50 What is Architectural History?
of the last two centuries. To what extent is the building at
hand exemplary of Federation Style or of Georgian or of
Neo-classical or of Modernism? Note the capital letters,
denoting hard defi nitions of these styles. For the architectural
historian giving evidence, this kind of assessment would seem
outdated, but it has strong traction outside of the academic
study of architectural history and remains a useful tool in the
classifi cation and protection of architectural heritage on for-
malist or aesthetic grounds.^23
The formalist and taxonomic approaches to style that
marked the work of architectural historians in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries have had a more productive
afterlife than the staid identifi cation of styles and periods, in
many cases opening the work of architecture and its history
to questions of philosophy and the deeper structures of
culture. They have also allowed historians of architecture to
pursue the relation of architecture to the visual arts (princi-
pally painting and sculpture) on chronological grounds other
than biography, which we shall consider next. This connects
artistic production to time and raises the loaded question of
the degree to which time lends the architect the constraints
of their practice. Do technology, religion, social mores, taste,
economics and other external factors shape architecture’s
appearance and inform its capacity to change, or does archi-
tecture govern its own formal laws according to its own body
of theory? This question remains open to debate.
Those architectural historians who accepted Arnold
Hauser’s invitation (1959) to write a ‘Kunstgeschichte ohne
Namen’ based on the measure of society rather than style
accepted that architecture’s appearance could be informed by
factors completely external to the artistic workings of archi-
tecture and its traditions.^24 The classicism of the Renaissance
manifests the new economic, religious and political condi-
tions of the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries on the Italian
peninsula. To take Renaissance architecture as a unit of
analysis is not, therefore, to accept the stylistic unity of this
architecture as a purely architectural phenomenon. From this
point of view, it is rather to regard this architecture as evi-
dence of historical forces unifi ed by factors that remain rela-
tively constant across the period marked by the emergence
of a market economy from a feudal society, until to the Sack