Evidence 95the promises of globalization invade the once relatively ‘car-
tesian’ spaces.^18Engaging with these historiographical problems, Twilight of
the Plan presented archival photographs documenting the
early life of the two planned cities, but turns quickly to the
present moment as surveyed (2006) by photographer Enrico
Cano. Thus it speaks not only to the process of conception
and realization but also to the history of the city as a setting
for modern life. The images might offend a puritan modern-
ist, but they describe a reality that includes architecture while
refusing the kinds of limits that architecture (and architec-
tural history) might impose, in order to understand the way
that these cities and their buildings operate as a setting for
all manner of social, familial and cultural activities.
Interior and exterior histories
When a work of architecture is itself evidence for a non-
architectural problem in history, as a document it internalizes
the evidentiary fi eld that would otherwise have been impor-
tant for analysis of the building as a subject of architectural
history. The building, drawing, photograph or urban block
thus indexes an internally complex fi eld of forces and deci-
sions. An example of a mass housing project might, for
example, be read as a simple artefact in a history, say, of
housing economics, or as a given consequence within the
mechanisms of housing policy and production. An architec-
tural historian might be inclined to dig deeper into the project
itself to understand how its production and appearance
attend to its role and function in housing. Someone, after all,
took the policy and effected the translation that made the
architecture look a certain way; someone (else) defi ned how
an individual building within the project might relate to
another; someone (perhaps different again) determined how
the housing scheme would be promoted to would-be inhabit-
ants. For each of these problems, the historian of architecture
has recourse to evidence that straddles a division between
specialized and non-specialized.
As much as a building can be understood to inform histo-
rical issues that are well beyond the fi eld of architecture,