94 What is Architectural History?
kind of history and another were clearer. The questions asked
of a building by an economic historian, for instance, may
differ markedly from the architectural historian’s questions.
There remains, here, an open issue of specialization and its
limits: what determines whether a history is architectural? As
Andrew Ballantyne has observed, ‘Buildings, especially when
they are aggregated into cities, are the largest artefacts.’ Con-
sequently, they are important and interesting to many others
apart from architects and architectural historians. For the
latter, though, he raises a fundamental issue: ‘What values
inform our judgement when we decide what it is that is most
important to write about? And what is it that we choose
to say about the buildings we decide to include in our
histories?’^16
One fi nal example allows us to pursue this idea further.
The 2007 exhibition ‘Twilight of the Plan’ (Accademia di
Architettura, Mendrisio), curated by architect and planner
Josep Acebillo and architectural historians Maristella Cas-
ciato and Stanislaus von Moos, treats the two contemporane-
ously planned cities of Chandigarh (Le Corbusier, Pierre
Jeanneret and others, from 1951) and Brasília (Lucio Costa
and Oscar Niemeyer, 1956–60) as a form of historical mate-
rial.^17 In his catalogue essay ‘Vers une “Grille ChaBra” ’, von
Moos describes the exhibition’s conceptual and curatorial
challenges. His comments bear strongly upon the problem of
balancing between the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ of a historical
architectural subject:
The pictures shown in the exhibition document the paradigms
for which those cities have either been admired or criticized:
the triumphalism of their governmental palaces, though
‘broken’ in the case of Chandigarh, the vast open (‘oceanic’)
spaces around them, the rhetoric of progress as dramatized
in their traffi c arteries (an infrastructure that has generated
higher traffi c densities in both cities than anywhere else in
their respective countries), and the confi dence in the welfare
state as refl ected in their carefully designed, yet stereotyped
housing schemes. Also shown, of course, are the gaps that
exist between the projects as they were planned and built on
the one hand and the way they have been occupied, used, or
re-defi ned during the past decades on the other, and the
breaks and fi ssures through which the realities of poverty and