Microhistories of ArchitectureEAHN Thematic Conference, ETH Zurich 12-15 June 2025

Horse-shaped roof beam on a 16th-century farmhouse in Witikon, near Zurich. From: Ernst Gladbach, Der Schweizer Holzstyl in seinen cantonalen und constructiven Verschiedenheiten (Zurich, 1882)

What can an idiosyncratic detail tell us about the history of an entire building or the people that built it? What is the importance of a single edifice for the history of a city? Can we rewrite the history of a canonical work of architecture by adopting the viewpoint of an anonymous craftsperson or a passer-by? More broadly, what does the life of one individual – perhaps an anonymous commoner, who lived centuries ago and left only scant evidence – matter for the grand narratives of history?

A few decades ago, such questions were at the centre of a historical method known as Microhistory. Microhistorians devoted their efforts to foregrounding the voices, subjectivities, mentalities and experiences of historical subalterns such as peasants, slaves or women. Around the same time, the Subaltern Studies group, pioneered by Ranajit Guha, sought ways to amplify such “small voices of history” in colonized and post-colonial contexts. The aim of all of these authors was to use marginal evidence and hyper-specific case studies as a lens through which to revisit larger historical narratives: to zoom in, in order to eventually zoom out again.

Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, first published in 1976, is often seen as a foundational work of the microhistorical method. The book opens with the evocation of a poem by Bertold Brecht, in which a “literate worker” wonders: “Who built Thebes of the seven gates?”. Ginzburg adds: “The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons, but the question retains all its significance”. Already from its start, the method of Microhistory offered itself for investigations in architecture: who was it that actually built the famous works of architecture that make up the historical canon? Who inhabited them and how? What did these people think of the famous monuments of antiquity or the works of famed architects? Did they leave their own marks on these monuments?

This EAHN Thematic Conference engages with the methodological tradition of Microhistory as a way to both interrogate our discipline’s capacity to rethink its own canons, and to question the historiographical challenges that come from applying the microhistorical method to architecture. At a time when architectural history joins the rest of the humanities in bringing to the fore marginalized, suppressed or minoritarian voices, such questions acquire new urgency.