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In the latter half of the nineteenth century, architecture was regularly celebrated as “the mother of the arts.” Though most users of the phrase rarely explicated its nuances, a close reading of the contexts and debates in which it was invoked reveals the complexity, nuance, and changing implications of the deceptively simple claim. In a period when the fine and applied arts grew increasingly distinct and the practice of architecture was progressively codified and professionalized, why did architects engage in rhetoric that emphasized architecture’s affiliation with and authority over the arts? To answer this question, I examine numerous instantiations of the phrase to trace an arc in which an earlier disciplinary affiliation between architecture and the fine arts transforms into an interpersonal relationship between architects and art-workers. In so doing, I suggest that the maternal metaphor was employed in response to collectively held anxieties to invert and project them as conceptual and historical claims of affiliation, authority, and identity—precisely those characteristics of the profession that were unstable at the time.

Architecture’s Maternity: Conceiving the Mother of the Arts in the Long Nineteenth Century