Organizing the past 59thus speak to (for instance) the history of ecclesiastical archi-
tecture in Europe.
Published almost twenty years later, New Directions in
Swiss Architecture (1969) is a book of comparable scope and
intention. Its authors Jul Bachmann and Stanislaus von Moos
take a more ambivalent stance to Smith’s qualifi cation of
autochthonous character. Although the country can lay
claim to some clear identifi cations, namely ‘machines, choco-
late, cheese, and watches, and beyond its famous “neutral-
ity” ’, they ask ‘is there any value which could be defi ned
as specifi cally Swiss?’^34 The scope of Bachmann and von
Moos’s book is close to that of Smith’s. Both concern modern
architecture, but whereas the latter example seeks out
that work demonstrating a real affi nity with the place, the
former considers the function of the territory as a setting
for exchanges that work between Swissness and European
internationalism.
At the risk of spending too long on this one national
example, a third book, roughly contemporaneous with the
previous two, illustrates one further stance available to his-
torians concerned with the limits offered by geo-political
borders. Eberhard Hempel introduces his authoritative con-
tribution to Pevsner’s ‘Pelican History of Art’ series, Baroque
Art and Architecture in Central Europe (1965), with a series
of historical and conceptual observations.^35 These concern
economics, arts and letters, religion, the organization of arts
practices, and patronage and style, before undertaking studies
bordered on one side by territory and on the other by chro-
nology. Hempel divides his book chronologically, with his
history concerning (to cite his subtitles) Painting and Sculp-
ture: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and Architecture:
Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries.
Curiously, Hempel treats political territories as mobile
categories in relation to the broader subjects of the book
(architecture, painting and sculpture). Therefore, in the sec-
tions entitled ‘The Heroic Age, 1600– 39 ’ and ‘The Years of
Recovery after the Thirty Years War, 1640– 82 ’, territorial
cases fall under the heading ‘Architecture’ – Austria, Hungary,
Bohemia and Moravia, etc., and Switzerland also. The
two subsequent sections, entitled ‘The Baroque Period,
1683 – 1739 ’ and ‘Rococo and its End, 1740– 80 ’, take their