130 What is Architectural History?
of buildings and city precincts offers a further reminder of
this lesson. The American journal Future Anterior (estab-
lished 2004) explores the complex interactions between
history-as-knowledge and heritage-as-trace that have been
recognized through the theorization of the way that historical
architecture endures in the present and of the way that this
work has acquired and retained historical signifi cance.
The precise means of this insistently critical and doggedly
suspicious analysis of architecture’s past is hardly limited by
the scope of pre-theory historiography as a backdrop for
present-day disciplinary efforts. The adaptation of tools and
approaches of other disciplines has been a source of produc-
tive interference for architectural historians, for whom paral-
lel historical specializations, continental philosophy, the
theorization of politics, economics, corporations and systems,
technology and the sciences have offered surprising insights
into traditional and canonical subjects of architectural
history. For all of these reasons the canon has not exactly
17 Façade, new Post Offi ce, Algiers, Algeria, early twentieth
century.