This lecture will be hybrid. Please book your ticket for attendance in person or online. You will receive access to the online event via email the day before the event.

Abstract

‘The styles are a lie’ proclaimed Le Corbusier, but added that Style in the singular is ‘the unity of principle that animates all the works of an era’ and hence a legitimate goal for modern architecture. When invoked by Le Corbusier in 1923, the distinction between Style and the styles was well established. If style in classical rhetoric was a matter of choosing the appropriate form for the occasion, later centuries understood it alternately as a historiographical principle and a moral ideal. This lecture looks at the implication of that conceptual transformation for architecture. Starting with Rem Koolhaas’ 1992 House With no Style, this lecture will move backwards through 19th and 20th-century style debates, ending with Carl Rumohr’s notion of style as a submission ‘to the intrinsic demands of the material’. Written a century apart, Rumohr’s materialism and Le Corbusier’s idealism represent poles in an ongoing debate over matter, meaning, and architecture’s relationship to time.

About Mari Hvattum

Mari Hvattum is professor of architectural history at Oslo School of Architecture and Design. She works on 19th-century architectural thinking and has been particularly interested in the relationship between architecture and time. Her books include Style and Solitude: The History of an Architectural Problem (2023), and Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (2004).