History and theory 117the stock of historical architecture, however defi ned, into the
history of architectural ideas, and into the terms of reference
for knowing architecture as a historically situated practice.
As we noted above, there are many possible views on the
historical fi eld that remains plausibly connected to architec-
ture as it is known now. Some follow the trajectory of Tafuri’s
Progetto e utopia, Peter Collins’s Changing Ideals in Modern
Architecture (1965), Joseph Rykwert’s The First Moderns
(1980) and Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture (1980),
each of which locates the origins of contemporary architec-
ture in developments of the eighteenth century, Enlighten-
ment thinking, the diminishing importance of the classical
tradition, and the rise of aesthetics.^1 Historiographically,
though, this can give rise to a complex mid-past comprising
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a fl attened-out
deep-past made up of the centuries preceding this relatively
cohesive periodization. It ties the history of modern architec-
ture to the intellectual developments that oversaw the rise of
architectural history.
Critical architectural history
The generation of architectural historians who became prom-
inent in the 1960s and 1970s reacted against the identifi ca-
tion of architectural history with the values of architectural
modernism that could be found in the books of Pevsner,
Giedion and Zevi. If the modern movement had fulfi lled a
series of promises contained in those histories, then what,
they asked, was left either to history or to architecture as
architectural modernism began to fade and crack as an ideo-
logical endpoint? Banham, Tafuri, Robert Venturi and others
of their generation expressed disappointment in the path
taken by modern architecture in the post-war decades, and
realigned the tasks of history with those of, again, contem-
porary architecture. Questions of form and function gave
way to others of historicity and meaning.
The audience for the history written in this period com-
monly described this work as architectural theory. Theory,
in this sense, no longer stood for the operating rules of archi-
tectural practice. Historically, architectural theory had been