Organizing the past 43of style and stylistic transformation were fundamental to the
disciplinary toolkit and cultural ambitions of architectural
historians working at the end of the nineteenth century and
thus steered, at least initially, the nascent academic fi eld of
architectural history.
Approach
The following pages consider a number of ways in which
architectural historians have, from the later decades of the
nineteenth century, addressed the task of writing about the
past. We might think of this as an issue of method. Where
methodological differences between one historian and another
can seem marked in early cases, however, they tend to be
more ameliorated in recent histories of architecture, to the
extent that it is often unproductive to apply a methodological
schema to the fi eld of architectural history, or to understand
the work of an architectural historian purely on method-
ological grounds. We might speak instead of methodological
biases or allegiances, but these will rarely be doctrinaire.
The softer term ‘approach’ is therefore useful for attending
to the various ways in which historians of architecture address
the question of architectural history’s ‘unit’, while acknowl-
edging that an individual will often use combinations of
frame, material and method that best suit the subject of a
historical study. The term ‘unit’ here refers to the way the
historian divides into workable portions the ‘total history’ of
architecture – the hypothetical but obviously impossible com-
plete past of everything that has happened everywhere at all
times as it can be understood from all perspectives. The ques-
tion of the historian’s approach can also help us to appreciate
how he or she deals with the management of architectural
history’s apparent demand for infi nite relativism, whereby all
knowledge depends on the point of view from which it is
generated and represented.
Aside from numerous anthologies that set out to group
essays and extracts from books into methodological or
theoretical categories, a number of monographic studies,
mainly concerning art history rather than architectural