54 What is Architectural History?
historical treatment of biographical subjects will be informed
by the historiographical trends of the time in which the
work is written as it seeks to present what is known and can
be known (and is relevant to know) of the individual
concerned. Many major fi gures of the architectural canon
furthermore index broader historical developments in archi-
tecture: Brunelleschi for the Renaissance, Borromini for the
baroque, Thomas Jefferson for the Enlightenment, Le Cor-
busier for modernism, and so forth. To invoke one or other
of these names is to recall the entire baggage of this associa-
tion and the historical discourse that has already accrued
around it.
Architectural history organized along biographical (and
occasionally autobiographical) lines most commonly includes
monographs, as well as the œuvre complète, which present
a known body of an architect’s work and establish frame-
works for its analysis. This is a favourite curatorial mode of
the museum, because the facts of a person’s life can often be
made to lend neat divisions for the interpretation of the sub-
ject’s work. These might include major life events, travel and
migration, realization (or not) of signifi cant works, and so
forth. Even if those divisions can be called to account by an
exhibition’s critics, a knowing reviewer or other literature in
the fi eld, they regularly establish a basic chronology and
organizing structure.
A biographical organization of architecture’s history relies
on a concept of architecture as an authored work, and of the
architect as an artist or craftsman – an active agent in the
work. This idea is relatively recent, enjoying continuity only
since the Renaissance. Even when architectural history makes
a claim on the city, it is feasible to name ‘authors’ against
whom one can measure the unfolding of an intentioned plan,
such as Albert Speer for the Third Reich’s Berlin, Robert
Moses for modern New York, Ernst May for Das Neue
Frankfurt, and – citing more obvious examples that evidence
a heavier individual hand – Walter Burley and Marilyn
Mahoney Griffi n for Canberra, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jean-
neret for Chandigarh, and Lucio Costa for Brasilia. In these
instances, the plan can be understood to have the autonomy
of an architectural work in order that it can be considered
in light of the architect’s œuvre.