48 What is Architectural History?
century thinking in the natural sciences. It relies on a capacity
for a rigorous taxonomy that most historians of architecture
can no longer countenance, but which was an important
aspect of stylistic architectural historiography in the fi rst part
of the twentieth century. This followed the nineteenth-cen-
tury examples, especially, of Fergusson and Fletcher, and was
manifest, for instance, in the global survey (from antiquity
to the middle ages) of François Benoit.^20
It is not enough to understand that with stylistic labels
come fi xed rules pertaining to proportion, decoration, colour
or any other factor governing a building’s appearance.
Whereas many have soundly rejected the notion of a stylistic
system for the history of architecture, it has often been
replaced awkwardly by chronological groupings that serve as
stylistic epithets in disguise. Other debates have circled
around the propriety of using stylistic and periodic terms that
were later applied to historical phenomena as unifying devices
(Romanesque, gothic, rococo) alongside stylistic labels under
which architects grouped themselves contemporaneously
(International Style, postmodernism, deconstructivism).
Where one lends order to chaos, to again recall Ackerman’s
phrase, the other manipulates the techniques of historians to
historicize architecture as it is being made, and in these
examples facilitate its entrance to the museum. This latter
approach sets out tenets against which individual examples
can be tested, and within which subsidiary groupings will
appear. Dutch International Style can be distinguished from
North American by the expert, as can that of California from
that of New England. Progressive historians and theoreti-
cians of architecture might treat postmodern historicism as
conservative while ascribing to formal postmodernism and
the neo-avant-garde the progressive tones of modernism.^21
These examples are deliberately blunt and can be easily
contradicted so as to expose the inevitable fallacies faced by
schemes that set out to organize the history of architecture
according to appearance. Any stylistic or periodic organiza-
tion of past buildings and monuments will introduce the
problems of reconciling the individual example with a nor-
mative rule against which very few cases can be measured
without compromising either the single building or the norm
against which it is measured. Where a label offers a useful