112 What is Architectural History?
with it. Both ideas of architectural history would be under-
pinned by a knowledge of architecture equivalent to that held
by the architect, but each position on the architectural histo-
rian’s role in relation to the architect assumes a greater or
lesser distance from the exigencies of the offi ce and studio.
Cultural versus architectural instrumentalization
These discussions allow us to home in on three positions that
continue to shape the terms under which architectural history
is deemed ‘useful’ to its professional audience. Zevi’s is the
contextualist position for which history is one of many set-
tings determining the architect’s approach to composition,
planning, decoration, materials and so forth. Second, drawing
from Millon’s response, is a tempered version of the same
stance: architectural history has much to teach us – architects
and accountants alike – but architectural knowledge is hardly
limited by history’s structures and abstractions. Third, Tafuri
takes the critical stance: the historian of architecture can act
against the habits upheld by architectural history, and this
antagonism can in turn question the facts concerning histori-
cal models, referents and precedents. As such, these positions
describe three stances that could variously be considered
disciplinary or habitudinal: architecture within history, for
architecture (Zevi); architecture alongside history, for culture
(Millon); and history against architecture, for architecture
(Tafuri).
The warning implied in this analysis is not far removed
from another offered by Carr. He writes of the undergradu-
ate ‘recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones
of St. Jude’s’ who wisely asks a friend at St Jude’s ‘what sort
of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet’. Archi-
tectural histories written with a professional readership of
architects in mind will not only be aware of their readers’
technical and artistic expertise, but they will recognize that
their readers also design works of architecture that will one
day become the material of the past and perhaps, depending
upon the qualifi cations, the matter of architectural history.
This awareness is inevitably underpinned by an idea of the
historian’s role in architectural culture that gives way to a