124 What is Architectural History?
study in architectural history was largely the domain of the
Ph.D. in the discipline of art history, where it has continued
to be taught, and where it has likewise contributed to this
same intellectual project. Especially has this been the case in
the art history departments of the University of California at
Los Angeles, Cornell University and Columbia University.
MIT has graduated a number of infl uential fi gures in Ameri-
can architectural history and theory since the early 1980s, as
have the graduate art history and (more recently) architecture
programmes of UCLA, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, and
Harvard. Other key university centres for architectural theory
in the United States included Princeton and Yale universities,
the Cooper Union and a number of important state universi-
ties – particularly Iowa, where Jennifer Bloomer and Cath-
erine Ingraham conducted infl uential research on architectural
representation.
Individuals based in these various universities – and other
besides – together worked on the formation of a discourse
exploring architecture’s limits as a setting and provocation
for the interdisciplinary study of architecture and its history
in the mode of theory. Across the Atlantic, the Architectural
Association and Cambridge University similarly formed
important British sites for architecture’s participation in the
humanities theory moment, and as many of the key fi gures
of these decades were regularly present in the important
centres of the American northeast, so too were they often
found in Bedford Square or Scroop Terrace.
This lens on the intellectual developments in architecture
is admittedly rather narrow. It does not follow the trajectory
of intellectualized architectural history across Europe – in
Paris, Barcelona, Delft, Berlin, Zurich, Venice and other key
continental centres of architectural thought – as well as in
anglophone settings that resisted the work of an American-
style architectural theory. The international attention to the
American theory centres was, however, so strong as to regu-
larly draw those thinkers, categorized as theorists or theoreti-
cians, into discussions that were American in setting,
European in outlook, and regularly replete with an interna-
tional range of accents.
Jean-Louis Cohen has observed that the interpretation of
French philosophy, for instance, by Italian writers of archi-