Architectural Humanities

Research areas: Cultural & living heritage

Over the past decade, a convergence of studies inspired by the humanities has taken shape from various quarters and with different configurations of the disciplines involved, focusing on the phenomena of architecture and the built environment, the city and urban experience, as well as design and landscape. In particular, within the original experience conducted at the Department of Architecture of the University of Bologna, Architectural Humanities have been interpreted from historical and philosophical-aesthetic perspectives, in a fruitful dialogue with many other viewpoints, such as those of the social and environmental sciences, anthropology, political studies, literature, cinema, television series, graphic novels, and photography.

Regarding the History of Architecture, the question is rather whether there exists a field of research-action in which to contribute—thanks to precise knowledge elaborated in specialized fields—to making decision-making processes, and more generally actions related to urban policies, more conscious, specific, and therefore more effective.

In other words, the issue is to understand whether the History of Architecture and the City can, without betraying its scientific methodology, expand its action into the realm of knowledge endowed with an operational dimension. Compared to other humanistic fields, this reflection is affected by the complex structure of the architectural discipline, which is partly design practice and partly analytical elaboration—historical, but also theoretical or critical—and, even within pure research, dual, as it refers as much to the humanistic sphere as to the technological one.

Naturally, to participate in a non-subordinate way in the renewal of a design culture in which knowledge of the existing is decisive as the object of the project, the History of Architecture and the City must undertake thematic and methodological updates. This is a necessary effort not only to safeguard the discipline itself from the cultural "market"—as we can now define, to be realistic, the dual action of research and teaching—but also to update the social and political role that history has always had and which perhaps requires new methods.

Some useful fronts have been open for some time, such as History’s attention to the geographical dimension of architecture, which today means bringing historical studies on architecture and the city within the scope of historical GIS. Certainly less established as a field of historical-architectural research is what we might define as "community history"—a research, or research-action, that responds to specific needs of urban knowledge expressed by the stakeholders involved in its transformation. This historical research, rejecting the traditional ancillary role of preliminary analysis within specialized design processes, presents itself as a widespread practice of urban knowledge available to citizens.

Naturally, this is not just a change or integration of tools; methodological and historiographical perspective updates are necessary and cannot be taken for granted. Limiting ourselves here to a first summary list: the definitive abandonment of the militant framework of historiography on the "modern"; the overcoming of a historiography predominantly focused on the authorship dimension, expanding the field of interest to the infra-ordinary, anonymous, and private dimensions, with corresponding expansions in terms of reference archival sources; and attention to diachronic studies that capture the temporal stratification of complex places with the willingness to extend chronology to current history.

Regarding Aesthetics—to be interpreted in turn as a discipline of critical analysis, intervention, and research-action—the goal is to attribute a pivotal role to this perspective within the various disciplines that make the urban and architectural dimension the object of their studies. Indeed, literature in the fields of urban studies, geography, philosophy, psychology, and the sociology of the city and architecture has increasingly drawn upon the theories and concepts of aesthetics, but there has been no sustained and explicit attempt to reflect on what an aesthetics of the field of architecture and design might mean from an integrated perspective. A growing body of literature, however, has begun to consider the role of aesthetics in how we experience, make sense of, order, and reconfigure the city and the entire architectural field.

The meanings of aesthetics are diverse, but in its most general sense, aesthetics refers to our sensual relation with the world. Aesthetics can concern questions of taste, art, appearance, or beauty, as well as the aestheticization of the world and the diffusion of aesthetics into all spheres of our experience—as a means to make our everyday reality more attractive, pleasant, or even marketable—as well as the question of what can or cannot be perceived as a technology of power or an object of resistance. Aesthetics is ever-present in how we make sense of the built environment and ourselves, linked to how we experience urban life from a material, social, cultural, psychological, political, and imaginary standpoint. For the construction of an aesthetic perspective within the Architectural Humanities, it becomes decisive to address the historical and theoretical reconstruction of the concepts of its tradition and their confrontation with contemporary problems, such as the Anthropocene and global warming, digital transformation, urban policies and the definition of public space, forms of storytelling and the representation of experience, the historical dimension of the city at the center and in the periphery, urban mobility, and the organization of daily life.