History and theory 119historians and the critical historians who followed them, even
if the place of criticism, history and other forms of intellec-
tualization and refl ection in architectural culture was more
secure than it had ever been. In this light, consider the ques-
tions posed by Anthony Vidler in Histories of the Immediate
Present:
What, in short, does the architectural historian do, not qua
history, but for architects and architecture? Or, to put it more
theoretically, What kind of work does or should architectural
history perform for architecture, and especially for contem-
porary architecture? This of course is a version of the com-
monplace refrain, How is history ‘related’ to design? Is it
useful? And if so, in what ways?^6The last of Vidler’s questions directly recalls the discussions
documented in the previous chapter, but we can pull the
question of utility in a different direction. The kind of useful-
ness we considered above invoked the possibilities of a direct
relationship between history and theory. Should the architec-
tural historian work with an eye on the future? Was the
objective of architectural history the distillation of models
and rules for the contemporary practice of architecture?
Should history, that is, nudge architecture into the future?
Vidler surveys the writing of several historians of art and
architecture who thought that, yes, history should serve these
roles. One could intellectualize the past as a historian, and
historicize contemporary architecture, but the ends were pro-
grammatic. Truly modern history was in tune with the Zeit-
geist. It aided the production of modern architecture because
it was synchronized with the most progressive expressions of
the age. By the 1970s and 1980s, this form of historiography
was widely thought to be decidedly passé.
The often artifi cial distinctions between architectural
history and architectural theory made since the 1970s have
regularly refl ected a difference in historiographical values
rather than a basic difference between one mode of enquiry
and another. Vidler’s post-war cases (Rowe, Banham, Tafuri)
occasionally profi le as theoreticians. Other times, they present
as critics and historians. When they are theoreticians, they
are not so in the sense that differentiates antagonistically