Foundations of a modern discipline 13the subject’s further enrichment. On the question of how to
‘do’ architectural history, there is no fundamental agreement
to be found in and between conferences, universities or any
other infrastructure supporting its discussion. This refl ects
the different patterns through which the knowledge tradi-
tions we are about to consider gave modern architectural
history a specifi c scope and structure in each iteration of its
appearance.
These observations do not add up to a systematic account
of architectural historiography before the emergence of a
‘modern’ architectural history. They are meant to point,
rather, towards a matrix of conceptual and methodological
problems inherited by architectural history as it became more
clearly differentiated from other modes of historical study
from early in the twentieth century. This new fi eld’s inheri-
tance from the various strains in which historical knowledge
of architecture was understood and transmitted was itself
institutionalized, contested and developed. Historiographical
issues of infl uence, style, taxonomy, critical categories (plan,
space, form, etc.), progress and change, restoration and pres-
ervation, instrumentality, analytical units, the permeability
of historical knowledge – these categories shaped the devel-
opment of architecture’s historiography in the fi rst century
of academic architectural history. But in doing so, they gave
new form to a much longer tradition of fi nding lessons, tra-
jectories and narratives in architecture’s past, and to defi ning
architecture itself in historical terms.
Architectural history as the architect’s patrimony
Architectural theory in antiquity
The oldest surviving account of architecture’s history was
penned in the last decades of the fi rst century BC by Vitru-
vius, an architect and engineer who, seeking to secure an
imperial pension, documented Roman building practices
and outlined their general principles. After 2,000 years,
we cannot expect much of what Vitruvius understood of