History’s Stoffwechsel: Interchange and Alternation in the Contents of Semper’s Der Stil

Abstract

Compelled by the shifting socio-cultural conditions of architecture’s present, the strategy of this brief contribution to the theme of “Change” is to move approximately a century and a half back and focus on a formative moment for architectural histories and theories. The main object of the essay is the process of interchange between theory and history during the emergence of the first so-called “world histories” of architecture in the 19th century. I choose to focus on the writings of architect and theorist Gottfried Semper, whose writings have made a theoretical contribution to the invention of architectural history within the shifting cultural and political milieu of the long nineteenth century. More specifically, I describe the interchange between history and theory that takes place in his Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetic as reflected in the asymmetrical relations  between aesthetics and form, as well as technics and history in the author’s table of contents. Ultimately, the essay presents Semper’s well-known metabolic concept of Stoffwechsel as a historical process based on an oscillating constancy of aesthetic, material, and technical forms.