Architecture in Repetition

What happens to architectural history when it is concerned with the many as opposed to the one? This session calls for studies of architectures that repeat and asks what we might learn about similarity and difference by looking at iterations of singular processes. Studies of quotations and influences have long been central to art historical studies of architectural production, but what happens when we turn to the study of repetition within the production of architecture itself? The possible objects of analysis are many: lithographic technology, pre-fabricated panelized systems, catalogs of pre-approved plans, standardized state facilities, and elements that repeat within large infrastructural and technological systems.

While the session is open to all periods and geographies, emphasis will be placed on expanding beyond—or at least testing the limits of—ideas of repetition in industrial and post-industrial societies. When we cease to equate repetition with efficiency and industrial standardization, it becomes an especially rich concept through which to study the connections between architecture and the intellectual, technological, and aesthetic contexts of its production. Beyond the possible objects listed above, welcome submissions might take the form of historical epistemologies interrogating the vocabularies of architectural repetition, such as the pairings of type–token or copy–original, family resemblance, the “slavish” copy, the counterfeit, etc. How can historicizing the concept of repetition break open historiographic traditions focused on singularity? And what might we learn by studying the construction and maintenance of multiple instances of a single design, whether in one city or different countries?