Opus incertum, 11 (2025), edited by Nadja Aksamija, Antonio Brucculeri, and Denis Ribouillault
The annual journal Opus Incertum dedicates the 2025 issue to architectural history and the challenges of interdisciplinarity. It is nearly impossible to define the discipline of architectural history in simple terms today. The field has become pluralistic and fragmented, marked by multi-, trans-, inter-, and even anti-disciplinarity (Mowitt, 1997). The adoption of various methods from the humanities and social sciences and the introduction of cultural approaches (e.g., visual studies, literary studies, intermediality, etc.) have resulted in extraordinary diversity in the writing of architectural history. Consequently, scholars from various disciplines now operating under the banner of architectural history often have little in common (Timbert, 2021). There also seems to be a discrepancy between how architectural history is taught in professional schools of architecture versus how it is studied in more traditional university settings, where it is often the domain of the departments of art history. Moreover, the different national contexts, some more and others less invested in interdisciplinarity, have created further fragmentation within the field on a more global scale. How have diverse academic formations shaped the range of architectural historians’ approaches to the discipline? What has happened to the relationship between the history of art and the history of architecture over the past twenty or so years (cfr. Payne, 1999 vs. Payne, 2016)? Where do we locate the “difficult dialogue” (Bardati and Rolfi, 2005) between these fields today, also in light of the different national developments? How has the discipline changed since the publication of the 2002 monographic issue of the Cahiers de la recherche architectural et urbaine (which focused on research methods specific to architectural history) and the special issue of the JSAH, “Learning from Interdisciplinarity” (Carpo, 2005)? What is the actual definition of the field today (cfr. Leach, 2010)?
This monographic issue of Opus incertum seeks to address a wide range of issues around the question of interdisciplinarity in architectural history. It attempts to deepen our understanding of how the encounters between architectural history and other fields in the humanities, social sciences, and engineering have opened up its research methods and transformed its narrative criteria, creating an expansive discipline whose contours are flexible, permeable, and increasingly wide-ranging. Its goal is not to take a position for or against interdisciplinarity, but rather to provide a broad “snapshot” of the field through diverse critical and methodological contributions.