Ph.D. Dissertation Lecture Series: Pedro Correa Fernández and Maur Dessauvage

Ph.D. in Architecture candidates Pedro Correa Fernández and Maur Dessauvage present their dissertations to faculty and students.

The Means of Abstraction
Building, Measuring, and Counting at the Dawn of Civic Equality
Chile 1810-1860
Pedro Correa Fernández

This dissertation examines the reorganization of the building arts in Chile in accordance with the new conception of the State that emerged with Independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The newly established governments embraced forms of republicanism that reshaped the political landscape and gradually dismantled the colonial structures that had previously governed the building trades. In bringing the arts and industries into regimes of accountability commensurate with the mandates of civic equality, the government precipitated new regimes of abstraction. This research reconstructs the work of agrimensores, rough equivalents of surveyors who became the novice agents of this transformation on the ground at a time when there were no certified architects in the country. Agrimensores projected a depersonalized state while introducing anonymous social relationships in the arts of building. This research examines how these abstractions were negotiated and resisted in the seams connecting and separating the nascent state from the landed elite, merchants, the church, and, most critically, the artisanal world. I argue that for roughly half a century, the abstractions of agrimensores were simply ways of displacing the problem of authority into another realm. They were anchored less in disenchanted technical expertise than in models of morality that sought to replace withering notions of honor as bases for authority. The fledgling republican virtues that emerged as the new anchors of practical knowledge, however, still drew heavily from the colonial world. Unlike the monumental architecture that marked the rise of civil society in Europe, the architecture of civic equality in postcolonial Chile remained firmly moored in the artisanal imagination.

Monuments for a State to Come: Architecture, Historicism, and German Nation-building, 1814–1871
Maur Dessauvage

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which put an end to the spiritual-temporal order of the Holy Roman Empire, German architects were tasked with creating monuments to a newly imagined “nation” that had not yet materialized. Although the disparate German lands would remain a fragmentary territorial constellation until national unification in 1871, Prussian, Bavarian, and Austrian monarchs took up major commissions for architectural monuments to lay claim to the artistic, dynastic, religious, and popular traditions of the Holy Roman Empire. This talk explores how this religio-political body was given new form in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the restoration of the “imperial cathedral” (Kaiserdom) in Speyer under Bavarian and Habsburg auspices. Instead of restoring the westwork in its original state, the architect Heinrich Hübsch created a new “imperial hall” that was consistent with his views of historical change, which he expressed most emphatically in his polemical essay “In What Style Should We Build?” from 1828. Through a close analysis of Hübsch’s theoretical texts, illustrated publications, and correspondences with patrons, I argue that this “historicist restoration” incorporated Speyer Cathedral in a developmental narrative that was conducive to the ideological demands of modern state-building in German-speaking lands before national unification. By examining this uncertain moment in European history, this talk elucidates the dialectic between the conceptual emergence of national histories and the physical and ideological construction of national monuments. In doing so, I show how new kinds of history and historical fields—including the very discipline of art history—became fundamental to nineteenth-century projects of German nation-building.