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AHO WORKS STUDIES 2011-2012
Institute of Form, Theory and History
What’s in a name?
literature. This actual rose appears in Shake-
speare’s
Romeo and Juliet
and in a time when
the rose-as-metaphor was still fresh and inno-
vative: ”that which we call a rose / By any oth-
er name would smell as sweet.”
Juliet’s naïve,
optimistic assertion that the name in itself is
less important than what it denotes (on this
occasion, the beloved one: Romeo Montague)
proved to be a fatal misconception with lethal
consequences and a core issue in one of the
great tragedies of all times.
There are many possible answers to Shake-
speare’s political-philosophical question “What’s
in a name?” With the risk of over-simplifying,
the question points to the fact that names sig-
nify in ways that are not always easy to con-
trol or predict. So when the name “Institute of
Form, Theory and History” appears on a web-
site, on an organisational chart, on a budget,
as part of an email signature, or more impor-
tantly, as the heading of a list of studios and
seminars offered in an architecture school, it
is tempting to ask: “What’s in a name?” What
does this somewhat peculiar constellation of
words (Form, Theory, History) signify, evoke,
trigger – not at least seen from the perspective
of the student?
I can only guess. Yet, I can immediately state
that the A=A formula appears to be useless
in trying to answer this tricky question and
maybe contribute to clarify matters. Form=
Form, Theory=Theory, History=History: this
exercise provides us only with a list of pure
nonsensical tautologies, of infertile and con-
fusing repetitions that apparently bring us no-
where. The same goes for Form, Theory, His-
tory=Form, Theory, History. All three words
seem to be in desperate need of precise epithets
to really make sense, both individually and as
a constellation. And first things first: If archi-
tecture is a big word, form is even bigger. It is
hard to imagine anything of importance going
on in a school of architecture and design that
doesn’t involve form, in one way or the other.
Yet form hardly points to anything concrete in
the way a rose, despite its intricate textual his-
tory, still refers to a concrete flower. For theory
and history the matter is slightly different. In
the Anglo-American world, and also in many
European languages, everyone understands
what kind of architectural practise a teacher
or a student is involved in if they say that they
are doing/teaching/researching theory-history,
or that they are enrolled in a theory/history
seminar. In Norwegian, the category “teori og
historie” is not very well established. At the
Oslo school, theory and history have tradition-
ally been lingering on the periphery of archi-
tecture proper, something you touch upon a
bit as an undergraduate, otherwise as a kind
of luxury for master students with singular
affinities, and then again, of course, in the PhD
programme, for the happy few.
There is indeed also something strange in
the way theory and history is talked about in
architecture schools, which differs from adja-
