40 What is Architectural History?
heritage. Giovannoni grappled with the issue of producing
architecture in a setting replete with reminders of the past’s
endurance, balancing client needs with the important task
of assessing and preserving buildings and monuments of
the past.
Whereas for Wölffl in and Scott the shift from Renaissance
to baroque styles was of key importance, Focillon saw paral-
lel themes in medieval cathedrals and the recurring ‘life’ of
artistic forms. The German art historian Wilhelm Worringer,
in his important volume Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1907)
likewise argued for super-geographical and super-chronolog-
ical phenomena that could be identifi ed according to critical
and architectural themes.^59 So too did Frankl, who married
questions of space and perception in medieval architecture
with the classical tradition that appeared in the early modern
period in Italy and elsewhere. Frankl, Worringer and Focillon
made important claims, each according to their own terms,
on medieval architecture that expanded the remit of critical
categories and historical patterns previously understood as
largely the domain of the classical tradition. Wölffl in’s other
famous disciple, Giedion, perceived the development across
history of what he saw as fundamental constants in architec-
ture, most notably ‘space’, which he regarded as predicated
in the architecture of the ancients and fulfi lled in the
work of modernist architects in the mid twentieth century.
Giedion’s work formed a mould for one of the most widely
resonating themes of twentieth-century architectural history.
In a variety of ways, and in a number of places, these
generations of scholars exposed architectural history to a
new kind of scrutiny, which continues to resonate with pres-
ent-day work in the fi eld.