120 What is Architectural History?
from history. And when they are historians, they exhibit the
criticality characterizing the theory-work of that moment.
Indeed, they tread a line that defi nes critical architectural
history: that theorized history of architecture, its intellectual
content and its representation; and that historicized theoriza-
tion of the same. It fulfi ls the criteria of theory as a refl ective
and self-refl ective postmodern academic writing genre
without converting historical analysis into architectural
programme.
Vidler is himself a major fi gure of architecture’s ‘theory
moment’. His attention, since the late 1990s, to the history
of architectural historiography is a natural extension of its
project. More recently, critical history-as-theory has tended
to ‘concretize’ as a form of intellectual history-after-theory
concerned with a broadly defi ned architectural culture. The
emergence of the subgenre of the history of architectural
historiography is symptomatic of a desire to understand the
transition from the sureties of modernism and the modernist
project to the absolute relativity of all knowledge in the
prelude to, and then wake of, the deconstructive turn in the
humanities.
Building on such examples as Kruft’s history of architec-
tural theory and the intellectual biography of Giedion written
by Sokratis Georgiadis (1989), the history of architectural
historiography had by the end of the 1990s become a main-
stream discourse for architectural historians.^7 Books on a
number of historians and intellectuals of architectural culture
came to assume an important place in architectural history.
Despite widespread objections that this work moved archi-
tectural historians away from architecture as the discipline’s
centre, it became both legitimate and popular to treat the
intellectual history of architecture’s broader cultural and
intellectual make-up, and thus to write of historical architec-
ture through its historians. These developments saw the
canon return to centre-stage, but mediated by the study of
historiography and historiology. This history of architecture
as the history of architectural history and the history of
architectural ideas attended to a defi nition of architecture as
a discourse.
We can understand these developments historically accord-
ing to recent thinking about the ambitions and strategies of