Organizing the past 75None of these books’ editors or authors would uncondi-
tionally position these as volumes of architectural history,
especially given their shared mission to open up knowledge
of the canon with the tools developed by post-structuralist
and postcolonial theory imported into the historiography of
architecture and theorization of historical architectural works
and themes. As a result, these works and themes defi nitively
extend their historical subjects by the use of new critical and
theoretical perspectives, all the while cutting through the
chronological divisions established and maintained in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Architectural histories
that take their subjects as participants in a broader, extra-
architectural theme, or that offer analogies with other histori-
cal phenomena, can extend the canon by reinstalling fi gures
and works overlooked and then forgotten by previous critics
and historians of architecture. They often do this by address-
ing an existing canon with new analytical tools that render
an established historical subject even more complex, thereby
valorizing its importance while questioning the mechanisms
of the canon itself.
Doubtless there are further approaches to the problem of
organizing the past of architecture into historical units to
which I could devote space here. Some of the choices avail-
able to contemporary historians of architecture have endur-
ance on their side; others are relatively new, bound to the
increasingly relativist and contextualist tendencies of all
kinds of historiography during the latter part of the twentieth
century. As strong strategies, they are all subject to intellec-
tual fashion. As softer frameworks or approaches to the
writing of architectural history, tempered one by another, or
by others, they describe a good number of the organizational
devices used by historians to convert the vast, heterogeneous
past of architecture into coherent histories. Where this
chapter has considered the terms on which historians can
enact this translation, the next will turn to the stuff of that
past. What of the past survives to the present as the material
of architectural history? We are speaking now of the content
of architectural history, and inevitably, therefore, of its rela-
tion to evidence.