Foundations of a modern discipline 35department of art and the architect a kind of artist. Both, in
turn, could be understood culturally using the forms of philo-
logical and physical evidence then available. For cultural
historians, architecture furthermore traced progress at a scale
exceeding the life and works of any individual, and it indexed
developments that were extrinsic to the history of architec-
tural ideas as documented in architectural treatises. Architec-
tural history offered a tangible trace of Zivilisation.^45
Burckhardt’s work offered a distinction, for instance,
between historical source and treatise that underpins the
disciplinary detachment necessary for writing architectural
history outside the new needs of the nascent architectural
profession. He wrote: ‘[the source] presents the fact pure, so
that we must see what conclusions are drawn from it, while
the treatise anticipates that labour and presents the fact
digested’.^46 When his student Wölffl in later set about to
write a history of visuality and visual experience, he could
read buildings as ‘sources’ in their own rights. His idea
of a ‘Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen’ rested heavily on
Burckhardt’s project of reading artefacts at the level of
culture. In drawing an analogy between building and costume,
Wölffl in asserted that ‘the general human condition sets the
standard for architecture... [A]ny architectural style refl ects
the attitude and the movement of people in the period con-
cerned’.^47 The widely adopted and adapted views on archi-
tectural history held by Wölffl in’s own students, including
Paul Frankl and Sigfried Giedion, in part derive from this
understanding of history. Their investment in a spirit of the
modernist age, the Zeitgeist, is a case in point.
Taken together, the work of these three generations of
scholars – from Burckhardt, to Wölffl in, to Frankl and
Giedion, as one disciplinary line – grapples with the twin
problems of writing architecture into cultural history and
writing on architecture in the broader mode of cultural
history. Exemplary of this conundrum is the work of Alois
Riegl. Among the freedoms Burckhardt had secured was the
study of marginal art history (minor works, craft, late style),
and Riegl exercised this to profound effect. In his books
Stilfragen (1893) and Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901)
Riegl explored the impulse to make art by studying the ‘low’
artistic categories of ornament and decoration.^48 His ‘unit’ of