104 What is Architectural History?
erudite history is true history’s extrinsic course – extending
the usefulness of Croce’s terms about as far as is possible –
philology lends knowledge to erudite history. This fi rst-prin-
ciples research is history’s coalface, the analysis and sorting
of evidence and artefacts and their reconciliation or confron-
tation with existing narratives. It deals in fragments rather
than wholes, and as historians of recent decades in particular
have learned, it can be brought to bear on the whole as a
disturbance.
Proximity and distance
The slow unpacking of Croce’s distinctions might seem a
curiosity were the infl uence of his thought on history’s ‘spiri-
tual’ content not so fundamental to the explosion of the issue
of the relationship between architectural history and archi-
tectural practice in the third quarter of the twentieth century.
Particularly in the wake of the Second World War, historians
of architecture demonstrated with increasing regularity that
by throwing the material of the past into relief, history can
be made (or found) to resonate with the present. Even if this
were not the case across the entire fi eld of architectural his-
toriography – and it certainly was not – the post-war decades
witnessed an increased tendency among architectural histo-
rians to present historically derived models for contemporary
architecture and the architect, and lessons for the treatment
of present-day problems faced by the architecture profession
based on the path of corresponding events in the past.
The architect, therefore, is regularly the privileged reader
for whom the architectural historian writes. As we have
noted above, many historians are themselves trained fi rst as
architects, or consider writing or staging architectural history
to be an aspect of their professional architectural practice.
For the architect involved in the preservation, restoration or
renovation of historic sites and buildings, the boundaries
between architectural practice and historical research are
only artifi cially enforced. Indeed, in these circumstances, the
professional tenor of the historian’s audience might seem an
even more obvious fact. That this would pose a conceptual
problem for architectural history as a disciplinary fi eld might,