What is Architectural History

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110 What is Architectural History?


Tafuri called ‘false hopes’, which offered a poor reconcilia-
tion of historical knowledge with historical narrative. For
Zevi’s insistence, though, on seeing the problems of the
present foreshadowed in those of the past, Croce could have
no better example of the ‘true architectural historian’.
Under Zevi’s historiographical regime, the historian would
follow the lead of the architect, who would understand the
problems of contemporary society and architecture’s place
therein, and then take over: presenting good, relevant history
and editing out bad and irrelevant examples. One would no
longer need to think about second-rate, minor or peripheral
architects, however important historians might fi nd them
beyond their application to present-day problems. Why
bother? Effective architectural history better educates archi-
tects and prepares society for the better architecture they will
build and the better cities they will plan. The historian of this
stripe would, therefore, not simply study materials and issues
that were of pure, rarefi ed, scholarly interest, but would test
their choice of subject against present needs. Architectural
history, therefore, is that portion of knowledge of the past
that remains relevant. This is the measure of any given his-
torical subject’s legitimacy.
Tafuri argued against this approach, but to the same ends.
How can the architect know what in architectural history is
worthy of study if he or she only knows a small portion of
that history? Even if a historian of architecture makes that
choice from a broad fi eld of historical knowledge, the nature
of transmission means that those geographies, cultures, archi-
tects and epochs edited out on the grounds of irrelevance are
lost to subsequent generations. Tafuri claimed that a strong
sense of ‘internal’ historical authority and continuity allowed
architecture to become isolated from society. Rather than
providing the architect with easy answers drawn from the
past, Tafuri thought, architectural historians ought to recall
the messiness surrounding the way buildings are made, and
to remind present-day readers of cases, architects and prob-
lems that fell out of view for being at odds with architecture’s
neater histories. As Tafuri would have it in rebuttal of
Zevi’s position, the architectural historian studied the past
in order to present historical knowledge with no ‘aesthetic
conclusion’.^19

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