جستجوی مقالات مرتبط با کلیدواژه « conceptual history of architecture » در نشریات گروه « هنر و معماری »

This paper reviews the three key periods of architectural criticism in the West: the emergence of architectural criticism in the Age of Enlightenment, its development, and its flourish and decline. It highlights French art criticism as the birthplace of architectural criticism, initially containing extensive, illustrated descriptions of significant works for students. It then moved on to the proliferation of knowledge and education the public taste as its goals. Over decades, architectural criticism alternated between serving the interests of capitalism and the construction industry and socio-political activism. With the emergence of academic criticism in American universities, architectural criticism fundamentally transformed into a self-referential and fell into decline.

One of the ways of studying architecture in the premodern Islamic world is to approach it epistemically, especially with regard to its relationship with the formal sciences. Since the very beginning of the intellectual movement in the mid-second century AH/eighth century AD, Muslim philosophers paid attention to the classification of sciences. In this article, we examine the most important primary sources on science classification in the first phase of the history of science in the Islamic world, that is, from the mid-second/eighth century to the fifth/eleventh century, with an emphasis on Fārābi’s works. Using the techniques of “conceptual history”, we trace the concept of architecture in the sources—regardless of its different manifestations as in words, terms, or systems of classification -̶ to identify its position in relation to other sciences. For this purpose, after a brief historical survey and introducing our sources that are six primary books written in the first Islamic centuries we observe the different manifestations of the concept of architecture. The most straightforward word in the conceptual field of architecture found in the sources is ṣināʿat al-bināʾ (the art/craft of building). This term mostly appears in Fārābi’s and Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’s works in the field of civil practical arts/crafts in relation to other sciences and arts/crafts. Fārābi also addresses another art/craft in the conceptual field of architecture as ṣināʿat al-riʾāsat al-bināʾ and describes its relation to ṣināʿa al-bināʾ. Some layers and parts of architecture are also found in sciences such as the al-ʿilm al-ḥiyal, al-ʿilm al-masāḥah, and al-ʿilm al-naql al-miyāh. After Ikhwān, consideration of arts/crafts including architecture gradually declined in the works of Muslim philosophers.

The common division in Iranian architectural history to two separate periods - pre-Islamic and Islamic - which was once efficient, has gradually lost its motivating power. Such a cliché had consequences including disregarding the architecture of the very transitional era from the late Sassanid to the early Islamic period. Understanding the real changes, evolutions, breaks, and continuity in the two sides of the supposed historical border requires more inquiry and research; a research that should begin with eliminating the border. Human beings think about architecture before, during, and after practicing it. They speak about it; and their words are evidences of their understanding of architecture. The concept of “architecture” is not constant and timeless. It changes during history; and its changes reveal themselves in the language. In this article, after introducing “conceptual history” and its benefits for Iranian architectural studies, we study the conceptual history of the architecture of the transitional era. We take lexical and etimological methods in defining semantic fields and categories of architecture in the era as a way toward understanding the cultural changes and evolutions of architecture. Our primary sources are in three languages: Pahlavi (Middle Persian), Persian (New Persian/ Dari), and Arabic. By the conceptual history of architecture of the transitional era from the late Sassanid to the early Islamic period, we will show that the concept of architecture in the era revealed in the term ābādāni, did not bear any radical changes. Of course the concept of architecture as ābādāni is far from the modern concept of architecture, despite including it.