Organizing the past 67historically. As we have seen, this failure has allowed for
vibrant discussions and important conceptual differences that
have informed a broad and rich approach to the study of
architecture’s past. The fact remains, though, that where
some think that architectural history encompasses all build-
ing ascribed to human culture from all time, others treat it
as a European tradition of mere centuries’ depth.
In the last essay published before his death, Reyner Banham
considered how this problem gave rise to a historiographical
premise: that there is something particular to architecture of
which histories can be written. Or rather: one can write his-
tories of the things that architects do that others do not.^51
This latter distinction allows us to include proto-architects
in this defi nition of a pretext for architectural historiography,
which is to say, include those master-masons, sculptors or
proti who would not have had the present-day concept of
‘architect’ available to them through historical circumstances.
The question therefore becomes: what have architects done
over time, which now defi nes them historically as architects,
and their work as architecture, and of which histories can be
written? Histories of this kind see coherence in the way that
architects have put concepts into play over time, knowingly
or not. Such histories as these might regard this as the basis
of architecture’s disciplinarity, rendering productive the
anachronistic application of the terms ‘architecture’ and
‘architect’ to buildings that, and individuals who, were not
considered as such in their own time. It links the present to
the past, and allows the historian of architecture to tell a
story about architecture without the burdens of that term’s
more recent history as a concept and an institution.
Following the lead offered by Michel Foucault, we can
think of these architectural histories as histories of technique,
where technique is a product of discourse. Architectural
histories need not be Foucauldian in their approach or tenor
to take advantage of the historical divisions that his thinking
has allowed the last few decades of historiography: the
history of technique within architecture, and of architecture
as a technique.^52
Consider, as examples of this broadly constituted approach,
architectural histories of drawing, of tectonics, of construc-
tion, of designing for a world seen as if in pictures, of writing