Looking Back at Distance Looks Back: Reflections on the First Combined Meeting of EAHN and SAHANZ (Sydney, 10–13 July 2019)

Abstract

Distance is both conceptual and actual. It is overcome or exploited in all manner of ways that have consequences for the history of architecture. It is fostered in the critical attitude. And collapsed when history is invoked in the present. It shapes the relationship of Europe to its Antipodes, as well as of Europe to its neighbours. Its presence is necessary for claims upon disciplinarity; its absence, the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries. In what ways has distance figured in the history of architecture? What has it altered? What has it prevented? What has it allowed? What does it permit, even now? These lines opened the call for papers for Distance Looks Back, the first combined meeting of the EAHN and SAHANZ (Sydney, 10-13 July 2019, http://distance2019.sydney). This meeting served, first, to break down the distance that keeps the activities of these two highly compatible communities at a remove from one another. It also served to explore the very idea of distance as a practical consideration of the architectural historian’s work and as a persistent theme in architectural history and its conceptualisation.