THE LECTURE WILL BE HELD IN AULA GRANDE
Prof. Sebastian Conrad (Freie Universität, Berlin)
In 1902, the Japanese architect Itō Chūta embarked on a remarkable world tour that would last more than three years, taking him across the entire Eurasian continent. The purpose of the trip: to prove that the earliest Japanese building, the Hōryūji temple in Nara, was deeply influenced by classical Greece. Just a few years earlier, the Indian archaeologist Rajendralal Mitra was engaged in precisely the opposite struggle: He invested decades of his professional life only to demonstrate that ancient India was not influenced by Greece in any substantial way.
These two trajectories, oppositional though they seemed, were provoked by the same overarching problematic: How to measure, and account for, beauty in a globalizing world? Was there a single aesthetic ideal from which all others derived? How to assess and compare aesthetic value across territorial and cultural boundaries? As a result of global integration, the final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the formation of international norms. They were accompanied by global standards, ranging from the meter and world time to the gold standard and international law. Historians have produced an extended literature on these subjects. What is much less addressed, however, is that standardization went well beyond the measureable, the tangible, and the legally accountable. This was even true in a field – beauty – that seemed so stubbornly particular, irreducibly local and tied to the specificity of culture that it seemed impossible to standardize. This talk will use the biographies of two eminent architectural historians, one from Bengal and one from Japan, as case studies. It will argue that both the emergence of world-wide standards, and the claim for local peculiarity, can be understood as a response to global challenges.