What is Architectural History by Andrew Leach

Author:Andrew Leach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

None of these books’ editors or authors would unconditionally position these as volumes of architectural history, especially given their shared mission to open up knowledge of the canon with the tools developed by post-structuralist and postcolonial theory imported into the historiography of architecture and theorization of historical architectural works and themes. As a result, these works and themes definitively extend their historical subjects by the use of new critical and theoretical perspectives, all the while cutting through the chronological divisions established and maintained in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Architectural histories that take their subjects as participants in a broader, extra-architectural theme, or that offer analogies with other historical phenomena, can extend the canon by reinstalling figures and works overlooked and then forgotten by previous critics and historians of architecture. They often do this by addressing an existing canon with new analytical tools that render an established historical subject even more complex, thereby valorizing its importance while questioning the mechanisms of the canon itself.

Doubtless there are further approaches to the problem of organizing the past of architecture into historical units to which I could devote space here. Some of the choices available to contemporary historians of architecture have endurance on their side; others are relatively new, bound to the increasingly relativist and contextualist tendencies of all kinds of historiography during the latter part of the twentieth century. As strong strategies, they are all subject to intellectual fashion. As softer frameworks or approaches to the writing of architectural history, tempered one by another, or by others, they describe a good number of the organizational devices used by historians to convert the vast, heterogeneous past of architecture into coherent histories. Where this chapter has considered the terms on which historians can enact this translation, the next will turn to the stuff of that past. What of the past survives to the present as the material of architectural history? We are speaking now of the content of architectural history, and inevitably, therefore, of its relation to evidence.

Notes

1 Johann Gottfried Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, trans. Frank E. Manual ([1784–91, 4 vols.] Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), esp. 79, in ‘Humanity the End of Human Nature’. Compare Peter Kohane, ‘Interpreting Past and Present: An Approach to Architectural History’, Architectural Theory Review 2, no. 1 (1997): 30–7.

2 Carl Albert Rosenthal, ‘In What Style Should We Build?’ in In What Style Should We Build? by Heinrich Hübsch, Rudolf Wiegmann, Carl Albert Rosenthal et al., trans. & ed. David Britt ([1829] Los Angeles: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992), 114.

3 George Selwyn, ‘Parish Churches in New Zealand’, Ecclesiologist (1841), cited in Robin Skinner, ‘Representations of Architecture and New Zealand in London, 1841–1860’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Auckland, 2007, 163–224, 168.

4 As a symptom, see Jean Étienne Casimir Barberot, Histoire des styles d’Architecture dans tous les pays, depuis les temps anciens jusqu’à nos jours, 2 vols. (Paris: Baudrey et cie, 1891).

5 For a longer list

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