Neoclassicism in the Extended Field: A Global Project
Symposium Schedule (All Times EST)
Register here: https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Ba08mWfSThaBygzaLa0xqw#/registration
Thursday, May 28
9-10:30 AM: Building Neoclassicism
Moderated by Robin Hartanto Honggare (National University of Singapore)
Dante Furioso (Princeton University, USA), Tools and Chains: Producing Neoclassicism in Colonial Havana
Erika Brandl (University of Bergen, Norway), Counterfeit Neoclassicism: Forging Identity and Hierarchy in West African Home Architecture (1816-1847)
Aleksander Musial (gta, ETH Zürich, Switzerland), Sites for Eternity: Modern Tumuli and Emancipated Settlements in Eastern Europe, ca. 1775-1825
11AM-1PM: Keynote Presentation, Prof, Meredith Martin (New York University, USA)
2-3:30 PM: Enforcing Neoclassicism
Moderated by Y. L. Lucy Wang (Pratt Institute and Syracuse University, USA)
Aden Solway (Harvard University, USA), Returnist Form in the Nationalist Maghreb
Michael Faciejew (Dalhousie University, Canada), The Architecture of False Transition: Neoclassicism in the Settler Colonial Hydroscape
Magali Franchino (Universidad de la Plata, Argentina and Universitat de Girona, Spain), Where Does Character Lie? Teaching Architecture in Buenos Aires: Between the Ideals of the Post-Revolutionary State and the Argentine Nation-State, 1820-1890
Friday, May 29
9-10:30 AM: Endowing Neoclassicism
Moderated by Nikos Magouliotis (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
Elli Antonia Vlachou (Independent Researcher, History and Theory of Architecture), Two Neoclassicisms: Diasporic Benefaction and the Making of National Architecture in Modern Greece
Charles Ro (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Imperial Forms, Impossible Sovereignty: Seokjojeon and the Limits of Korean Neoclassicism
Jyoti Pandey Sharma (School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India), An Unconventional Cosmopolitan Affair in Mofussil India: Neoclassical Adventures of the Trio of an India Queen: Her Italian Mercenary-turned Architect and her Anonymous Artisans
3-4:45 PM: Consecrating Neoclassicism
Moderated by David Sadighian (Yale School of Architecture)
Sara González Castrjón (Universidad Católica de Santa María, Peru), Negotiated Neoclassicism: Neoclassical Aesthetics and Ecclesiastical Art in the Andean Highlands
Alexandra Lindqvist (Independent Scholar), Neoclassicism as Autocratic Modernity: Catherine II, Orthodoxy, and Non-State Patronage in Late-Eighteenth-Century Russia
Robbin Skinner (Victorian University of Wellington, New Zealand), Concrete Expression: Neoclassicism in Colonial New Zealand
João Francisco Grave (University of Lisbon, Portugal), Lisbon and Beyond: Discussing Pombaline Sacred Architecture
Saturday, May 30
9-10:45 AM: Localizing Neoclassicism
Moderated by Ünver Rüstem (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Adekunle Adeyemo (Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife-Ife, Nigeria), (Re)appropriating Neoclassicism: Robert Jones’ Mapo Hall, Ibadan, Nigeria
Shen Boyang (National University of Singapore), Premature Death and Political Possession: Neoclassicism and Preparatory Constitutionalist Architecture on the Eve of the Qing Collapse
Federico Marcomini (Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Italy), The Ambiguities of the Classical and Africa’s First Independent Republic: Architecture in Liberia (1823-1910)
Markus Lähteenmäki (University of Helsinki, Finland), Empire Off-Center: Territorial Expansion and Contested Meanings of Neoclassicism in the Russian Empire
12-1:30 PM: Visualizing Neoclassicism
Moderated by Barbara Vujanović (The Ivan Meštrović Museums)
Jennifer Laffick (Southern Methodist University, USA), Atlantic Davidians: French Neoclassical Painting in Cuba and Brazil
Agnieszka Anna Ficek (Meadows Museum, USA), Classical Forms, Colonial Fantasies: Neoclassical Iconography and the Visual Logic of Peruvienophilie
Benjamin Weisgall (Columbia University, USA), Constance and Propriety: Classical Architecture in Colonial India
SAH Virtual: Case Studies in the Global Beaux-Arts
Scholars agree that Beaux-Arts classicism was the dominant architectural language of empire. Though typically associated with the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Beaux-Arts architecture manifested in various contexts and across geographies, languages, identities, and cultures. This style—a recognized design language with a set of rules and standards—has been translated, repeated, and transplanted. Students from across the globe, especially from the Americas, came to study at the École, bringing back what they had learned to their communities of origin. In settler colonial societies, like the United States, the style appears among the enclaves of the marginalized, like Black Americans asserting their national identity at state and city fairs. Britons used Beaux-Arts-inspired civic and commercial buildings across their empire from Ireland to Africa to make their geographic reach visible. In the global south, like Japanese colonial-era Taiwan, the colonized locals appropriated the styles of planned Beaux-Arts districts to create their own modern vernacular. Beaux-Arts architecture as a global phenomenon appeared well into the twentieth century.
As such, as historians concerned with globalizing our profession, studying the Beaux-Arts allows for documentation of this style’s widespread effects on individual cultures and regions. How did subaltern architects employ Beaux-Arts principles of order, rationality, symmetry, and typology in their own contexts, even after liberation? Did the monumentality of classicism take on new meanings in recently transformed societies, and (if so) how?
With this history in mind, each speaker will explore the globalization of the Beaux-Arts by recentering this style within architectural history. These case studies rely on archival research and close attention to visual form to highlight the duality of agency and coloniality in Beaux-Arts empire building.
Session Organizer: Charlette M. Caldwell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Papers and Presenters:
Anchors of Empire: The Neo-Baroque from Northern Ireland to South Africa, Pollyanna Rhee, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Faces of A Colony: Japanese Colonial Planning in Taiwan and the Emergence of a Modern Vernacular, Meng-Hsuan Lee, Columbia University
The Argentine Pavilion’s Transatlantic Voyage: A Transplanted Beaux-Arts, 1889, Rebeca Yuste, Columbia University and Dumbarton Oaks
Beaux-Arts Jim-Crowism: William Sidney Pittman’s Negro Building at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, Charlette Caldwell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Colonial Compositions: Beaux-Arts Designs on the Maghreb, c.1878, David Sadighian, Yale University
CAA: Neoclassicism in the Extended Field
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