114 What is Architectural History?
other. The latter of these two ambitions promoted a form of
historical instrumentalization against which many historians
and theoreticians of architecture have taken a critical stance
since the 1970s. Their reaction gave rise to a critical histo-
riographical tradition loosely connected with Tafuri’s ambi-
tions for his discipline that set out to antagonize the Western
canon and to question its importance for contemporary
architecture. This development lent an altogether different
character to the more recent study of architectural history.