44 What is Architectural History?
history, will shed further light on the points raised through-
out this chapter.^5
Mark Roskill’s What is Art History? (1976) works through
a series of conceptual and methodological themes, sticking
close to the history of painting, but making a number of
points of interest to a discussion on methods of architectural
historiography.^6 The Research Guide to the History of
Western Art, by W. Eugene Kleinbauer and Thomas P.
Slavens (1982), makes many pertinent observations on style,
period and transition, as well as on interpretative frame-
works.^7 Again their subject is the history of art, but the
methodological issues and examples they raise often parallel
or overlap with those found in architectural history. Laurie
Schneider Adams’s well-organized survey The Methodologies
of Art includes discussion and examples of a range of media
and positions on art-historical method.^8 Likewise, Michael
Podro’s The Critical Historians of Art (1982) is an astute
biographically arranged study of perspectives and approaches.
His book also principally concerns art historians, but many
of these, as we have considered above, wrote on architecture
and also fall in the remit of our interests.^9 In his book Meth-
odisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis (1977), Otto Pächt
works across artistic media, including architecture, to offer
a personal but privileged insight into methodological prob-
lems shared by historians of art and architecture.^10
In this chapter we consider six approaches to the organiza-
tion of the past of architectural history: style and period,
biography, geography and culture, type, technique, and
theme and analogy. An architectural historian would not
tend to follow one of these modes exclusively. As such, these
headings are much less a methodological map of the fi eld of
architectural history than a limited survey of historiographi-
cal approaches, where one is often tempered through its
combination with others.
Style and period
In an essay called ‘Style’, fi rst published in 1962, James
Ackerman observed that ‘for history to be written at all we