What is Architectural History

Foundations of a modern discipline 25

and skills of an individual.^20 Despite its enduring relevance
to historical analysis and assessment, the technique of under-
standing artistic infl uence, geographical difference, and the
tools and tricks of attribution owes much to categories fi rst
systematically articulated by Vasari in the sixteenth century.
Shaped by formation and circumstance, the architect is mea-
sured to varying degrees against both the trope and persona
of the artist.^21

Architecture and empirical knowledge

Architectural history and empiricism

Alongside the historical accounts of architecture found in the
treatises by Vitruvius and Alberti, and alongside the artists’
lives immortalized by Vasari and those following in his foot-
steps, the centuries-long process of documenting the pre-
modern architectural remains of ancient and medieval culture
offers yet another approach to the problem of knowing
architecture historically. Modern architectural historians
borrowed from this tradition too. The rise of the empirical
sciences from the eighteenth century onwards had wide-
spread repercussions for the way that buildings, sites and
monumental sculptures could be known in their own terms,
as artefacts. For an archaeologist to document a building or
for an architect borrowing the archaeologist’s tools of mea-
surement, documentation, analysis and extrapolation, it was
not important either to know the identity of the building’s
architect or builders, or to determine whether or not the
building or site qualifi ed as architecture. Archaeology took
architecture as a subject of disinterested study based on what
could be seen, measured and deduced from the available
evidence.
Those who invested in the documentation of ancient build-
ings and cities were not without motives, be they agents in
the expansion of imperial territories or promoters of a higher
culture whose model lay somewhere under Egyptian sands
or Roman clay. That the tools of their analysis were intended
to act against those motives suggests an analogy with the rise