Introduction: Building Word Image, a New Arena for Architectural History

Abstract

The study of word-image relationships is one of the most innovative and cross-disciplinary fields to have emerged in the humanities over the last decades. This special collection of Architectural Histories opens up this area to architectural history by exploring the rising coexistence of the graphic and the verbal in the public dissemination of architecture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Originating from a conference session at the Third International Meeting of the European Architectural History Network in Turin, June 2014, this selection of articles also presents the foundation for an EAHN Interest Group on Word & Image, which will help to define this new arena. Even if word-image relationships are, so far, rarely identified as a specific topic within our discipline, as architectural historians we already investigate them across periods, territories and subjects. The purpose of this collection is to make this a subject per se by examining descriptions and illustrations of buildings in printed and publicly disseminated media such as newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books, manuscripts or catalogues. We hope that the papers in this special collection of Architectural Histories will encourage architectural historians of all fields to question the interplay between buildings, words and images afresh, thus building a new understanding of the verbal and visual presence of architecture.