Abstract / Description of output
In 2009 the historian Glen O’Hara appealed for the mingling of ‘blue’ and ‘green’ histories in an effort to understand better Britain’s place within the increasingly globalised history of empire. In suggesting this, O’Hara meant to draw attention to the apparent distinction between maritime and territorial historiography. Since then the rise of the ‘oceanic’ in British imperial history has moved centre stage, forcing historians to rethink traditional land-based conceptions of empire, particularly in the context of Asia, to an approach that is concerned more with a water- or ocean-based framework of analysis. As a result, we now tend to view the empire not only from a globalised perspective, but also as a web-based construct of multiple and intersecting nodal points.
In the context of this wider historiographic development, a parallel shift of focus away from grand buildings and monuments has begun to affect the architectural history of British imperialism. A greater interest now attends ‘banal’ architectures of little or no artistic merit or significance, with a view to revealing the critical role played by such architectures in the day-to-day functioning of empire, including dock, warehouse, office, and shipping facilities. Historians of architecture must now pay heed to those less identifiable, harder to categorise, if not ephemeral typologies that were in a sense the operational ‘tools’ of the British imperial system, strategically located as they were along the networks of information flow and commodity exchange. These buildings occupy what might be termed an indeterminate, or ‘grey’, zone within the received hierarchies of architectural historiography, blurring traditional distinctions between infrastructure and ‘architecture’.
This paper proposes to outline what a history of imperial architecture along these lines might look like (where the ‘blue’, ‘green’ and ‘grey’ intersect and coalesce), as well how it can be tackled methodologically and historiographically.
In the context of this wider historiographic development, a parallel shift of focus away from grand buildings and monuments has begun to affect the architectural history of British imperialism. A greater interest now attends ‘banal’ architectures of little or no artistic merit or significance, with a view to revealing the critical role played by such architectures in the day-to-day functioning of empire, including dock, warehouse, office, and shipping facilities. Historians of architecture must now pay heed to those less identifiable, harder to categorise, if not ephemeral typologies that were in a sense the operational ‘tools’ of the British imperial system, strategically located as they were along the networks of information flow and commodity exchange. These buildings occupy what might be termed an indeterminate, or ‘grey’, zone within the received hierarchies of architectural historiography, blurring traditional distinctions between infrastructure and ‘architecture’.
This paper proposes to outline what a history of imperial architecture along these lines might look like (where the ‘blue’, ‘green’ and ‘grey’ intersect and coalesce), as well how it can be tackled methodologically and historiographically.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 3 Nov 2018 |
Event | A World of Architectural History - Bartlett School of Architecture, London, United Kingdom Duration: 2 Nov 2018 → 4 Nov 2018 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/events/2018/nov/world-architectural-history-conference |
Conference
Conference | A World of Architectural History |
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Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
City | London |
Period | 2/11/18 → 4/11/18 |
Internet address |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- architecture
- empire
- infrastructure
- technological zone
- technology
- capitalism
- Asia
- Jardine Matheson
- water
- oceans