66 What is Architectural History?
typological, yet in her article on McIntosh’s banks she uses
the tools of a typological division of architectural history,
and of the architect’s biography, to manage a subdivision of
the larger histories to which McIntosh’s case contributes.
To suggest, though, that a typological organization of
individual architectural histories is often commonsensical, as
in Webb’s book, is not to overlook more complex historio-
graphical manoeuvres that are likewise predicated on a typo-
logical identifi cation.
In Bouwen voor de Kunst? (2006), for instance, Wouter
Davidts addresses a sub-genre of the museum type, the
museum of contemporary art, while conducting a critique of
typological and critical categories.^49 Davidts’s book reverses
a simplistic typological reading while upholding the ‘natural’
frame suggested by his subject. He acts against the tendency
of architectural histories concerned with institutions to pay
too little attention to the extra-architectural forces that help
to shape the building. The art gallery is for him a building
and an institution, and the programme of one shapes that of
the other. Davidts’s study pays close attention to the work-
ings and imperatives of art institutions while offering a his-
torical account of the building types on which they rely.^50
This counters the tendency among architectural histories to
privilege the building above the institution – refl ected, of
course, in those institutional histories that regard architecture
and architectural decisions as incidental to the functions and
ambitions of the institution being housed.
Setting aside these observations concerning overtly typo-
logically organized architectural histories, the vast majority
of histories of architecture organized along typological lines
treat the functional division of one building type from another
much more pragmatically, where a type is a convenient way
to limit a historical study rather than constituting a fi xed and
defensible unit.
Technique
Earlier in this book we encountered a basic failure of archi-
tectural historians to agree on what architecture has been,