The History of Construction is of interest to anyone who wants to know how and why things have been constructed the way they are. There is no established academic discipline of construction history but there are a growing number of researchers and academics working in this field who are structural engineers, archaeologists, architects, historians of technology and architectural historians. Although the subject has been studied since the Renaissance and there were a number of important studies in the nineteenth century, it largely went out of fashion in the mid-twentieth century. In the last thirty years there has been an enormous increase in interest in this field, which is vital to the growing practice of building conservation.
Early writers on construction history
The earliest surviving book detailing historical building techniques is the treatise of the Roman author,
Vitruvius, but his appraoch was neither particularly scholarly nor particularly systematic. Much later, in the
Renaissance,
Vasari mentions
Filippo Brunelleschi's interest in researching Roman building techniques, although if he wrote anything on the subject it does not survive. In the seventeenth century, Rusconi's illustrations for his version of
Leon Battista Alberti's treatise explicitly show Roman wall construction but most of the interest in antiquity was in understanding its proportions and detail and the architects of the time were content to build using current techniques. While early archaeological studies and topographic works such as the engravings of
Giovanni Battista Piranesi show
Roman construction they were not explicitly analytical and much of what they do show is made up.
Nineteenth century studies on construction history
In the nineteenth century, lecturers increasingly illustrated their lectures with images of building techniques used in the past and these type of images increasingly appeared in construction text books, such as Rondelet's. The greatest advances however were made by English and French (and later German) architects attempting to understand, record and analyse Gothic buildings. Typical of this type of writing are the works of Robert Willis in England, Viollet-le-Duc in France and Ungewitter in Germany. None of these however were seeking to suggest that the history of construction represented a new approach to the subject of architectural history. August Choisy was perhaps the first author to seriously attempt to undertake such a study.
The early twentieth century studies of the construction history
Santiago Heurta has suggested that it was modernism, with its emphasis on the employment of new materials, that abruptly ended the interest in construction history that appeared to have been growing in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. With the advent of concrete and steel frame construction, architects, who had been the chief audience for such studies, were no longer as interested as they had been in understanding traditional construction, which suddenly appeared redundant. Very little was thus published between 1920 and 1950. The revival of interest started in archaeology with the studies of Roman construction in the 1950s, but it was not until the 1980s that construction history began to emerge as an independent field.
The late twentieth century
By the end of the twentieth century steel and concrete construction were themselves becoming the subject of historical investigation.The Construction History Society was formed in the UK in 1982. It produces the only academic international journal devoted to the subject annually. The First International Congress on Construction History was held in Madrid in 2003. This was followed by the Second International Congress in 2006 in Queens' College, Cambridge, England and the Third International Congress held in Cottbus in 2009.[4] The Fourth International Congress is scheduled to be held in Paris in 2012 .
