| Abstrakt: |
This paper first examines how architectural history surveys ignore the hydro-ecological roots of the built environment and what the "absence" of water in historiography means for epistemology. This absence has not been accidental but rather deeply rooted in the Enlightenment ideals that, paraphrasing John Locke, identified "land" as a stable foundation on which to enshrine human progress and property rights, while keeping water outside the historiographic proper as a strange, unpredictable, and inscrutable other. The Greek thinker Pherecydes of Syros imagined Chaos, the mythical Greek figure, as water. From Greek mythologies to the Abrahamic religions to the atharvaveda, the orderly cosmos emerged from the primordial water, represented as a void. The modern world inherited this intellectual fidelity to the idea of land as order and water as chaos. Analyzing the conspicuous absence of the spatiality of water in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture in history textbooks, the paper probes the disciplinary production of "land-centrism" that gave rise to epistemological taxonomies of what constitutes "architecture." While revisionist histories since the advent of postmodernism in the 1980s have ushered in a host of multidisciplinary, canondebunking, expansive, and inclusive readings of architectural history, entrenched binaries of what architecture is and isn't continue to persist. Building on the philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich's notion of "waters of forgetfulness," the paper argues that the birth of modern historiography in the 19th century was tied to a double denial of water from modern consciousness. First, architectural history has essentially been conceived as a telluric narrative that took precedence over water ecology. Second, as Jamie Linton argues in What is Water? (2010), the scientific abstraction of water—a quantitative and utilitarian view—in the modern era led to the reification of water as a resource to be harnessed for human use, robbing it of its multiple ontological and social significances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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