IngentaConnect Sir Banister Fletcher: pillar to postcolonial readings

Author: Mckean, John¹

Source: The Journal of Architecture, Volume 11, Number 2, April 2006 , pp. 187-204(18)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

Abstract:

Looking at world architecture in a post-colonial light, what is the possibility for a `world history of architecture'? This question is approached through thoughts on east-west plunderings in architectural history and in the strange double image of world history portrayed in Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture , which (in all but the earliest and very latest editions) divided the world into `The Historical Styles' and `The Non-historical Styles'. Resonating throughout this text, which began as a paper to a conference on `Globalisation and Representation',1 is the knowledge that the author has been commissioned to undertake a completely new text for the next edition of Banister Fletcher, for which work started in November, 2005. Pointers to how that project might proceed include its becoming a dual work, aware of the unspoken space between: — a narrative with stress on points of cultural intersection and articulation of hybridity (after Homi Bhabha) rather than on the `constituent' as opposed to `transitory' facts of architectural history (after Siegfried Giedion), and: — an archive of illustrated places, itself a social construct but one which recognises the role of viewer/reader in its [re]construction—for images are there to be plundered and misread, which is always their fate in the hands of creative designers.

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Sir Banister Fletcher: pillar to post-colonial readings