118 What is Architectural History?
the means of intellectualizing the rules of architectural com-
position, disposition, materials, ornamentation and so forth
- thinking through architecture’s borders as an art, discipline,
profession or craft. This is the theory tracked by the wide-
ranging surveys of Kruft and Mallgrave, noted earlier. From
the 1960s, theory came to defi ne the more open critico-his-
torical analysis of architecture. It was postmodern in the
sense defi ned by Lyotard.^2 It set aside grand narratives and
opened the door to an increasingly relativized knowledge. In
architecture this intellectual shift combined semiotic theory
(of a kind), historical revisionism, and Freudo-Marxist per-
spectives on architecture, its history and historiography. By
the 1980s it further welcomed a translation of the decon-
structive philosophy given widespread currency by Jacques
Derrida in his 1967 book De la grammatologie.^3 Architec-
ture’s later-twentieth-century intellectual history presents a
curious confusion of terms.^4 The reactions to anachronistic
and teleological architectural historiography mounted in the
1960s and 1970s and given full expression in the 1980s and
1990s rejected the subservience of architectural history to
architectural theory, of a critical point of view to projective
thinking. It did so, however, in the language of a critical
history, (now) understood as a manifestation of ‘theory’ as
a genre of humanities writing.^5
The work of many architectural historians active from the
1960s onwards was shaped by shifts in tone and value across
the humanities disciplines. Especially was this the case in
anglophone settings of humanities study, particularly in
North America, which rose to dominance during these
decades. This was due, not least, to the innovative adaptation
and dissemination of continental philosophy carried out by
American scholars of architecture, but also to basic changes
in the institutional structures supporting their work, like the
emergence of the Ph.D. in architecture and the dramatically
expanded programmes of key publishers of books and jour-
nals in the history and theory of architecture. The intellec-
tual, stylistic and institutional changes tracked by these
developments did not, however, see a corresponding change
to the fundamental questions posed of the architectural his-
torian’s place in architectural culture. Ultimately, the nature
of this issue did not differ substantially between modernist