80 What is Architectural History?
course of the project, from conception to completion, and
suggest reasons for those changes. We can propose the
meaning a subject of historical study once projected or
accrued, and how that might have changed or remained
consistent over time. Depending on the qualifi cations we use,
we can ask the evidence to help us to decide whether or not
any particular work forms part of the history of architecture.
Is it canonical? Or peripheral? Taking another angle, do
certain kinds of evidence pose problems for the historian’s
approach, tools, analysis, argument or conclusions? For all
of these questions, evidence maintains a crucial role in medi-
ating the relationship between historical problems and their
analysis. The way that evidence is understood by the archi-
tectural historian doubtless informs the way that his or her
work is conceived, researched, documented and presented.
‘Work’ here means both the subject of study and the medium
of the architectural history. As discussion around the recently
launched multi-media edition of the JSAH recognizes, some
forms of evidence and modes of analysis demand a different
approach to publication from that which books and other
traditional print-media can sustain.^3 Any position, implicit
or explicit, on an item of historical evidence will shape how
research is resolved as history and therefore will inform the
process by which a fragmented and disarticulated knowledge
of the past becomes historical narrative.
Just knowing that something happened is rarely signifi cant
in its own terms, or perhaps goes only so far as to fi ll out a
little more of the infi nite breadth and depth of what Fernand
Braudel called ‘total’ history.^4 In architecture, the survival
from a distant past of a building, monument or the confi gura-
tion of an urban zone is proof enough of that artefact’s
having been made, from which we can draw certain assump-
tions, the facts of which we might be able to recover and test:
somebody commissioned and paid for it, somebody coordi-
nated its construction, somebody took decisions on how it
would look and from what it would be made, somebody
inhabited it or the space around it. The extent to which we
can deduce the particulars of a building’s past from the build-
ing itself is limited by the kinds of documents and traces that
point to answers to those issues, as well as by their reliability,
which will be subject to any number of measures.