Foundations of a modern discipline 39describing and understanding the historical architecture and
monuments of new or reinvigorated nation-states, kingdoms
or empires in light of a project of cultural advancement tied
to what Burckhardt and Michelet had called the ‘Renais-
sance’ or its ‘natural’ Romantic counter-example, bound to
the architecture of the middle ages. That moments of ‘crisis’
and ‘decline’ would offer compelling subjects for some of
these historians suggests that those who celebrated the rise
of advanced cultures in the past also understood their
impermanence.
Many of the tenets of an art history of architecture, and
of an architectural history written by and for the architecture
profession, were teased out over the course of the nineteenth
century. It remained for a generation of scholars and archi-
tects born in and around the 1880s, whose intellectual forma-
tion almost uniformly precedes the outbreak of the First
World War, to fi rmly establish the conditions, tools and
objectives of architectural historiography as we recognize it
today. This work together comprises the modern architec-
tural history that Wölffl in and his generation helped to set
in train.
A close encounter with the English scholars Geoffrey Scott
and Martin Briggs from around the First World War onwards
makes clear the debts these owe to Wölffl in and Gurlitt, as
well as the important function performed by both in dissemi-
nating and popularizing their perspectives on architecture’s
history to a widely dispersed anglophone readership. In a
similar manner, the French art historian Henri Focillon
(1881–1943, later an infl uential professor at Yale University)
developed a long-standing engagement with the German-
language discussions on space, perception and change.^57
Louis Hautecœur likewise confronted questions of periodiza-
tion, style and the systematization of cultural artefacts.
Hautecœur’s (originally) seven-volume Histoire de
l’architecture classique en France (1948–57) echoes Venturi’s
Italian project of decades earlier while offering its own
important advances.^58 Venturi’s former student Gustavo
Giovannoni (1873–1947), an architect and art historian,
mobilized his historical knowledge to practical ends by
addressing the close relationship of architectural form to
urban form in respect of Italy’s proliferation of monumental