72 What is Architectural History?
architecture analogous to technology and information
systems, to politics, to society, to medicine and so on? Which
of the architectural historian’s tools and techniques might
usefully contribute to the study of those other fi elds?
Architectural histories organized along these lines align
with the writing genre of late-twentieth-century architectural
culture usually called architectural theory. Among thematic
histories we would count those that identify architecture’s
role in extra-architectural historical and theoretical themes,
or the coincidence of architectural interests and develop-
ments with those beyond architecture. They are often recog-
nizable by the pairing of the term ‘architecture’ with an
external corollary: domesticity, language, the body, politics,
religion, society, science, utopia, dystopia, hygiene, technol-
ogy, advertising, consumption, memory, literature, fi lm and
so forth. The list is long, fl exible and comprises a substantial
bibliography that has dominated architectural publishing in
recent decades. These histories treat the intersections and
analogies to be found with and in the architectural subject.
For histories conceived with these objectives in view, archi-
tecture becomes both evidence of the world of phenomena
exceeding architecture itself and a player in that world.
This category might seem like a catch-all for those histo-
ries not easily associated with the preceding classifi cations
and indeed it is the most diffi cult to isolate, since it opens
out into a large number of disciplines beyond architecture
and architectural history. Although there are indeed plentiful
examples of thematic architectural histories, especially since
the 1980s, they allow for an important conceptual distinc-
tion. If the longue durée history of architecture evidences a
‘technical’ or disciplinary consciousness, then thematic and
analogous histories of architecture demonstrate an interdis-
ciplinary consciousness whereby one understands where
architecture sits in relation to its various physical and con-
ceptual settings. Whereas technique concerns the core, theme
and analogy pertain to the edges, and thus to the borders
between architecture and other things.
An infl uential early example of such a thematized, theo-
retical architectural history is Tafuri’s Progetto e utopia
(1973), which historicized and politicized the interaction
of architecture and ideology after the Enlightenment.^60 In