






































On Durability

Mari Hvattum

“An Attempt to Grasp Eternity” 

On November 9, 1993, the Mostar bridge 
fell. For months it had withstood heavy artillery, 
withstood in the same way that it had endured wars, 
floods, and disasters ever since its erection in 1566.1 
But that afternoon it finally gave in; its collapse was 
broadcasted on television screens all over the world.

Some days after the event, the Croatian 
journalist Slavenka Draculić picked up a newspaper 
with two pictures on the front cover. One showed 
the body of  a woman, killed in the ongoing war; the 
second was a photograph of  the destroyed bridge. 
To her own dismay, Draculić found herself  crying 
as much over the bridge as she did over the dead 
woman. It made her feel slightly guilty, prompting 
her to reflect on her own reaction: “Why do I feel 
more pain looking at the image of  the destroyed 
bridge than the image of  the woman?” she asked 
herself, and continued: “Perhaps it is because I see 
my own mortality in the collapse of  the bridge, 
not in the death of  the woman.” Draculić added: 
“We expect people to die. We count on our own 
lives to end. The destruction of  a monument […] 
is something else. The bridge, in all its beauty and 
grace, was built to outlive us; it was an attempt to 
grasp eternity. […] A dead woman is one of  us – 
but the bridge is all of  us, forever.”2 In a collection 
dedicated to the human in architecture, Draculić’s 
“eternity” offers, I believe, a poignant point of  
departure.

We do indeed expect the built world to persist 

 On 
November 9,                    

1993, the 
Mostar bridge 

fell

“
”



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longer than we ourselves do. People die, but the things they built tend to 
last a little longer. It is a twofold that says something crucial about the role 
of  architecture. In the next few pages I want to use this particular kind 
of  “eternity” as a point of  departure for thinking about that which lasts 
and that which perishes, and the ways—or at least some of  the ways—in 
which it happens.

Relative Permanence 

     Architecture may last longer than the people building it, but it is not 
eternal. Buildings are subject to all sorts of  changes: weathering, war, 
neglect, changing uses and needs, economic up- and downturns, the force 
of  gravity and the law of  materials. In her book The Human Condition (1958), 
Hannah Arendt writes about the relative permanence that characterizes 
the human-made. “The durability of  the human artifice is not absolute,” 
she points out, yet artifice gives to human life—fragile as it is—a certain 
stability and solidity.3 “The things of  the world,” says Arendt, “have the 
function of  stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact 
that – in contradiction to the Heraclitian saying that man can never enter 
the same stream – men, their ever-changing nature not-withstanding, can 
retrieve their sameness, that is their identity, by being related to the same 
chair and the same table.”4 The durability of  the human-made—the fact 
that the things we make last longer than us and are modelled on things that 
last longer still—is what for Arendt upholds a human world.

At first glance, Arendt’s observation may seem staggeringly out of  
sync with her times. More often than not, twentieth century architects and 
artists took the exact opposite stance, celebrating the ephemeral over the 
durable and looking towards the future rather than the past. “Our houses 
will last less time than we do, and every generation will have to build its 
own city,” proclaimed Antonio Sant’Elia triumphantly in his manifesto for 
futurist architecture from 1914.5 To many modernists, ephemerality was a 
badge of  honour, testifying to the dream of  an architecture that responded 
strictly to the here and now. When the English architect William Holford 
characterized the modern monument as a “momentary crystallization of  
a scientific fact,” he testified to this belief.6 If  the historical monument 
spoke of  eternity, the modern monument, paradoxically, must speak 
strictly of  the now.

The fascination with the transient carries well into the present. A quick 
look at contemporary architectural publications, exhibitions, or student 
projects gives a strong sense that the ephemeral has a great deal more 



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appeal than the durable. But there is another side 
to the coin. For if  modernity is “the ephemeral, 
the fugitive, the contingent,” as Charles Baudelaire 
famously stated, he also reminded us that its other 
half  is “the eternal and the immutable.”7 And 
modernity has indeed sought eternity: the eternity 
of  scientific facts, for instance, or the eternity of  a 
petrified past, safely stowed away in the museum. 
In architecture, the desire for eternity is perhaps 
encountered most directly in modern preservation, 
with its dream to fixate the historic monument as 
an unchanging entity, available for contemporary 
veneration.

I will try to steer clear of  both poles in this 
dichotomy, addressing neither the ephemeral nor 
the eternal. Or rather, the “eternity” that I will speak 
of—the eternity that Draculić hinted at as well, I 
think—is not the pretend eternity of  the musealized 
monument but rather what Hannah Arendt called 
durability, that is, the relative permanence of  the 
human-made world.

“The things 
of the world”, 

says Arendt, 
“have the 

function of 
stabilizing 

human life”

“

”

Figure 1: Old Bridge in Mostar, 

ca. 1974



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The Durability of Making 

     Let me try to be a bit more specific. For what—if  we stick to the 
realm of  architecture—is it that endures? The buildings themselves? Their 
materials and constructions? Matter can certainly endure for a very long 
time, like the stones of  the cave tombs in Barnenez, supposedly the oldest 
building in the world, or the tar-saturated wood of  the nearly 1000 year 
old Norwegian stave churches. Ancient matter has a fascination of  its 
own—Alois Riegl, for one, considered the appreciation of  “age value” as 
a particularly modern sensibility.8 The memory of  matter can endure even 
longer, like Aldo Rossi’s famous example in the Architettura della Citta of  
how traces of  a Roman amphitheatre continue to structure the city, even 
when the original stones and bricks are long gone.9 Rossi drew on a long 
tradition of  seeing type as a harbinger of  durability, a dominant position 
in architectural thinking throughout much of  the modern period.10 This is 
not, however, the only way to think about durability in architecture. Here 
I will focus on a little handful of  thinkers who, each in their own way, 
proposed that what endures in architecture is not just matter, or type, but 
human action: ways of  doing things, ways of  making oneself  at home in 
the world. If  Hannah Arendt wrote of  the reification of  work into a world 
of  things that in turn stabilizes and lends durability to human life, then we 
can perhaps speak of  architecture as a reification of  human action into 
built form.

The three nineteenth century thinkers that I will discuss in the 
following—the German art historian Karl Bötticher; his fellow 
countryman, the architect Gottfried Semper; and the Norwegian 
ethnologist Eilert Sundt—did just that. And although only one of  them 
could be considered an ethnologist by profession, all three drew on the 
new discipline when trying to understand the origin and development of  
architecture. In fact, their thinking on architecture could be seen, if  not as 
fully fledged ethnologies (or anthropologies) of  architecture, then at least 
as attempts to integrate the human into architectural thinking in ways that 
broke sharply with the academic neo-classicism of  the late eighteenth and 
early nineteenth centuries. If  theorists such as Marc-Antoine Laugier or 
Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy had envisioned architecture 
as an imitation of  primordial architectural form—most famously the 
primitive hut—these mid-nineteenth century thinkers saw architecture as 
an imitation, rather, of  human action.



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Baumkultus der Hellenen 

     Karl Bötticher is most famous for his books 
on Greek tectonics, published in several versions 
from the mid-1840s onwards.11 Here, however, 
I will discuss a much more idiosyncratic work by 
Bötticher, namely Der Baumkultus der Hellenen from 
1856. Despite its small size and seemingly obscure 
topic, this book presented a fierce criticism of  
nineteenth century art history, which had, according 
to Bötticher, ignored the link between ritual action 
and architecture. The obsession with style and 
appearance had led to a neglect of  the purpose for 
which man builds, he argued. In the eyes of  the 
ancients, ritual practice could not be separated from 
the building or artefact accommodating it, and 
understanding ritual action was thus a prerequisite 
for understanding architecture, the Greek temple in 
particular.12 Cultic practice and its physical setting 
formed one indivisible knot of  meaning and should 
be studied accordingly.

That more holistic approach was exactly what 
Bötticher set out to achieve. He traced the decorative 
apparatus of  the temple back to the ephemeral 
adornment of  sacred trees: ribbons, bells, and 
garlands embellishing places for ritual and sacrifice. 
He considered such arrangements architectural 
pre-forms, motives that would later be reified into 
architectural form in the temple. “Bäumen seien 
die ersten Tempel der Gottheiten gewesen” (trees 
were the first temples of  the dieties) he stated.13 By 
suggesting that the adornment of  holy trees was 
the beginning of  architecture, Bötticher invoked 
a notion of  origin that broke sharply with neo-
classical thinking. The origin of  architecture, far 
from being found in architecture itself, resides in 
the ephemeral arrangements of  worship.14

Bötticher’s thinking on the origin of  architecture 
turns our conventional ideas about ephemerality 
and durability upside down. What lasts, here, is not 
matter, construction, or type, but ephemeral human 



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acts, metamorphosed into the architecture of  the temple. It is a delicious 
idea: the most durable thing in architecture is a ribbon or a bell, fluttering 
in the wind.

Durable Metamorphoses  

Bötticher did not develop his ideas on ritual into a fully-fledged 
theory of  architecture. As many scholars have pointed out, Der Baumkultus 
remains a somewhat isolated work within his oeuvre.15 For Bötticher’s 
contemporary, Gottfried Semper, however, the ritual origin of  architecture 
would become a central premise. In Semper’s view, architecture is 
essentially about the stuff  people do in order to make themselves at home 
in the world. And the most primordial way of  doing that is to imitate. 
Primitive man imitates the order of  the world around him, writes Semper: 
the rhythmical shifts of  day and night, the cycle of  the moon, the ebbs and 
flows of  the sea. He continues, “[P]rimitive human beings […] delight in 
nature’s creative law as it gleams through the real world in the rhythmical 
sequence of  space and time movements, in wreaths, a string of  pearls, 
scrolls, round dances, the rhythmic tones attending them, the beat of  an 
oar [...] These are the beginnings out of  which music and architecture 
grew.”16

By imitating nature’s rhythms in the things he does and makes—in 
dance, knots, or tattoos on his skin—man makes for himself  a specifically 
human realm. Architecture emerges gradually out of  these ephemeral 
acts, as a metamorphosed reification of  human action. The origin of  
architecture, then, is not found in building, but in man’s attempt at coming 
to terms with the world around him through rhythm and ritual.

Weaving is one of  Semper’s key examples of  how the ritual act is 
translated into physical form.17 Beginning with the rhythmic movement 
imitating the order of  the natural world, the weaver produces an 
enclosure—the wickerwork wall, for instance—which in turn establishes 
a human domain separated from the natural world. Weaving, then, is 
simultaneously a ritual imitation of  cyclical time and the technical origin 
of  the architectural wall.  It runs through the history of  architecture as 
a constant motif, yet is continuously transformed and metamorphosed 
into new guises through the process of  material transformation, or 
Stoffwechsel, as Semper called it. The wickerwork enclosure, then, ossifies 
into Chinese lattice work, Assyrian stone reliefs, Pompeiian frescoes, and 
sixteenth century Portuguese tiles, continuing to echo even in the modern 
wallpaper. Through history, architecture retains its role as enclosure yet 
it is never exactly the same—it goes through a never-ending material 



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metamorphosis and carries all the memories 
of  its previous stages with it, at any point of  its 
development.18

So what is it that endures, here? Not matter, 
certainly: the material is but a medium in this 
metamorphic process. What endures is human 
work, ossified in a chain of  ever-changing 
materialities. Rather than looking for the origin of  
architecture in architectural form, Semper located it 
in human action, thus overturning key principles of  
neo-classical thinking.19 In one of  his late essays he 
stated this quite explicitly: “In a most general way, 
what is the material and subject matter of  all artistic 
endeavour?” he asked, and answered, “I believe it 
is man in all his relations and connections to the 
world.”20

Patterns of Use 

     The nineteenth-century discipline that most 
vigorously explored ‘man in all his relations and 
connections to the world’ was of  course ethnology, 
or Kulturgeschichte as it would be called in German 
and Scandinavian-speaking countries. Both Semper 
and Bötticher were influenced by contemporary 
ethnology. Scholars have for instance pointed 
out Semper’s reliance on the German ethnologist 
Gustav Klemm, whose Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte 
der Menschheit (1843–1851) elaborated on the ritual 
origins of  art and postulated dance and knots as 
the dual origin of  architecture. Klemm described 
artefacts as “mimetic narratives” and as primary 
vehicles for man’s orientation in the world.21

If  architects read ethnology, ethnologists also 
sometimes read architectural history. At least that 
is the case for the Norwegian ethnologist Eilert 
Sundt (1817–1875), a younger contemporary of  
Semper and Bötticher.22 Neither an architect nor 
a historian, Sundt nevertheless made a significant 
contribution to understanding the relationship 
between architectural form and human action. He 

What 
endures is 

human work, 
ossified in 

a chain of 
ever-changing 

materialities 

“

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also gave quite an original answer to our initial question of  what it is that 
endures in architecture.

Sundt studied theology and earned his living as a Protestant minister. 
His reputation as pioneer of  Norwegian social science, however, he earned 
from his empirically scrupulous studies of  everything from marriage 
habits and mortality statistics to Norway’s gypsy population and the social 
conditions of  the urban poor. Among his many books is one on vernacular 
architecture in the Norwegian countryside published in 1862. It is called 
Om Bygnings-Skikken paa Landet i Norge, a title perhaps best translated as 
“On the manner of  building in the Norwegian countryside.”23 On his 
many travels up and down the country, Sundt tells his readers, he had been 
struck by the underlying regularity of  vernacular buildings. Although each 
hamlet, farm, and building was to some extent different from every other, 
they all adhered to a common pattern. The regularity was noticeable not 
least in the organization of  the domestic interior. Sundt observed how 
building form, furniture, and permanent elements such as fireplaces, 
windows, and entrances followed the exact same template, reflecting the 
social structure of  rural Norwegian society. “I cannot tell how surprised I 
was when I first realized this house custom [hus-skikk]” he wrote:

Once you have gotten to know how things are arranged in one house, you know 
for certain how all houses of  a similar kind are organized. When I now travel 
through the Gudbrandsdalen region and see an old-fashioned house, it is as if  
I can see through the walls and know, that here, by the door, stands the great 
cabinet; there in the corner is the main seat; in the other corner, the master bed, 
etc. It is as if  the houses were made of  glass.24

While in the city, people build “after their own heart,” Sundt writes; in 
the countryside, building is governed by ancient traditions that regulate 
not so much the building itself  as the way of  life that in turn regulates 
building. Sundt called this reciprocal process ‘skikk.’ It is a tricky concept 
to translate, but comes close to tradition, or custom. ‘Skikk’ refers to ways 
of  doing things, ways of  arranging social phenomena into certain patterns 
that can be embodied in buildings and things. It is tempting to adopt 
Arendt’s vocabulary: ‘skikk’ is human work transformed into a built world.

The durable factor in Sundt’s architectural analysis was not wood 
or stone, but ways of  translating life into recognizable—and indeed 
durable—configurations. In an almost proto-structuralist fashion he 
describes how the ‘skikk’ governs life, how life governs architectural 
form, and how architectural form in its turn gives stability to life. It is 
a slow cycle that is not unchangeable but nonetheless relatively stable. 
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as a waning phenomenon. Modern man does not 
adhere to any ‘skikk,’ he writes. In the modern 
city, houses reflect individual habits and desires, 
and have thus no durability outwith the life of  the 
individual: “It is different in the cities: the houses 
are more singular and the people as well – each 
with their own habits and needs, […] one in this 
way, the other in that way.”25 Modernity, for Sundt, 
represents a break with the durability of  ‘skikk.’ It 
is replaced by individualist transience, but also, we 
may add, by a compensatory search for eternity. For 
Sundt’s farmhouses, that eternity came in the form 
of  the museum, where so many of  the interiors he 
studied would end up.

Mimesis of Praxis

“[B]uildings and paintings and poetic texts, 
as much as rituals, are cables that hold a society 
together through time” write Alexander Nagel 
and Christopher S. Wood in their book Anachronic 
Renaissance.26 Nagel and Wood are particularly 
interested in artworks that—explicitly or 
implicitly—evoke multiple temporalities, like the 
way Roman spolia in early Christian churches acted 
as veritable time machines, connecting and doubling 
time and tying the present to multiple pasts “like a 
homeopathic remedy for discontinuity.”27

In the 
modern city, 

houses reflect 
individual habits 

and desires, 
and have thus 

no durability 
without the life 
of the individual

“

”

Figure 2: Section of 

farmhouse, Norway 

taken from 

Sundts book



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Semper’s material metamorphosis, Bötticher’s reified ritual 
arrangements, and Sundt’s long-enduring “skikk” are all examples of  such 
multi-temporal conditions. Their durability has nothing to do with the 
fixed eternity of  the museum or the immobilized past of  the historical 
monument. Instead, all these examples demonstrate architecture’s capacity 
to accommodate and preserve human action, giving shape to our attempts 
at making ourselves at home in the world. Aristotle said that the tragedy 
was “not an imitation of  men but of  actions and of  life.”28 Much the 
same could be said for architecture in the way I have outlined it here, as a 
“mimesis of  praxis,” it is an imitation of  human action.

All of Us

Back to the question: What is it that endures in architecture? A 
brief  glance at Semper’s theory of  Stoffwechsel, Bötticher’s ephemeral 
tree decorations, or Sundt’s “skikk” has taught us that it is neither matter 
nor form. It is rather—very much like Hannah Arendt proposed—the 
fact that work and works tie us to a shared duration, not a singular, 
monolithic past, but a heterogeneous, multi-temporal, contentious past. 
Perhaps that can help us understand Slavenka Draculić’s reaction to the 
destruction of  the Mostar bridge. “Why do I feel more pain looking at 
the image of  the destroyed bridge than the image of  the woman?” she 
asked herself, emphatically stating that while “the dead woman was one 
of  us, the bridge was all of  us, forever.” In what way was the bridge all 
of  us? By means of  its symbolic role as a bridge between East and West, 
Muslim and Christian—a sort of  super-symbol of  a multi-ethnic Balkan? 
Perhaps, but that is not the whole story. As the architectural historians 
Hans-Henrik Egede-Nissen and Emily Macas have both pointed out in 
their respective PhD dissertations, this symbolism is not uncontroversial.29 
Political scientist Heiko Wimmen put it even more strongly: “This popular 
image probably reveals more about the Western need to reduce a complex 
and multi-layered structure to clear-cut oppositions, which can then be, as 
it were, bridged.”30 It seems to me that Draculić’s “all of  us” may point 
to something more than simply the bridge as a symbol of  ethnic conflict 
and its potential reconciliation. Rather than a horizontal “us,” she evoked 
a vertical “us” linked through time as much as through geographical or 
ethnic divides. The bridge was an attempt to grasp eternity, she wrote—a 
complex, contested, and relative eternity in this case, but nevertheless an 
eternity involving “all of  us.” It was perhaps this contentious but significant 
common-ness that made UNESCO forego their usual requirement of  
material authenticity and inscribe the reconstructed Mostar bridge into 



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the world heritage list.

What lasts in architecture is not stone, but rather 
memories, rituals, dreams, and acts metamorphosed 
into matter and form a thousand times over. 
At a time when we seem to oscillate between a 
fascination for ephemerality and a longing for 
museum-like eternity, it may be good to keep this 
relative permanence in mind, particularly when 
thinking about architecture and its relationship to 
the human.

Endnotes

[1] The Mostar bridge was erected for Sultan 
Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566 by the architect 
Mimar Hajrudin. The bridge was hit several times 
during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, both by the 
Serbian-backed Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (JNA) 
and the Croatian Defense Council (HVO). For 
more information, see “Nomination Dossier: The Old 
City of  Mostar,” UNESCO, January 2005, http://
whc.unesco.org/uploads/nominations/946rev.
pdf. I am indebted to Hans-Henrik Egede-Nissen, 
whose Ph.D. dissertation “Autentisitetens relevans: 
på sporet av et endret fokus for kulturminnevernet,” 
presents a thorough analysis of  the destruction and 
reconstruction of  the Mostar bridge. See Hans-
Henrik Egede-Nissen, “Autentisitetens relevans: på 
sporet av et endret fokus for kulturminnevernet” (Ph.D. 
dissertation, Oslo School of  Architecture and 
Design, 2014), 175-234.

[2] Slavenca Draculić, “Falling Down. A Mostar 
Bridge Elegy,” The New Republic, December 13, 
1993.

[3] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: 
University of  Chicago Press, 1989), 136.

[4] Ibid., 137.

[5] Antonio Sant’Elia, “L’Architettura Futurista: 
Manifesto” (Milan, July 1914). English translation 
in Ulrich Conrads (ed.), Programmes and Manifestoes 

What lasts 
in architecture 

is not stone, 
but rather 

memories, rituals, 
dreams, and acts 

metamorphosed 
into matter and 

form a thousand 
times over 

“

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on 20th-century Architecture (London: Lund Humphries, 1970), 38. On the 
convoluted history of  the manifesto and its reception, see Esther da Costa 
Meyer, The Work of  Antonio Sant’Elia: Retreat into the Future (New Haven: 
Yale University Press, 1995), 141-168.

[6] William Holford, “In Search of  a New Monumentality,” Architectural 
Review vol 104, no 621 (September 1948): 125

[7] Charles Baudelaire, Painters of  Modern Life, trans. J. Mayne (London: 
Phaidon, 1995), 12.

[8] Alois Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung 
(Wien und Leipzig: Braumüller, 1903), 9 and 16-18.

[9] Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of  the City, trans. D. Ghirardo and J. Ockman 
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1982), 89.

[10] See, for example, Anthony Vidler, “From the Hut to the Temple: 
Quatremère de Quincy and the Idea of  Type,” in The Writing of  the 
Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (New York: Princeton 
Architectural Press, 1987), 147-64; Anthony Vidler, “The Third Typology”, 
Oppositions 7 (1976): 1-4; and Adrian Forty, “Type,” in Words and Buildings: 
A Vocabulary of  Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 
304-11.

[11] Karl Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, vols. 1-2 (Potsdam: Riegel, 
1844-1852). Second, revised edition: Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1874-1881.

[12] Karl Bötticher, “Einleitung,” in Der Baumkultus der Hellenen nach den 
gottesdienstlichen Gebräuchen und den überlieferten Bildwerken dargestellt (Berlin: 
Weidmann, 1856), 1-6.

[13] Bötticher, “Umriss des hellenischen Baumkultus,” in Der Baumkultus 
der Hellenen nach den gottesdienstlichen Gebräuchen und den überlieferten Bildwerken 
dargestellt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1856), 9.

[14] Ibid., 7-25

[15] See, for example, Hartmut Mayer, Die Tektonik der Hellenen: Kontext 
und Wirkung der Architekturtheorie von Karl Bötticher (Stuttgart and London: 
Menges, 2004), 16.

[16] Gottfried Semper, “Prolegomenon” in Der Stil in den technischen und 
tektonischen Künsten; oder, Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, 
Künstler und Kunstfreunde, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Kunst und 
Wissenschaft, 1860), xxi-xxii. English translation in Gottfried Semper, 
Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. and ed. H. F. 
Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty 2004), 82.

[17] Semper presented his ideas on weaving in several places, see, 



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for example, Der Stil §54 and §57-61, as well as “The Four Elements of  
Architecture,” in The Four Elements of  Architecture and Other Writings, trans. and 
ed. Harry F. Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1989), 103-104.

[18] A poignant presentation of  Semper’s notion of  Stoffwechsel and 
Bekleidung is found in §66, “Excursus über das Tapetzierwesen der Alten,” 
in Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: 
Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860), 276-322. 

[19] This point is elaborated in J. Rykwert, “Gottfried Semper and the 
Conception of  Style,” in Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. 
A. M. Vogt, C. Reble, and M. Frölich (Basel: Birkhaüser, 1976), 68-81.

[20] Gottfried Semper, “On Architectural Styles,” in The Four Elements of  
Architecture and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Harry F. Mallgrave and Wolfgang 
Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 269.

[21] Gustav Klemm, Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit, vol. 1 (Leipzig: 
Teubner, 1843), 2-3.

[22] The links between Semper and Sundt have been explored by the Swedish 
art historian Rudolf  Zeitler in the unpublished lecture “Om Eilert Sundt og G. 
Semper” (1979, typewritten manuscript held at the Norwegian Directorate for 
Cultural Heritage Archive in Oslo), though from quite a different vantage 
point  than the present comparison.

[23] Eilert Sundt, Om Bygnings-Skikken paa Landet i Norge (Christiania: Malling, 
1862).

[24] Ibid., §5, 14. In the original text:

Jeg kan ikke sige, hvor jeg blev forundret, da jeg første gang blev opmærksom på og 
opfattede denne hus-skik. [...] Det er så i disse bygder, at når man først har gjort 
sig fortrolig med hver tings plads i et hus, så veed man med det samme, hvordan 
det er i alle de andre huse af  samme bygningsmåde. Når jeg nu kjører igjennem 
Gudbrandsdalen og i forbifarten ser på et hus, at det hører til dette gammeldags slag, 
med stue og kleve, hvilket er tilfælde med de allerfleste, og når jeg fremdeles ser, hvordan 
huset er stillet, eller hvad der er fremsiden og bagsiden - hvilket kan skjønnes på 
dørens eller vinduernes eller skorstenspibens plads, - så kan jeg ligesom se ind igjennem 
væggen og vide, at her ved døren står fremskabet, der ved hjørnet er høisædet, i hjørnet 
hist borte står husbondens seng o.s.v. Det er, som om husene skulde være af  glas.

[25] Ibid., 14-15. In the original text:

Anderledes i byerne: husene mere ulige og menneskene ligeså - med ulige vaner og 
fordringer, mere udviklet forskjellighed i sind og tænkemåde, en så, en anden så. I 
den fjerne landsbygd kan en velstående og en fattig bonde have det så temmelig ens 
i sit hus og sit daglige liv, i hovedstaden derimod kommer forskjellen mellem den 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

61

Hv
a

tt
um

rige og den fattige, den dannede og den udannede o.s.v. tilsyne på hvert punkt. 
Der er vexel-virkning her: under bylivets bevægede forholde kunne de forskjellige 
anlæg og sindsretninger udvikles frit, og frit sees da enhver at indrette sit hus og 
sit hele husliv, som han bedst veed og kan; men de udvortes forskjelligheder, som 
herved opstå, skabe igjen forskjellige vaner, tilbøieligheder, lidenskaber, og hermed 
påskyndes hin sindets og tænkemådens udvikling, så forskjellen mellem de enkelte 
mennesker bliver altid større og større.

[26] Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance 
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010), 15.

[27] Ibid., 183.

[28] Aristotle, Poetics, trans. J. Hutton (New York: Norton, 1982), 1450a.

[29] Egede-Nissen, Autentisitetens relevans, 210. Emily Gunzburg Macas, 
“The Old Bridge,” in Representing Competing Identitites, (Ph.D. dissertation, 
Cornell University, 2007), 198-255.

[30] Heiko Wimmen, “New Nations, Imagined Borders: Engineering Public 
Space in Post-War Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina” (paper presented at the Beirut 
Conference for Public Spheres, Beirut, Lebanon, October 22-24, 2004), 
quoted in Macas, Representing Competing Identitites, 217.


	0-Front Matter
	1-Editorial
	2-Harries and Scruton
	3-Pedragosa
	4-Hvattum
	5-Dicks
	6- Roussel 
	7-Back Matter



