98 What is Architectural History?
in the past in his book Teorie e storia dell’architettura
(1968).^2
From the eighteenth century onwards it became clear that
one could study architectural history as a dimension of the
study of human culture, for its own sake, as well as for the
lessons it might offer architects working in the present
moment. Architects engaged historical knowledge of archi-
tecture as a traditional knowledge open to contestation and
development, and as a lexicon of examples that could be
invoked almost as curios. Many writers have drawn the par-
allel between the illustrated histories of architecture that
began to appear in the middle decades of the nineteenth
century, such as Quatremère de Quincy’s Dictionnaire histo-
rique d’architecture (1832) or Joseph Gwilt’s An Encyclopæ-
dia of Architecture (1842), and the ‘encyclopedic’ displays
enacted in the picturesque and folly gardens like Retz near
Paris, the Swedish King Gustavus III’s gardens at Haga and
Drottningholm, or the Russian landscapes described in
Andreas Schönle’s The Ruler in the Garden (2007).^3 The
great eclectic debates of the mid to late nineteenth century
relied on the availability of architectural history to those
who were designing buildings.^4 The signifi cance and propri-
ety of styles and decorations were treated as codifi ed and
fi xed by some and regarded as arbitrary by others. They
were, nonetheless, available to the architect like patterns in
a book of samples, retaining meaning at some level but no
longer contingent on the place and time in which they fi rst
appeared.
These examples serve to demonstrate the tendency, fully
exercised in the twentieth century, to divorce the usefulness
of architectural history for the designing architect from the
precise circumstances of that history as it might be under-
stood by a historian. It is hard to ignore the tendency of
architects to fi nd in history something useful, be it models,
concepts, strategies, provocations or inspiration. This sense
of architectural history’s import lends a qualifi cation for the
works of architecture’s historical canon and the terms and
means of its revision over time. It has also shaped how archi-
tectural history is taught in schools of architecture and has
thus informed the structure of the problem of historical
instrumentalization for architecture well into the future.