Evidence 83behaviour, trade and exchange, political and religious events,
or as a knowledge system, or an analogy or interlocutor for
parallel historical problems. Such extensions as these further-
more revisit the place of certain forms of evidence and their
status for the architectural historian’s traditional questions
and problems, thereby forcing these questions and the mate-
rials to which they were addressed to adapt to and accom-
modate new perspectives and agendas within architectural
historiography.
A broader, more generous and more contemporary
defi nition of architectural history’s scope would include a
correspondingly wider defi nition of evidence. Architectural
histories of recent decades draw from a range of media and
sources and take an open view of the status of both. This
shift away from a more constrained view of ‘proper’ evidence
has learned from a number of broader historiographical
developments of the twentieth century, which (especially
from the end of the 1960s) aided the broad reformulation of
architecture as a practice, culture and discourse. An architec-
tural history might now, for example, take architecture’s
representation in photography as its subject. A collection of
colour slides or touristic postcards could pose its own ques-
tions within the disciplinary ambit of architectural history.
They would not necessarily comprise evidence towards
another kind of history more overtly concerned with build-
ings, although they could do this too. Contemporary histori-
cal research into the cultural, sociological and intellectual
dimensions of architectural culture no longer take the study
of architecture as such (buildings, city centres, monuments)
as their sole end.
These observations are not meant to suggest that the tra-
ditional tasks of a modern, academic architectural history are
complete. Nor do they imply that the kinds of evidence to
which historians of architecture have turned throughout the
last century no longer serve any function for contemporary
architectural historiography. Questions about the conception
and construction of buildings, and about the people who
design them, continue to dominate the fi eld, even if they have
made room for other means of approaching architecture
historically. Historians once asked their questions of the
canon’s artful buildings alone. Over the course of the