84 What is Architectural History?
twentieth century the fi eld opened up to include drawings
and such other documents as Burckhardt described as appro-
priate for the (nineteenth-century) study of culture. This evi-
dences an increasingly generous approach to the rapport
between historical problems concerning architecture and
their attendant fi elds of evidence.
Categories of evidence
As an account of the past of architecture, architectural history
inevitably advances or reinforces a historical defi nition of
architecture along with the historical preconditions of the
term’s contemporary limitations. What does present-day
knowledge of architecture allow us to call ‘architecture’ his-
torically? And what did people of the past call (what we now
call) architecture? In this light, the material narrated by archi-
tectural histories serves as a form of authority against which
can be measured the answer to the fi rst of these questions.
The means by which that material is narrated tracks a form
of enquiry into the second. The questions ‘What is architec-
ture?’ and ‘What was architecture?’ therefore serve the archi-
tectural historian to different ends. Since the historian asks
these questions through the analysis and appraisal of his or
her materials, the same may be said of these, too. The relation
of history to evidence, for instance, is one specifi cally con-
cerning ‘how’ and ‘when’ a building came to be, along with
the attendant issues of ‘what’ (the nature of the artefact and
its signifi cance), ‘why’ (the reasons for this nature, the inten-
tions of the author, the preconditions governing appearance
and technical issues) and ‘who’ (concerning the artefact’s
origins both as an authored work and as a work realized
under specifi c social, cultural, political, economic or religious
conditions). With some limitations, such questions as these
serve as well in their abstraction for prefabricated housing in
Sub-Saharan Africa as for English stately homes. But the
‘what’ of architectural history turns quickly to architecture’s
defi nition in terms of traditions, aesthetic criteria and theo-
retical content. Debates around the issue notwithstanding,
what could be called architecture by critical consensus in
1920 had changed substantially by 1960 and dramatically by