Organizing the past 69Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New
Zealand (SAHANZ), Macarthur and Moulis observe one of
the complications of relating the history of the architectural
plan to the history of architecture: ‘The plan has been an
integral, general tool for architecture across diverging socio-
historical circumstances, in which the concept of architecture
has also varied greatly. It is diffi cult, then, to imagine a
history of the plan that is premised on a solid concept of
architecture.’^56 Even to limit the history of architecture to a
Western tradition, the qualifi cations, skills, knowledge, tasks
and status of the fi gure of the architect have all changed
dramatically over the centuries. Beyond a loose defi nition of
‘architecture’ as ‘the art or science of building’, there is no
unifi ed defi nition of the term that has survived changes in
society, technology or institutions. Macarthur and Moulis
thus ask, ‘what bases are there of a longitudinal history of
architecture?’^57
The plan offers an example of the kind of historical subject
that might operate across other forms of historical change.
It can be understood literally and conceptually. It can be
found in drawings and diagrams as well as in buildings them-
selves. From a drawn plan the historian can extrapolate a
ground plan of a building, either as a reality subject to scale
or as a fi gure reacting to the experience of a building by its
inhabitants. (The classic historical problem of this kind is to
understand the building represented by Piranesi’s complex,
multi-level plan of the fi ctional Ampio Magnifi co Collegio of
1750.^58 ) Conversely, from an extant building the historian
can diagrammatize the building at scale or in abstraction.
Colin Rowe’s famous historical comparisons of Renaissance
and modern buildings in his essay ‘The Mathematics of the
Ideal Villa’ are exemplary of this possibility.^59
Historical knowledge of the plan operates between these
two approaches. Planning forms a ‘technique’ of architecture
that, while independent of the various contexts that shape
any given plan (drawn or derived), can nonetheless learn
from those historical contexts while overcoming the specifi ci-
ties of any building to understand how architecture has
been sustained historically and historiographically. The plan
therefore presents architectural history with the problem
of whether this fi eld of study is a branch of history or an