128 What is Architectural History?
extreme attitudes to this recent and, for some, traumatic
institutional and intellectual history, the separation between
theory and post-theory will appear as an impossible chasm.
It nevertheless remains possible for us to identify a series of
historiographical themes and attitudes that owe a debt to
architecture’s theory moment, even if they now belong to
what has been construed, in terms of equal contingency, as
a ‘return to history’.
As much as we can speak of a ‘return’ to architectural
history, we must recognize that it is neither easy nor simple.
Critical theory has allowed historians to make fundamental
insights into the workings and representation of knowledge
and the conditions of its production and survival. Architec-
tural history and its production have by no means been
exempt from these lessons. Historians working more recently,
who have some experience of these intellectual developments,
but who turn again to what might be called architectural
history’s ‘core’ concerns, are well aware of the implications
of this intellectual history for their research, writing and
teaching in the present. Books by Reinhold Martin and Felic-
ity Scott, who with Branden Joseph edit the journal Grey
Room (founded 2000), demonstrate the possibilities of such
a history.^24 The increased weight given recently to the intel-
lectualization of architectural history itself – the historians
and their values – is symptomatic of the effects of a sustained
spell of theoretical refl ection on the disciplinary fi eld and its
relation to architectural culture.
A long roll call of architectural historians has been subject
to this kind of analysis, from the scholars of Vienna and
Venice to the founders of American, British, Turkish, South
African, Iberian, French, Belgian, Italian, Australasian and
other national or regional historiographical communities.
This examination is inevitably couched in the search for and
analysis of disciplinary models. (When the subjects of this
intellectual historiography confront us with unconscionable
political views, such as the generation of art historians sym-
pathetic with the aims of German National Socialism, under-
standing their cases historically has helped us to see how the
ideas that shape historical research can themselves relinquish
the basic conditions of civilization that its historians appear
to defend.)^25 Much of this research and scholarship takes up