116 What is Architectural History?
of Croce’s critical philology or Tafuri’s critical historiogra-
phy, the historical conditions under which buildings, monu-
ments and city precincts were conceived, negotiated and
realized in past moments. Neither does it imply that archi-
tectural history is inevitably in the service of professional
interests and the programmatic imperatives of architecture
itself. Many architectural historians are indeed trained fi rst
as professional architects; as a result, many hold topics of
architectural history up against the needs of contemporary
practice as a qualifi cation for their study, or demand that
historical analysis is brought directly to bear on issues of the
present. There are, however, strong and important disciplin-
ary counter-traditions, the most signifi cant of which being
the study of architectural history within the history of art,
within social, institutional, and intellectual history, and as a
subject for the close study of architecture’s documentary
landscape.
In the twenty-fi rst century, as in the nineteenth, architec-
tural history stands before a set of conceptual problems
derived from these sometimes contradictory institutional and
intellectual traditions from which it emerged and to which it
has to varying degrees been held accountable. This situation
is shared by other histories of professions, arts and tech-
niques, like music, for example, or medicine, where a histori-
cal discipline has formed alongside an art’s or a profession’s
consciousness of its historical patrimony.
Among its roles, architectural history serves to defi ne the
historical context of contemporary architecture. To this
extent it must negotiate, articulate or reconcile the differences
between what architecture is, what it has been and, for some,
what it can or ought to be. The term ‘architecture’ has some-
times allowed accidental confl ations of past and present reali-
ties and perspectives for historians and architects alike. This
is, of course, a fundamental issue for all branches of history:
how to know the past in the present. It is made slightly more
pressing in architectural history, however, because extant
works of historical architecture acquire contemporary signifi -
cance and are known within contemporary modes of visual-
ity and experience. A building of the seventeenth century that
remains standing today is not past in a simple sense. The
complexity of this situation feeds back into the analysis of