Foundations of a modern discipline 37an individual conducting research and writing on the history
of architecture, many of those who from the end of the nine-
teenth century turned to study architectural history outside
the traditional terms discussed above cultivated an academic
detachment within a humanistic attitude. Whatever shared
character we can ascribe to this shift, it remains important
to recall that the academic turn to architectural history was
largely uncoordinated and polychronic.
A number of individuals born into the German Confedera-
tion and Switzerland in the 1850s and 1860s defi nitively
shaped architectural history as a modern discipline or fi eld.
The Saxon Cornelius Gurlitt, for instance, chaired the Bund
Deutscher Architekten and taught the history of art and of
construction at Dresden’s Technische Universität. He estab-
lished the systematic study of the hitherto overlooked archi-
tecture of the baroque seventeenth century.^50 Fellow German
August Schmarsow taught history of art in Breslau, Göttin-
gen and Berlin, and founded the Kunsthistorisches Institut in
Florenz in 1888. His work drew on eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century advances in the fi eld of aesthetics in relating
questions of space, perception and bodily experience to archi-
tecture.^51 Riegl taught art history at the Wiener Universität,
where his fellow art historian Franz Wickhoff had been
teaching since 1882. Both had studied under Mauritz Thaus-
ing and pursued his interest in Giovanni Morelli and his
‘scientifi c’, proto-psychoanalytic approach to connoisseur-
ship and attribution.
We opened with the words of Heinrich Wölffl in, whose
doctoral dissertation and books pursued the work of Gurlitt
and Schmarsow. His fi rst writing threw into relief a series of
conceptual questions concerning the way historical architec-
ture might be understood formally and psychologically.^52 A
little younger than these other individuals, his impact on
architectural historiography of the twentieth century was
more persistent, not least because of the later importance of
his students. Alongside Gurlitt, Schmarzow, Riegl, Wickhoff
and many more others than we can consider here, Wölffl in
ushered in a new approach to the study of art and
architecture.^53
As much as these few developments indicate a systematic
turn to considering architectural history academically, they