32 What is Architectural History?
Between the general and the particular
Today, an architectural historian might research and write
on the habits of do-it-yourself renovators in the post-war
Australian suburbs, or issues of race in New York’s public
swimming pools. It would not seem necessary to justify why
these would fall within the ambit of architectural history, but
it would once have been unthinkable to have worked so far
beyond the canon.^34 The breadth that characterizes the pres-
ent-day limits of architecture and its history is but one impor-
tant legacy of the nineteenth-century cultural sciences.^35 Of
the four disciplinary traditions from which academic archi-
tectural history emerged as a twentieth-century fi eld, it owes
its most direct methodological debts to cultural history. The
materials, questions and signifi cance of architectural history
research have to one extent or another been informed by its
nineteenth-century developments in concert with the knowl-
edge architectural history has drawn from the other tradi-
tions introduced above.
In his 1867 architectural history Die Geschichte der
Renaissance in Italien, Jacob Burckhardt explained the rise
of the fi gure of the architect in terms of cultural mentality
and the embedded values of fourteenth- and fi fteenth-century
mercantile Italian culture.^36 Changes to the status of the
individual in Renaissance Italian society – and indeed to
society itself – fi rst allowed for the possibility of individual
artistic achievements. Thus culture offered a new scale of
analysis, subsuming the individual. Burckhardt did not
undermine the trope employed by Vasari except to explain
the artist in cultural terms. As far as cultural history included
the history of art and architecture, it tempered the life and
work of the artist as an analytical category, recognizing that,
since the sixteenth century, the fi gure of the artist, as a subject
of biography and historiography, had been over-determined
by ancient measures and patterns. So too Burckhardt explains
the fourteenth-century shift away from theocratic and feudal
social structures and their concomitant expression in archi-
tecture: ‘In the independent cities municipal pride was, above
all, to fi nd satisfaction in an imposing cathedral and in out-
doing the neighbouring cities. Simple devotion, subject to ups
and downs, gave way to state decisions and taxes.’^37 The idea