- Neu
E-Book, Englisch, 236 Seiten
Akyüz / Chan / Olsberg Provenance in Architecture
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-7757-6123-9
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A Dictionary
E-Book, Englisch, 236 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-7757-6123-9
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The provenance of artworks is a burning issue in current scholarship and politics. Transpose provenance into architecture and it reveals new and surprising dimensions in the social, material and cultural lives of buildings and architectural artefacts, reframing questions of migration, movement and circulation. Provenance in architecture illuminates the intricate trajectories of fundamentally composite objects from their complex origins to their uncertain destinations.
This dictionary examines architectural provenance across 101 key concepts from “Acquisition” to “Will”. The entries provide new ways of writing architectural history, highlighting how architecture moves, is destroyed, survives and is transformed.
Uwe Fleckner is a professor in art history at the University of Hamburg and conducts provenance research as a director of the Research Centre of "Degenerate Art."
Mari Lending is a professor in architectural history and theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and directs the international research project “Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity.”
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
- Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Geschichte der Architektur, Baugeschichte
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Enzyklopädien, Nachschlagewerke, Wörterbücher
- Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architekturtheorie
- Rechtswissenschaften Öffentliches Recht Staats- und Verfassungsrecht Staatshaftungs- und Entschädigungsrecht, Amtshaftung, VermG, Einigungsfragen
- Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architektur: Berufspraxis
Weitere Infos & Material
Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Contents
Architectural provenance A preamble
Acquisition
Actor
Afterlife
Architectural drawing
Archive
Artefact
Attribution
Authentication
Authenticity
Authorship
Bond
Bricolage
Capitalism
Cargo
Catalogue
Celebrity
Circulation
Collecting
Collective memory
Component
Concrete
Construction site
Contract
Copyright
Costs
Counter-monument
Craft
Crisis
Deaccessioning
Demolition
Dereliction
Displacement
Dispossession
Dispute
Doppelgänger
Dust
Element
Exhibition
Expropriation
Extension
Facsimile
Fire
Fragility
Fragment
Framing
Ghosts
Graffiti
Heritage
Image vehicle
Inheritance
Inscription
Labour
Lacuna
Maintenance
Material
Mobility
Model
Monument, toppled
Moveables
Network
Obsolescence
Occupation
Palimpsest
Pasticcio
Patina
Photography
Plaster cast
Political iconography
Postproduction
Precedent
Preservation
Pristine
Privilegio
Provenience
Quarry
Quote
Readymade
Reconstruction
Recycling
Renovation
Reparation
Reproduction
Residents
Restitution
Restoration
Reuse
Ruin
Sourcing
Spolia
Storage
Subtraction
Theft
Thing-right
Transfer
Transformation
Translocation
Type project
Vandalism
War
Weathering
Will
Bibliography
Image credits
Contributors
Colophon
Acquisition
The decennial of 18 Brumaire in 1809 was going to be a many-splendoured thing. Among the projected celebrations, the boundless Description de l’Égypte was to mark one of the most prized possessions of the newfound empire – the domain over the classical tradition and imperial authority, and their wellspring in pharaonic antiquity. The ill-fated campaign to conquer Egypt (1798–1801) was a military disaster, but in the exhaustive notes and surveys of the combined French sciences lay the potential for an all-encompassing book that could substitute lost ground. Like so many things Napoleonic, the Description blew its budget and overshot its deadline, and when it did come out the next year, its exuberant frontispiece was full of contradictions (fig. 1).
1 François-Charles Cécile, Frontispiece, engraved by Abraham Girardet and Charles Sellier, etched by Jean-Baptiste Réville, from Description de l’Égypte, Antiquités, vol. i (Paris: Imprimerie impériale 1809)
Designed by committee, forged from disparate sources, unrestrained by decorum and vocal in its assertion of historical finality, the enormous engraving epitomised the imperial monument. But strangely, a group of spoils, stacked together beside a token seashore for implicit delivery to France, contradicted universally accepted facts and seemed to rehearse a decade-old humiliation (? spolia). Dead centre in the image, behind the Rosetta Stone and resting against a carved pharaoh, was a massive slab of stone, the circular astrological ceiling from Dendera.
In reality, most of the things that were rounded up neatly in the frontispiece were either lost or never possessed. The heroic exodus of pharaonic treasures envisaged in advance of the campaign had failed to take place. It was Bonaparte’s distinguished army of the recent Italian campaign that was now booted out from France’s most promising prospective colony by an Ottoman-British coalition and a ragtag band of saboteurs and assassins. In an ironic reversal of the Treaty of Tolentino, through which the Republic had enriched the Louvre with the masterpieces of the Italian canon, the Treaty of Alexandria of August 1801 dictated that the French now cede their collected treasures to an Ottoman-British coalition. By 1809 and the printing of the frontispiece, the Rosetta Stone was still indexical of French defeat, displayed in the British Museum with an epigraph celebrating its capture from Bonaparte’s expedition (? cargo). It was a nose-thumbing not soon forgotten. But where the Rosetta Stone had been lost, the Dendera zodiac had never moved an inch, and was still very much in situ in the ceiling of the Temple of Hathor (fig. 2).
2 Édouard de Villiers du Terrage and Jean-Baptise Prosper Jollois, The circular zodiac of Dendera, engraved by Louis-Jean Allais, from Description de l’Égypte, Antiquités, vol. iv (Paris: Imprimerie royale 1817)
If the frontispiece was mysterious in its portrayal of ancient treasures in a transitory state, its explication, an exegesis printed in the Description itself, was outright jiving when it declared that the image showed “the most precious fragments collected in Upper Egypt, such as the planisphere of Dendera”. An apparent typo, the wording only revealed that possession was a descriptive exercise, a graphic fact.
The polytechnicians that travelled Egypt alongside the expeditionary force were acutely aware of the transcendent nature of their historical mission. For these savants the mission had been a reflexive one: by bringing the rejuvenated and enlightened French sciences to bear on the place of their ancient origins, both would be enriched and revealed, bypassing centuries of decadence. What ensued as the military ambition faltered was a race for transcription, analysis and replication that outdid questions of possession in the immediate, material sense. Egyptian antiquity, obscured, inaccessible and buried in lifeless sand as though a metaphor of historical entropy, could be revealed by empiricism spliced with inference and held by description and printing. Accurate ? reproduction, as thing, as image – the enormous engravings of the Description were both – could outweigh the whims of warfare and vicissitudes of geopolitical fortune. Knowledge, a permanent record, offered a stronger sense of domain than ? fragments in a museum.
Vivant Denon was the first to draw the zodiac and he published it in his wildly successful Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte in 1802. But Denon was chiefly an artist and prone to interpretation and enthusiasm, and it was for the impossibly productive ponts-et-chaussées-engineers Édouard de Villiers du Terrage and Jean-Baptise Prosper Jollois to fashion a graphic transcription that could outdo the thing itself (? architectural drawing). In the fullest awareness of the profundity of their task, the two worked on in the darkness of the temple interior under diminishing supplies of lamp oil till they had exhausted their stock of pencils, fashioning ad hoc replacements by pouring melted bullets into straws. Eminently legible, accessible and indisputably French, the resulting engraving was everything the zodiac was not.
Discovery, transcription and publication was ample claim to ownership of a thing no one could access. And the controversies that immediately followed the first reports of the discovery made the zodiac a ubiquitous presence in France in the wake of Denon’s Voyage. Dated between fourteen thousand years old or from Roman imperial times, the Dendera planisphere was either a straightforward reiteration of Greek astrology or refutation of biblical chronology and proof of Egypt’s deep antiquity, and the pages of the daily Moniteur Universel brimmed with opinion pieces. In August 1802, the zodiac was hot, and eyeing ownership of a supreme conversation piece, the editorial commission of the Description de l’Égypte requested permission from Interior Minister Jean-Antoine Chaptal to have sculptor and Egypt veteran Jean-Jacques Castex execute a copy in marble in the domestically compliant scale of 1:3. A report estimated its costs to 1,800 francs, and Castex requested lodgings and a studio, into which he disappeared to work on a preparatory wax ? model. It was nearly eight years later that the commission, facing imminent publication of the Description, followed up with some impatience. Meanwhile, Castex had spirited his model off to Naples, jealously guarding his monument. With thinly veiled concern, the commission gently beckoned Castex and his zodiac to Paris with the reassurance that they were not attempting to deprive him of the ownership of the monument. By now, the best Dendera planisphere was in Southern Italy.
It was long after the fall of Napoleon that Castex’ genteel and gleaming white marble zodiac appeared under royal auspices as an artwork at the Salon of 1819. Still, serialisation and beautification had not entirely killed the allure of the thing itself. In an Egypt now ravaged by greedy collectors who specialised in moving the gigantic, the antiquities dealer Sébastien-Louis Saulnier saw an opportunity to achieve the impossible (? collecting). On his orders, the mason Jean-Baptiste Lelorrain acquired a firman for the removal of the zodiac from Ahmet Pasha, the entrepreneurial governor of Upper Egypt, in January 1821. Ownership, and its modern provenance, was in any case long since established. To Saulnier, Denon had claimed the astrological ceiling for France (see Buchwald and Josefowick 2010, p. 11). For Lelorrain, it was the war booty of the French army.
To Bonaparte’s savants Egypt had been a landscape resilient to revolution. In a culture in which societal disruption was measured in the destruction of monuments and ? vandalism was on everyone’s lips, Egyptian antiquity, monolithic, cold and rigid, was a bulwark against the destructive forces of time. Ironically, this extended to whatever coveted ornaments were affixed to the giant structures of pharaonic architecture, and the expeditionary engineers had quickly abandoned efforts to detach the zodiac from the temple. Now, it successfully resisted Lelorrain’s attempts. Lodged three feet deep in the structure, it weighed 60 tonnes and had to be wrestled from the ancient architectural matrix by force (? displacement). Employing a workforce of twenty locals, Lelorrain toiled over twenty-two days in the gruelling heat using hacksaws and explosives drilled into the structure to sever the stone slab from the temple. So as not to disrupt the integrity of the monument, a ? plaster cast was installed in the ceiling.
When it arrived in Paris in 1822, Jacques-Joseph Corbière, the Minister of Public Instruction and soon-to-be Interior Minister, established a commission comprised by luminaries of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres to evaluate the importance of the zodiac. They concluded that it was an important piece. In 1822, Louis XVIII purchased the planisphere for 150,000 francs and had it installed in the Royal Library. A commemorative medal was struck, neatly expressing Bourbon domain over the Egyptian and Graeco-Roman past by juxtaposing the zodiac with the king’s other recent acquisition, the Venus de Milo. Access to the original zodiac hampered neither reproduction nor discourse, and over the next two years the planisphere was the subject of nine monographs. But what had...
