How useful? 113historiographical agenda, which Carr describes as the
‘buzzing’ of the bees in the historian’s bonnet. ‘If you can
detect none’, he writes, ‘either you are tone deaf or your
historian is a dull dog’.^20
One of the architectural historian’s most important tasks
is to understand and appraise the past, to recover decisions
and guess at their consequences. In this sense, architectural
historiography explores the relationship between historical
formation and perspective and the construction, defence and
criticism of a historical corpus of architectural knowledge.
The meaning of all of these terms is open to debate, and
through this debate the limits of the discipline or fi eld or
specialization of architectural history are received, tested and
defended from moment to moment. In this light, we might
restate the three positions described earlier through Zevi,
Millon and Tafuri in relation to three specifi c stances relative
to the corpus of historical knowledge of architecture, the
content of architectural history: instrumental historiography
as the manipulation of historical knowledge, scientifi c or
learned history as the study of architectural history for its
own ends, and critical history as the use of knowledge and
analysis against history’s manipulation to ends direct (instru-
mental and operative) or habitual (resulting from pervasive
hegemonies). Just as many schemas advanced thus far in this
book are merely diagrams of tendencies rather than entire
approaches, architectural historians will more often than not
affi liate with one of these positions in concert with aspects
of the others.
The degree to which any one attitude towards writing
architectural history is given greater licence to shape archi-
tectural history (its frames, perspectives, objectives and
effects) depends to a large extent on the author’s or the cura-
tor’s concept of their audience and of the immediate impor-
tance of his or her history for that audience. The direction
of one’s instrumentalization, it stands to reason, is a vital
aspect of this problem. It is useful to make a distinction
between the advancement of culture, in which architecture
and the architect take part, and the advancement of architec-
ture per se, as a question of form, theory, plan and meaning.
The form of architectural history that might seem contempo-
rary for one of these ambitions might seem dead for the