100 What is Architectural History?
human spirit. Even recent history deemed to have little rel-
evance to the present moment in any given place belongs to
the category of the chronicle. He also designates as chronicles
those rarefi ed histories of times and places long forgotten, or
those monuments that, like ancient ruins, confront the viewer
with a sublime sense of age and of past passed – but which
offer to the present no ‘lessons’.
As foreign as we ourselves might now fi nd Croce’s dis-
cussion on history, he lends us a neat conceptual division
between approaches to the task of writing architectural
history on the basis of the historian’s relationship to a con-
temporary audience. Writing half a century later in What Is
History? (1961), E. H. Carr used parallel terms to make the
same point, distinguishing between ‘basic’ facts and ‘histori-
cal’ facts.^9 Insofar as it concerns architecture and its histori-
ography, then, this distinction is not to speak of a scholarly
medievalist audience for medievalist scholars. In the particu-
lar circumstances presented by architectural history, rather,
a contemporary history will resonate with an audience of
architects, of students of architecture, and of those others
who encounter on a daily basis the problems of changing the
world through building. The availability of a concept of
architecture that reaches across the years and centuries is
therefore important to such an audience, as it is one basis
on which histories can remain poignant and relevant to
architects over time. Another basis is the kind of abstraction
that allows for productive misunderstandings and anachro-
nisms, which offer lessons to the present built upon a past
seen through present-day eyes and shaped by present-day
values.
Consider some examples. How do the ancient structures
of Assyria, the medieval architecture of Western Europe, or
the buildings and dwellings of Aboriginal Australia relate to
present-day architectural practice? Some would argue their
fundamental relevance, on different terms and for a different
geographical audience in each case. Others would consign St
Stephen’s Cathedral in Metz (from 1220) or the structures of
Ninevah to an inert past state: obviously artful buildings, and
of interest in their own terms, for scholars, but of little direct
relevance to modern and contemporary architecture, with
which they have almost nothing in common.