History and theory 129Carr’s exhortation to know the historian before knowing the
history. By studying the historians of architecture we would
understand how historiographical devices have shaped the
history of architecture and thus the historical architectural
subject in the present.
Other critical studies of contemporary architecture have
demonstrated how historical cases might operate under a
broader rubric of criticality in architectural culture, where
the present can inform knowledge of the past against the
activation of that knowledge to ends determined by architec-
tural programme. The critico-historical writing to appear in
more recent issues of Thresholds (founded 1992) are exam-
ples of this. So too are those contributions to Log (founded
in 2003), the journal which grew out of the ANY project of
the 1990s directed by Cynthia Davidson from 1993 to 2000:
a series of internationally staged and staffed events and pub-
lications exploring criticality within architectural theory. So,
too, although in a different tenor, is the historical typological
research published and presented by Momoyo Kaijima and
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow.^26 Behind these
approaches and others like them is a productive but relentless
examination and cross-examination of the fi eld of architec-
ture by architectural historians we can describe as critical and
theoretical.
Postcolonial architectural history is likewise a strong force
to emerge from these intellectual, institutional and historical
circumstances of the 1990s. Its terms have informed the his-
toriography of a vast number of geographies and cultures,
and its effect has been to both broaden and deepen the defi ni-
tion of ‘architecture’ by divorcing it from the last vestiges of
the unquestioned Western canon.^27 It maps a historical
enquiry concerned with the ways in which the power, forces
and habits of subjugation shape the production and the anal-
ysis of architecture. This has given rise to themes that are as
theoretical as they are historical: fl ows of political power,
infl uence, patronage and privilege; economics, politics, ideol-
ogy; gender, sexuality and race; mentality, collective memory,
worldview, representation, psychology. These themes have
come to stand for a persistent awareness that the past of
architectural history is no closed book. The recent theoriza-
tion and historicization of the preservation and restoration