03XX Einleitungsartikel d. Gastherausgeber

Ruth Hanisch; Richard Kurdiovsky; Bernadette Reinhold; Antje Senarclens de Grancy

doi:10.11588/riha.2025.2.112031

Authors

Ruth Hanisch

Ruth Hanisch, freelance architectural historian. Studied art history in Vienna; master thesis on Felix Augenfeld, a student of Adolf Loos who had to emigrate; doctorate on the relationship between city and port in the Early Modern period; habilitation on the interactions of modernity and tradition in early Modern Viennese architecture. 1997–2002 teaching and research assistant at the Chair of Urban Planning History at ETH Zurich; teaching appointments at ETH Zurich, Ruhr University Bochum, University of Kassel and others. Numerous publications on architecture and urban planning in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Richard Kurdiovsky

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2935-5193

Richard Kurdiovsky, architectural historian. Studied art history, history, classical archaeology and Slavic studies in Vienna; 2000 master thesis on the architect Alfred Castelliz, a student of Friedrich Schmidt and Otto Wagner; 2008 doctorate on Carl Hasenauer and his artistic relationship to Gottfried Semper. 1997–2004 freelancer at the architecture collection of the Albertina Vienna; 2001 contract assistant to Prof. Dr. Hellmut Lorenz at the Institute for Art History at the University of Vienna; since 2005 employee of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (inter alia research projects on the Vienna Hofburg in the 19th century and on state-sponsored building activities in the Habsburg Monarchy); since 2008 teaching appointments at the University of Vienna and Vienna University of Technology.
Bernadette Reinhold

https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5704-5708

Bernadette Reinhold, since 2008 head of the Oskar Kokoschka Centre and Senior Scientist at the Art Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Studied art history, history and philosophy at the University of Vienna; research assistant at the Bundesdenkmalamt (BDA) Vienna, the Commission for Provenance Research at the BDA and at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (FWF project on the Vienna Hofburg in the 19th century). Board member of the Austrian Society for Architecture, among others. Numerous publications, research and exhibition projects as well as teaching activities on architecture and the history of urban planning, modern art, Austrian cultural policy, gender studies and biographical research.
Antje Senarclens de Grancy

https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2346-7024

Antje Senarclens de Grancy, architectural historian, associate professor at the Institute for Architectural Theory, Art and Cultural Studies at Graz University of Technology since 2022. Studied art history, history and anthropology in Graz and Paris. Long-term member of the FWF Special Research Unit on "Modernism – Vienna and Central Europe around 1900"; visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh (2018) and at ENSA Paris La Villette (2022). Publications on the history and theory of architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries in a social and political context, reform movements (Werkbund, Heimatschutz) in Central Europe, canonisation and exclusion processes in architectural history (with regard to gender/race) and, most recently, the relationships and intersections between camps and modern housing and urban planning.

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Abstract

This article examines the origins of the monograph as a publication format dedicated to individual architects and explores how such person-centered narratives in architectural history are, or might be, written today in light of contemporary concerns such as gender equality and hegemonic discourses, including those addressed in postcolonial critique. Originally conceived as a means of honouring exclusively male and European architects and artists, the diversity among the authors of these publications was also very limited in the early days. The article poses critical questions: Who is deemed worthy of a monograph and thereby integrated into the architectural canon? What values and hierarchies are reinforced through such recognition? What roles do the various actors involved – the monograph’s author, those working in archives, collections, and publishing houses – play in shaping these narratives? The article offers a critical reassessment of the monograph as a traditional scholarly format, while also highlighting its potential to support a more interconnected and contextually grounded approach to architectural historiography.

Published in 2025: Special Issue "Architekt:innen-Monographien. Kanonisierung, Kontextualisierung, Kritik"

Date

2025-09-24

DOI

https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2025.2.112031

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