What is Architectural History

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132 What is Architectural History?


and structure of a discipline, it borrows persistently and
extensively from its cognate fi elds and, more recently, from
less predictable sources of knowledge, material, analytical
strategies and media. Across the humanities, disciplines are
vastly different now from their forms of half a century ago.
It follows that as a body of knowledge, an evidentiary fi eld
and a set of tools and assumptions, the work of architectural
historians today would by and large be unrecognizable to
Heinrich Wölffl in and disconcerting to Sigfried Giedion; it
might appear nonsensical to Geoffrey Scott and frayed to
Henri Focillon.
As an abstract endeavour, the project of knowing archi-
tecture’s past in terms that reconcile the intrinsic and often
unrecoverable facts of any given subject, be it a building, a
drawing, a life-in-architecture, with the qualifi cations that
allow it to interest scholars in the present has changed little
across the decades. Architecture remains a profession for
some historians, an art for others, and a cultural mirror for
others still. As we have seen, few historians would treat the
history of architecture from one perspective, disciplinary or
methodological, without introducing a degree of balance.
Now, as in the past, this has enriched architectural histori-
ography as a practice. As a practice and a fi eld of knowledge,
it remains shaped by forces, weak and strong, which are
subject to reappraisal now more than ever before. Indeed, the
subject and work of architectural historians is open to a
constant test of boundaries, methods, materials, and even the
position of architectural history relative to the wider cultural
and institutional settings of architecture.
The metropolitan, regional, national and international
scales at which the Offi ce of Metropolitan Architecture
(OMA) and its research-twin AMO practise under the fi rm
hand of Koolhaas have insisted on new terms for the archi-
tect’s work, which has helped to shape architecture’s contem-
porary agenda. The tools of architecture, their work argues,
can shape governance, capital, consumerism and national
and continental identities. Their claim separates the media of
architectural practice from its tools and strategies. As a result,
the terms of architectural historiography have also begun to
shift. How can the tools and strategies of architectural his-
toriography inform the analysis and implications of histories

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