38 What is Architectural History?
hardly point to a consolidated germanophone approach to
the subject. Architectural history was, however, treated dif-
ferently from linguistic community to linguistic community,
and within German-speaking architectural historians there
could be found as much diversity as among francophone or
anglophone historians. There was no single moment in which
architectural history, as we might now understand it, went
‘on-line’. The emergence of the fi eld was more haphazard and
relied on the coincidence of diverse interests across a broad
range of geographies.
Outside of German-speaking Europe the magisterial
surveys of the British architects Joseph Gwilt (1784–1863),
James Fergusson (1808–86) and Banister Flight Fletcher
(1866–1953) tracked their Empire’s obsession for a critically
distant systematization of the world and, in their case, its
architecture.^54 History, for them, contained the proper (‘true’)
principles and models for Great Britain, its colonies and its
territories. In francophone Europe, France and Belgium drew
much from their respective yet interconnected archaeological
sciences and architectural heritages, and French architect
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) and archaeolo-
gist Louis Courajod (1841–96), and Belgian historian Antoine
Schayes (1808–56), worked towards understanding artistic
and architectural geographies within the broader project of
the restoration and conservation of medieval monuments –
and around the new problem of national identity to which
they were intimately connected.^55 In Italy, a sense of cultural
patrimony heightened by its enduring importance to other
European cultures drove the work of Italian art historian
Adolfo Venturi (1856–1941) and his founding nationalist
history of the country’s art, Storia dell’arte italiana (25
volumes, 1901–40). Across the Atlantic, nineteenth-century
American scholars like Benson Lossing (1813–91) and Louisa
Caroline Tuthill (1798–1879) were founding an American
cultural history and beginning the long process of looking
back on Europe with eyes conditioned by cultural proximity
and geographical remove.^56
These very few examples of individuals and groups attend-
ing in new ways to the history of architecture during the
nineteenth century stand for many more others than we can
consider here. Many of these were overtly concerned with