How useful? 101These specifi c cases are debatable, of course, but they serve
to make a blunt point: when architectural history sets out to
chronicle the past, this past architecture remains an object of
study as a matter of will (as Croce suggests) rather than as
a matter of import for the present. A subject is not inherently
‘contemporary’ or ‘past’. When a subject that can be consid-
ered historically takes on a present-day importance – as
Aboriginal architecture does in the light of a cultural renewal,
or as Jamaica’s Rastafarian architecture does within the
project of its legitimization alongside conventional architec-
ture – its status shifts from being a subject of ‘dead history’
to being part of a ‘living chronicle’.^10 As Carr has it, ‘a mere
fact about the past is transformed into a fact of history.’^11
These examples are no less subject to the mechanisms of
which Croce wrote a century ago than were the ‘rediscovery’
and romanticization of various national medieval pasts of
nineteenth-century Europe. Nor are they less prone to this
contemporanization than were those who in the eighteenth
century ‘discovered’ Greece and argued the importance of its
architecture for the various cultures of the Enlightenment.
The fresh popularity of any given historical case or theme
also belongs to this process. These diverse examples are here
bound together by two connected questions. How, fi rst of
all, does the past relate to the present? And why does the
present look to the past?
Contemporaneity and architectural history
These questions bring us closer to the issue of architectural
history’s audiences. Generally speaking, architectural histo-
ry’s readership can be found in the community of architec-
tural historians as well as in the wider communities of what
we can describe as architectural culture, including architects
and students of architecture. Historical exhibitions expand
this audience to a less specialized community, but often on
the basis of even stronger claims of cultural relevance or
patrimony. The imperative for new books and articles to add
to and engage contemporary knowledge is therefore drawn
in two directions that often diverge. A book might contribute
to the disciplinary knowledge of a particular historical