36 What is Architectural History?
this analysis was, in these instances, the Kunstwollen (will to
make art), rather than the artworks themselves. By under-
standing how architecture might embody artistic, cultural
and psychological phenomena, he set out to understand how
changes to architecture over time refl ect changes within the
deepest strata of culture.
The analytical strategies and conceptual devices of ‘classic’
cultural history gave rise in the early twentieth century to a
range of historiographical approaches to writing on architec-
ture that combined empirical study, philology and intellec-
tual adventurousness. These new approaches served to
expand architectural history as a fi eld of study even as
they opened specifi c methods and motivations to sharper
criticism.^49
A modern discipline?
The widespread emergence by the middle of the twentieth
century of architectural history as a distinct fi eld of study
refl ected many decades of institutional and intellectual con-
solidation. As an academic fi eld, architectural history relied
upon the emergence of architecture as a subject of historical,
scientifi c study in the mode of the cultural sciences, informed
by architecture’s technical specifi cities and the professional
nature of the audience for the books, articles and lectures of
architectural historians. Early architectural histories regu-
larly combined the different objectives of, say, biographical
knowledge of architects, direct study of their works, and an
appreciation of their signifi cance, for both other architects
and problems only indirectly connected to architecture. The
term ‘architectural historian’ is almost universally anachro-
nistic when applied to fi gures working before the mid twen-
tieth century, and even after the Second World War it often
ascribes a strong sense of disciplinarity to a way of working
better understood as a form of specialization within a parent
discipline: in architecture for an art historian; in history for
an architect. The roll call for those who position themselves
fi rst as architectural historians is rather short, and we should
bear this in mind. Whatever the precise disciplinary status of