Project Details
Projekt
Mimetic Practices in Recent European Architecture.
Subject Area
Theatre and Media Studies
Art History
Musicology
Art History
Musicology
Term
from 2013 to 2017
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213948042
Mimetic techniques and practises are found throughout architecture and its discourses. Vitruvius himself explained the emergence of architecture as a mimetic process. Later, the Vitruvianism of the 15th to 18th centuries witnessed broad development of mimetic concepts, in which as a rule the imitation of nature took place as an appropriation of models from antiquity. Recourse to models found in nature is to this day a preferred strategy among architects when called upon to explain their own design processes.While practices of allusion, copying, and montage, of the remake as of mimicry, are all common aspects of today’s architectural scene, originality remains the dominant evaluative paradigm to the extent that it obscures our awareness of the mimetic phenomena. This despite the fact that, where ideas of resemantization and identity construction are ascendant, phenomena such as reconstructions, copies, or new construction in historicizing forms are everywhere to be found. Moreover, it has all but escaped mention that the way architectural imitatio naturae are understood has shifted since the 18th and 19th centuries from a focus on motifs to one on processes. In this light, it is symptomatic of more recent western architecture that it expands the classical spectrum of analogy types to include concepts such as natural history, morphing, folding, and autopoesis. The concepts of architectural mimesis thereby described could be assigned their place on a greater horizon under the following headings: Anthropometry and Vitruvianism, the rejection of mimesis and the crisis of representation, the history of architecture as natural history, or the imitation of technology and the technology of imitation. The project proposed here begins from an awareness of these historically overlapping paradigms to investigate mimetic strategies in both the theory and practise of architecture since Postmodernism. The spectrum extends from reconstructions or constructions of historical façades to the imitation of natural processes of change or the interpretation of an architectural body as a cybernetic organism. The different strands of inquiry thereby named correspond to the following four subdivisions of the project: a) reconstructions, copies or historicizing new constructions as a process of confrontation with the architectural past; b) the ‘magical’ or wish-fulfilment aspects of reconstructions, copies, etc.; c) the integration of material remains (spolia) into new construction as a way of making meaning; d) the imitation or reproduction of natural creative processes as architectural mimicry.The areas of inquiry are thus engaged with the three forms of mimesis as defined in the umbrella proposal, although none can be said to correspond exactly to the other. It will be our intention throughout to inquire after the architectural specifics of the mimetic practises, that is, after the materiality, corporeality, and public as well as institutional presence of architecture.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Subproject of
FOR 1867:
History and Theory of Mimetic Practices
