24 - Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture: A Conversation with James S. Ackerman

Summary

On November 15, 2010, James S. Ackerman, then the only living participant of the international conference “De divina proportione,” held in Milan in 1951, sat for a video interview later shown at the conference “Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture,” held in Leiden in 2011 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Milan conference. In this interview Ackerman discusses how the study of proportional systems has changed over the past six decades, and thereby provides a unique link between the two conferences.

About James S. Ackerman

James Sloss Ackerman (1919-2016) was a leading figure in the field of architectural history, having made foundational contributions to medieval, Renaissance, and theoretical studies during his career of more than six decades. In 2001 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of architectural history and urbanism. The prize committee noted that Ackerman's work ”…contributed to the modern approach to architectural history based on a systematic critical examination of written and visual sources.” Ackerman combined this approach, as he notes in the interview below, with ”…a broad cultural and political and economic and social interpretation of the history of architecture.” Born in San Francisco, he completed his undergraduate studies at Yale University (1938–41), where he studied under Henri Focillon. During World War II he briefly volunteered as a courier for the Milan office of the Monuments and Fine Arts Commission, and was assigned to transport archives stored for safekeeping at the Certosa of Pavia, which confirmed his interest in Renaissance architecture. Ackerman completed his graduate studies at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts (MA 1947, PhD 1952), where he studied with Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky. Subsequently, he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (1949–52). He taught at the University of California at Berkeley (1952–60), and at Harvard University as Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts from 1960 until his promotion to emeritus status in 1990 (at the time, professors at all universities retired from teaching at 70). Ackerman received the Paul Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award of the Renaissance Society of America in 1998, and became an honorary citizen of the City of Padua in 2008. Also in 2008 the Venice Biennale award committee granted him the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.