways in which ceramics were carriers of factual content.
Speakers and Participants
- Jon Adams, LSE
- Marta Ajmar-Wollheim, Victoria and Albert Museum
- Rachel Ankeny, University of Adeleide
- Alison Boyle, Science Museum
- Edward Chaney, Southampton Solent University
- Hasok Chang, UCL
- Johannes Cramer, Technische Universität Berlin
- Albane Forestier, LSE
- Fances Halahan, Institute of Archaeology
- Vaughan Hart, Bath University
- David Haycock, the National Maritime Museum
- Peter Howlett, LSE
- Janet Hunter, LSE
- Justus Lentsch, University of Bielefeld
- Sabina Leonelli, LSE
- Harro Maas, University of Amsterdam
- Erika Mattila, LSE
- Julia Mensink, LSE
- Martina Merz, University of Lucerne
- Ashley Millar, LSE
- Mary Morgan, LSE
- Andrew Nahum, Science Museum
- Nicola Navone, Universita della Svizerra italiana
- Werner Oechslin, Institute für Geschichte und Theorie derr Architektur, Zürich
- Antoine Picon, Harvard's Graduate School of Design
- Ed Ramsden, LSE
- Tirthankar Roy, LSE
- Lambert Schneider, University of Hamburg
- Max-Stephan Schulze, LSE
- Richard Steckel, Ohio State University
- Simona Valeriani, LSE
- Aashish Velkar, LSE
- Patrick Wallis, LSE
- Alison Wylie, University of Washington
- David Yeomans
- Alison Boyle, Science Museum