12 What is Architectural History?
clues for the historian of society or technology, an architec-
tural historian may wish to know how a ‘traditional’ house
might have made way for modernist planning, or for the mass
production of building parts. The architecture thus becomes
evidence of itself, of the decisions and awareness of its
designer and/or builder. Is a house exemplary, or symptom-
atic? Is it important architecturally, or historically?
Architectural historians have tended to enjoy these kinds
of ambiguities. Pulling architecture in one disciplinary direc-
tion and another means that architecture as a subject sustains
perpetual scrutiny from many angles, which in turn feeds
back into the knowledge base of architectural historians to
2 Florentia, rendering intended to illustrate Ptolemy’s Geografi a,
probably drawn 1420.