Organizing the past 45must fi nd in what we study factors that are at once consistent
enough to be distinguishable and changeable enough to have
a “story” ’.^11 For the historian of art and architecture,
‘works... are the primary data; in them we must fi nd certain
characteristics that are more or less stable’. Style, he writes,
is a ‘distinguishable ensemble of such characteristics’.^12
Works of art, and works of architecture among them, are
rarely preserved for their intrinsic artistic merit. This means
that the facts and circumstances of a building’s conception
and realization are susceptible to loss over time. The inten-
tions, formation and even the identity of the artist, architect
or mason can be obscured, or disappear entirely. In these
circumstances especially, ‘style is an indispensable historical
tool; it is more essential to the history of art than to any
other historical discipline’.^13 Nevertheless, style is a structure
applied by historians to history rather than a logic extracted
from the past. The question the historian must ask,
Ackerman notes, is ‘what defi nition of style provides the most
useful structure for the history of art?’^14
When Heinrich Wölffl in, writing half a century earlier,
posed the possibility of conceiving of an ‘art history without
names’, he too proposed that one could understand architec-
ture’s history on the basis of its appearance and visual char-
acter and the changes to which they were subject over time.
Ackerman’s refl ections on style soften the sometimes-hard
formalism of Wölffl in’s approach, rendering style useful as
an analytical category without requiring adherence to a doc-
trine. For both historians of architecture the evidence for a
stylistic history would be the building itself. The stylistic
makeup would include decoration, details and the visual
organization of the building’s façade given by the architec-
tural order used in its columnation, or its form and massing.
How does a building balance stability and change within
history? Why do styles change over time? How can we know
one style from another? How can we name stylistic periods,
and understand how they rise and fall, when architecture as
a category of the arts is made up of individual works?
Wölffl in belonged to the fi rst generation of those who
sought to systematise historical knowledge of architecture
among the arts. In Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe he
lent analytical criteria to stylistic divisions based on a