68 What is Architectural History?
instructions for other architects (the Italian word trattazione
best captures this technique), of ordering reality along archi-
tectural lines (the Italian, again, progettazione), or simply of
making windows, doors, corners and pathways. These can
equally be subject to such historicization as the long dura-
tional history of architecture allows. Giedion’s Space, Time,
and Architecture (1941) is a model of this approach to
writing history: identifying in their abstraction the values
and activities of the modern architect and retrospectively
constructing their history.^53 His two-volume work The
Eternal Present (1962) is likewise a classic instance of an art
history of ‘space-making’, delving deep into Mesopotamian
and Egyptian examples in order to activate a modernist tele-
ology with a lengthy run-up.^54 Giedion’s student Christian
Norberg-Schulz offers a parallel example in his books
Intentions in Architecture (1965), Existence, Space, and
Architecture (1971) and Meaning in Western Architecture
(1975).^55 The technique with which these are concerned is
‘place-making’, a phenomenological concept that acquired
signifi cant currency and historical authority through
Norberg-Schulz’s work. Whatever the stripe and tenor of the
content of a history of technique in or as architecture, the
historiographical mechanism of the longue durée owes a
great deal to the trajectory of French historiological thought
that spans from Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Foucault.
In the hands of Giedion and Norberg-Schulz, to give two
instances drawn from many possible examples, these techni-
cal histories are less histories of architecture than of practices.
These are not always, and in fact are rarely, specifi c to archi-
tecture. And the identifi cation of the ‘techniques’ of which
these historians make histories is itself a product of history.
These histories would be inconceivable outside of the moment
in which they were written.
More recently, John Macarthur and Antony Moulis have
argued for a history of plan-making (or architectural plan-
ning) as a basis for such a long-durational history of archi-
tecture. The plan, like any other technique in architecture, is
a historically shaped construction of architectural historians.
For architects to think planimetrically is not a given of archi-
tecture, but rather something acquired through transmission
and habit. In a paper delivered to the 2005 conference of the