60 What is Architectural History?
headings from these territories, which are then further divided
up to three times: into ‘Architecture’, ‘Sculpture’ and ‘Paint-
ing’. Some miss a category. Prussia is considered for its con-
tribution to the baroque period, while Silesia’s rococo arts
rate merely a passing mention.
Switzerland participates in broader artistic and historical
phenomena shared by Austria, Hungary and Poland, for
instance, but lends to these broad developments grouped
under the broader geography of Central Europe a cultural,
historical, geographical and technical specifi city that must
(for Hempel) be balanced out with the general history of this
period.
The depth of histories framed on geo-political grounds is
also determined by the histories of the borders themselves.
Hempel’s history of Central European baroque reconciles
contemporary (for 1965) nations with former territories. The
former state of Czechoslovakia, therefore, appears among his
subheadings, but so do Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, which
formed part of that state from 1918 to 1993, and part of the
Czech Republic to the present. Looking farther south, an
architectural history of Austria, for instance, might expand
and contract its geographical remit along lines determined by
the infl uence of Vienna, from duchy to Empire to Republic.
Such a history of Austrian architecture would, therefore,
intersect with the architectural histories of Poland and
Turkey, which are themselves subject to the same problem
of territorial fl uidity over time. For Austria, but also Poland,
Germany, the Czech Republic and other contemporary states,
the added complexities introduced by migration in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as by the mid-twen-
tieth-century diaspora of Jewish architects, would allow
some historiographical frameworks to claim buildings in the
United States, South Africa and Australia as ‘Austrian’ (to
keep to this example), or more specifi cally as ‘Viennese’, or
at least bound to an Austrian or Viennese architectural
patrimony.
What do the methodological divisions in architectural
history of biography and geo-politics have in common? For
one thing, they share the need to negotiate the balance of the
general with the particular: how far can we read an indi-
vidual architect’s work as an index of his or her generation?