What is Architectural History?

Stephen Walker

1 What? (is architectural history)

What is architecture? What is the actual object of our investigation, of our project? How can
one define a building, define architecture, define the city?

Examples can easily demonstrate the impossibility of defining architecture decisively. While
this might be stating the obvious, when we are talking about architecture or a city we don't
have a common language. Each starting point, each viewpoint or perspective, each
discipline and profession seems to lead to a different portrayal of the ‘same’ thing.

Definitions also suggest not only something finite but something that can be planned or
shaped according to a given definition. And for architects, urban designers and planners
this is of course the very basis of their trade, - without a preconceived idea, call it definition,
of architecture or the city one cannot design it. But simultaneously, this definition has to be
reduced in its complexity in order to allow a translation into a designed proposition of a
future building or future city (or a new addition to an existing one).

John Evelyn

‘Evelyn asserted that the art of architecture was embodied in four kinds of person. First
was architectus ingenio, the superintending architect, a man of ideas, familiar with the
history of architecture, skilled in geometry and drawing techniques, and with a sufficient
knowledge of astronomy, law, medicine, optics and so on. [This is of course the
Vitruvian shopping list.] Secondly, the architectus sumptuarius, ‘with a full and
overflowing purse’—the patron. Thirdly, architectus manuarius, ‘in him I comprehend
the several artizans and workmen’. And fourthly, architectus verborum—in whom he
classed himself—the architect of words, skilled in the craft of language, and whose task
was to talk about the work and interpret it to others. Evelyn’s personification of the parts
of architecture expressed an important idea: that architecture consisted not just of one
or two of these activities, but of all four of them in concert.’ Forty, Words and Buildings,
p.11. citing Evelyn’s Account of Architects and Architecture, appended to Evelyn’s
English translation of Fréart de Chambray’s Parallel of the Antient [sic] Architecture with
the Modern. (Printed by Tho. Roycroft for John Place, London, 1664)

• narrow definitions of architecture that continue in circulation (education and practice)

• architecture tends to privilege certain understandings of physicality or morphologies
over others.

2 Who? (can tell architectural history)

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the
past.”—Party Slogan from Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1987, pp.30-31.

One can also observe how traditionally, the tools of both historical analysis and of design
have been similar, that is to say, the same techniques of epistemology and projection can
run without problem backwards and forwards.
Historical Time, Ordering, Tools, the Canon (not the Cannon, though that’s part of the
story). Such techniques are usually formal (including recognisable tools or approaches that
supports an approach that sees buildings, and their constituent parts, as static) They follow
architectural tendencies that favour abstraction: architectural style, building typology,
chronology, genealogy, genius, and more detailed stuff on the grid or axis, and so on.
They are further historically linear, chronological and historically delimited. Moreover, these
Standards imply that architectural history ends at a certain date; history is the past.
What histories are told, what left out?
They are reliant on traditional modes of architectural representation: the plan drawing,
aerial perspective, the finished (civic) building.
Intellectual disciplines, and even more so those that are developed alongside a professional
discipline, tend to aim for the authoritative position that delineates it from the those outside
this discipline, the non-expert, the amateur, the other. It establishes a position of power, the
power of defining what is important and what isn’t, what has value and what hasn’t, of what
our understanding of the world, and of buildings and cities for that matter, is supposed to
be.

They are driven from the singular to the general (so think about what doesn’t fit)
We accept that the Standards still provide valid approaches and are important for students
of architecture to know about, but these are almost common knowledge and are left for
students to pick up on their own. In contrast, our examination, our interpretation, is not
interested in the generic, the typical, the abstract, but in the specific. But how are actually
examined, how are they mediated? How is architectural History, are architectural Histories
produced?

3 The first history: Vitruvius

De architectura Ten Books on Architecture [c.15BC]

Not a history of architecture, Vitruvius not an architectural historian
The start of the architectural treatise.
The start of the brand, raising issues of authorship, authority, mediation, technology,
audience, distribution.

4 The Treatise: Alberti (1404–72), Serlio (1475–1554), Palladio (1508–80)

Throughout the 15th to 18th century the architectural treatise would remain the
principal theoretical medium for architects to make their architecture public. Christof
Thoenes argues in this respect that 'the social function of the treatise was that it
established a new level of communication between the architect, the client and the
general public.'1
The architectural treatise had two functions. Firstly, it had a projective function as it
could be read as instruction for an emerging architecture. Secondly, it had a
reflective function as it established a historical reference and lineage for this new
architecture. The wide distribution of architectural knowledge and propositions
through the treatise was further enhanced by the invention of a new production
technique – the printing press.

5 The Genius: Vasari (1511-74)

Considered the first art historian and often referred to as the “father of art history.”
Linked to the trajectory above (Alberti, Serlio, Palladio etc.) but added new impetus.
Vasari, Lives of the Artists, [1555] typifying the general Renaissance view of
Antiquity as a (cultural) high-point in the history of humanity, one that had to be
regained—here, Vasari’s project is more specific, seeing the recovery of these
cultural standards as only just beginning to occur, his intention was to provide
biographical examples of ‘great artists’ (there are 20 in total) in order to perpetuate
the ‘recovery’ of the lost heights and further prevent any such decay from
happening again.
When and How: Vasari, Florence, patronage under the autocratic Cosimo de Medici.

1
Christof Thoenes & Bernd Evers, Architectural Theory: from the Renaissance to the Present, Taschen (2003).
p12
The writing and historical ordering (3 parts) of biographies; promotes an understanding of
architectural and artistic history as the history of the individual genius. Clearly still evident in
the current canon.
Also, On Technique; [1550] artists and architects were now considered to be professionals;
Vasari’s other work set out rules governing the production of work:
For Vasari, disegno was the foundation or animating principle of all the fine arts; within his
theory, the physical aspect of the artistic operation becomes a transparent term, ideally an
unobstructed conduit between idea and receiving intellect.
The consequences of this are manifold; it separated the task of the artist from the
production of objects, perhaps most famously and decisively in architecture, where Vasari
argued that ‘…because its designs [disegno] are composed only of lines, which so far as
the architect is concerned, are nothing else than the beginning and the end of his art, …all
the rest… is merely the work of carvers and masons.’2

Prime examples of such constructed subjective histories would be the paintings Roma
Antica and its pendant Roma Moderna, painted in several editions between 1754 and 1759
by Giovanni Paolo Pannini.
Both paintings show two very similar yet distinguishable spaces of enormous dimensions
that are hung from bottom to ceiling with around sixty painted veduti of Roman ruins and
contemporary or even only projected buildings respectively.3 The paintings were originally
commissioned by the French ambassador to the Vatican, the Duc de Choiseul who can be
seen standing in the centre of these paintings with Pannini behind him. However, Pannini
reproduced the paintings and today exist still several versions of both Roma Antica and
Roma Moderna, each with the respective client replacing Choiseul.4
In relation to the construction of architectural histories one can assert that the collection and
reassembly of both antique and contemporary architectures into two dedicated imaginary
exhibition spaces, as represented in the two respective Pannini paintings, creates an
entirely new, selected, overview of Rome. Both paintings give thus a "curated image" of
Roman architecture in a comprehensive totality that would never exist outside the gallery
space. Pannini acts here as producer of a new perception and understanding of Rome's
architecture and its history. In effect he re-creates Rome's architecture and its history.

6 The Chronological Organisation of History Lenoir (1761–1839) Winkelmann

(1717–68)

Contrast to previous collections—Wundercabinet or cabinet of curiosities—where

interesting stuff was just thrown together.
Then consider Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des antiquités et monuments français in the
former Convent of the Petits Augustins in Paris founded as one of the second Revolutionary
museums in 1795. The Museum contained French sculpture and buildings parts from the
Middle Ages to the early 19th century and is often considered to be the first museum to be
organized in a strict chronological order5. Lenoir had amassed the museum's collection in
part on his own initiative, in part on order of the Revolutionary Commission des Arts. The
aim was to save some of the most important building parts and sculptures from the at times
controlled, sometimes anarchic destructions and demolitions of historic and ecclesiastical
monuments during the first years of the French Revolution. In 1795, the collection was
made up of four categories of artefacts: antiquities (found in France), Celtic antiquities,

2
Giorgio Vasari, On Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture,
Sculpture, and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, [1550,
second edition 1568, when §§74-5 were added], tr. Louisa S. Maclehose [1907] (New York: Dover Publications,
1960), §74, §75 Use of Design (or Drawing) [disegno] in the Various Arts, emphasis added.
3
The depicted individual paintings within these two paintings are indeed creations of Pannini or his
workshop that produced these paintings as, still exclusive, souvenirs for the European visitors of Rome.
4
Paintings exist now at the Louvre, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Boston; and National Gallery Scotland
5
The Villa Albani in Rome, already completed in 1760, which housed the antiquity collection of Cardinal
Allesandro Albani could also qualify for this position. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, one of the founders of
modern art history (as well as librarian to Albini before becoming the 'Prefetto delle Antichità' or Prefect of
Antiquities in Rome) was consultant for the collection and applied a specific historiographical order to its
content.
monuments of the Middle Ages, and monuments of the Renaissance. However, these
objects were, at first, not presented in such a historiographic order.

One the one hand, Lenoir tried to convey a visual, eclectic effect with this collection. Yet, on
the other hand, with the 'deliberate intervention', in which objects were ordered in their
relation rather than in their difference to one another, Lenoir aimed to prove that there was
a direct relation and lineage from the French Celtic culture to the Romans and back to the
contemporary French. As such, he followed a clear curatorial concept that was supported
by a specific ordering and display technique in which the curator created new knowledge
and new meaning.6

Lenoir's curatorial and hence creative achievement is to organize, for the first time, a public
art or architecture museum in a strictly chronological manner. The chronological display
was a new concept that had yet not been applied to other early museums or collections.
From the 19th century onwards it should become the overriding model not only for the
presentation of architecture but in the formation of the public museum in general. Bennett
argues that historicising 'principles of classification and display were alien to the eighteenth
century' and that, until then, 'architectural styles [were] displayed in order to demonstrate
their essential permanence rather than their change and development'.7

This new form of display also falls together with the discovery of 'historical time' and the
establishment of new disciplines including history, art history, archaeology, or ethnology
that were based on the concept and acknowledgement of historical time. In this sense,
Lenoir’s work was anticipated by Johann Winkelmann’s contribution to and influence over
the writing of art history. His (outspoken) writing replaced the prevailing, thematic treatment
of (particularly classical) art at the time, introducing instead a linear conception of art history
with named epochs or periods that stretched from classical times to the present.

It is here where the professional disciplines, architecture as well as history and museology,
assert their authority over the ‘grand narrative’, when the professional begins to dominate
the amateur in the quest for portraying the city, its architecture and the life within it. From
that moment one can witness the parallel development of a authoritatively defined history of
the city, one that is guarded by the initiated, the specifically educated, the professionally
accredited ‘narrator’ on the one hand, and the subjective interpretation of the city by those
outside these defining disciplines, professions, and their associated institutions. This is not
to say that these individuals are, at least way into the 20th century, not also the privileged
members of a society. These are still the personal histories of the upper classes as in the
case of the aristocratic travellers of the Grand Tour bringing ‘Rome back over the Alps’ as
an exhibition title once suggested.8

7 Total History Sir Banister Fletcher (1866–1953)

A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. London: Athlone Press, University of

London, 1896 and onwards
Tree of Architecture.
6
When the antiquities of the collections were removed from the Musée des monuments français and
exhibited in the Louvre, Lenoir's museographical concept broke down. Lenoir had to invent a new concept that
dealt with the 'problem' of having a museum that contained only French and mostly medieval material. Around
1800 this material was not considered to be 'high art' or 'architecture'. Although the material was considered
nationally relevant, Lenoir had to turn the artefacts into 'museum objects'. The way he did this was by arranging
the objects in a strict historiographic or chronological order and presented them in period rooms. Through this
contextualization he 'elevated' the medieval architectural artefacts and pieces of art into a realm in which their
presentation was justified. One has to remember here that classical Greek or Roman architecture, and those
styles that referred to it, had been used as collection and exhibition material since the 15th century. It served the
purpose to relate the then contemporary architecture – Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, and in particular
Neo-Classicism – to its predecessors. These artefacts were used as demonstration and reference material.
Medieval architecture, however, had, in 1795, not entered the canon of historical references for architecture or
indeed any other cultural field.
7
BENNET, Tony (1995) The Birth of the Museum – History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.p75
8
HELMBERGER, W. and KOCKEL, V. (1993) Rom über die Alpen tragen. Fürsten sammeln antike
Architektur: Die Aschaffenburger Korkmodelle. Landshut / Ergolding
Complete survey of architectural history, whole history, homogenising techniques.

Consider the contemporary claim for ultimate history: product of the confidence of the
Victorian Age, of the position of Britain in the World (Empire) and so on, and the relative
importance of certain histories over others.
“Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of conventional
history, and show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other, now that
all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution.”
—Lord Acton, Report to the Syndics of Cambridge University Press, 1896.

Histories are generally disciplinary specific and Eurocentric. ‘Global’ surveys of urban
history map directly onto the history of European colonisation: in Banister Fletcher,
Pevsner, and Summerson, for example, South-American, Persian and Indian histories
feature larger than East Asian or Chinese examples. The geographically non-European
were still accounted for or retold as the extended stories of European architecture. We
would also maintain that there is a close connection between the received ‘tools’ of
analysis, and the establishment and maintenance of the linear narrative and received
hierarchies of architectural history. However, these tools are not applicable to many other
pieces of ‘architecture’. Other techniques are needed to begin to account for these other
places, and these techniques can in turn broaden our awareness and understanding of
what Michel de Certeau calls the ‘opaque and stubborn places’ within Western cities that
make up the canon of Urban History9.

8 The History of the Present: Pevsner (1902–83) & Giedion (1888–1968)

“One should proceed by feeling one’s way; one should try out probable and partial
hypotheses, and be satisfied with provisional approximations so as always to leave the door
open to progressive correction.”
—George Sorrel, Matériaux d’une théorie du prolétariat, 1919.

Nikolaus Pevsner was the main importer of continental modernist ideas into Britain

Sigfried Giedion was the secretary of CIAM (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne)
Giedion Space, Time and Architecture: the growth of a new tradition, 1941
and Mechanization Takes Command: a contribution to anonymous history, 1948
Giedion writing history of his own time, a propaganda from within CIAM.

On Giedion as ‘the fashion police’, Mark Wigley writes: ‘Giedion… does not pretend that his
writing simply offers a commentary on an existing tendency, acknowledging, with his very
first lines, that he actively constructs that tendency as such because the historian inevitably
rearranges the past in the light of present conditions and “the backward look transforms its
object.”’ Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern
Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.  London: MIT Press, 1995, p.49, citing Giedion, Space,
Time and Architecture, p.5.

9 International History: Hitchcock (1903–87) & Johnson (1906–2005)

CIAM, The International Style etc.

Modern architecture was stripped of its original social / utopian dimensions on the occasion
of perhaps its first significant transatlantic crossing in 1932, where it was the subject of
Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s International Exhibition of Modern
architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and their simultaneous publication
The International Style. Modern Era defined by industrialization and social change, which
9
Michel de Certeau examines the ‘imbricated strata’ of Rome, where, ‘[…] opaque and stubborn places
remain. The revolutions of history, economic mutations, demographic mixtures lie in layers within it and remain
there hidden in customs, rites and spatial practices.’ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 200-1.
bring the needs to revolt against conventional architecture which, as they saw, was
unsuitable for the changing society (and which was actually taking place only in Europe and
the United States).

Their presentation defined three principles:

• architecture as volume;
• regularity; and
• the avoidance of applied decoration,
thus opening modern architecture to subjective formal manipulation.10
cleaning, simplifying, instrumentalising, ideologising

The conventional histories of modern architecture focus on only the works of European and
US American architects. As a result, modern architecture in the rest of the world is excluded
or, included only if it exhibits the same qualities set by the authority of the western historian.
Hence, the modern architecture in non-west context has been historically perceived as the
deviations of that from the west.

Consider also the founder of MOMA NY, Alfred Barr’s famous Diagram (1936) of the
genealogy of Modern Art. Pevsner and Giedion shared their background as art historians:
most of the first generation of modern architecture historians tends to conceptualize
architecture with a close relation to art.

10 The Beards! Banham (1922–88) & Tafuri (1935–94)

Tafuri’s 1967 book Teorie e storia dell'architettura (Theory and Histories of Architecture)
outlined, among other things, the deficiencies of architects as historians. It also predicted
the failure of modernism (cf. Walter Benjamin), outlining modern architecture's complicity
with capitalism. Tafuri led a celebrated dispute with Zevi and Portoghesi, particularly after
his appointment as professor of architecture at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura di
Venezia, Tolentini, Italy, in 1968. Tafuri accused them of viewing architecture with
"operational criticism", i.e., using their agendas as practicing architects to frame the history
of architecture. He instead suggested that architectural criticism and history be considered
the same thing, and that practicing architects abandon the prospect.

‘Each of his [Tafuri’s] works serves as a platform for questioning the methods of
architectural history, which, as he so emphatically states below, is not to be distinguished
from criticism. In Theories and History of Architecture, he identified a major problem of
“operative criticism,” endemic to architects who write about architecture. His suggestion to
counteract this tendency to impose contemporary standards on the past was to shift the
discourse away from the protagonists and individual monuments and consider architecture
as an institution.’— ‘There is no criticism, only history,’ an interview with Manfredo Tafuri
conducted in Italian by Richard Ingersoll and translated by him into English, in Design Book
Review, no. 9, spring 1986, pages 8–11. Here, taken from the intro.

Banham: European and US. The ordinary (objects), the everyday, new ways of seeing and
mediating (the car, the film).

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, BBC Documentary 1972

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlZ0NbC-YDo&feature=gv

10
Henry-Russell Hitchcock & Philip Johnson, The International Style: architecture since 1922, New York,
1932. see also Hitchcock’s The “International Style” Twenty Years After [1952] reprinted in the new edition of
The International Style in 1966, along with the Foreword, for a discussion of their original intentions of this term.
See also Henry-Russell Hitchcock architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Penguin Books, 1958,
1977, Ch.22, n.1, p.621, for a discussion of the difference between the terms International Style and the ‘vaguer’
modern architecture of the second generation.
Part II: Other Histories: Challenging the canon
11 The Canon

The control over (architectural) history goes hand in hand with architects’ self-belief that
they exert (near-total) control over the ‘objects’ (and subjects) of their design.
Rethinking the canon; what we accept as ‘history’ and how we ‘do history’. Not just a linear
chronology with history ‘in the past’.

‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of

barbarism.’ — Walter Benjamin, [1940] Theses on the Philosophy of History, Thesis
VII.

12 institutional(ised) history:

The role of the RIBA, for example: Think also of some of Manuel DeLanda’s considerations
directed at the discipline of Chemistry, regarding the canon, institutions, social status, and so
on. Royal Societies or Academies with an official reader/ secretary to control
correspondence. (see Assemblage Theory, p.90 etc.)
Scientific fields formed by a ‘domain of objective phenomena, a community of practitioners,
and the laboratory instruments and machines that allow the latter to interact with the
former.’ Assemblage Theory, p.88. To these three, DeLanda later adds a fourth (partly an
extension of the laboratory); namely organisations (such as the Royal Academies, from the
mid C18th), which set out ‘to promote scientific agendas in education, to gain legitimacy in
the eyes of the government and ecclesiastical officials, and to provide the required services
to keep the community bound together.’ p.90. Royal Societies also tended to have a
dedicated staff member whose role it was to read letters from other similar societies,
translate and respond to them, thus controlling the party line. Also, university / academic
departments, national conferences with published proceedings etc. Cf. Institute of British
Architects founded 1834, with Royal Charter added in 1837). There follows an interesting
discussion about the dynamics of cohesion that exists within the community of scientists; ‘in
these communities, reputations still matter, and ridicule and ostracism can still be used to
enforce community norms, but what really binds the community together is the set of
cognitive tools that govern the personal practices of its members: the concepts they use to
refer to the properties and dispositions of phenomena; the statements about phenomena they
believe to be true; the problems posed by phenomena;… and the classification schemes used
to order the domain.’ Assemblage Theory pp.88–9. DeLanda goes on to discuss the
‘consensus practices’ (p.89) that are characteristic of the community as a whole. These are
frequently invisible (or ‘tacit’) knowledge to those within the community as much as those
on the outside.

How close is architecture to these scientific societies or academies? Several commentators

have argued it is a ‘weak’ discipline.

13 PoCo

Consider research studies that use Post-colonial frameworks, largely drawn from the theory
of Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004). In Bhabha for
Architects, 2010, Felipe Hernández points out the inadequacy of conventional frameworks in
the history of modern architecture; namely, its inclusion of the modern architecture in non-
western countries only when they meet the west’s standard, and the exclusion of indigenous
buildings such as slums from the history of modern architecture as they are outside the
conventional principle of ‘good’ architecture. Using post-colonial frameworks, Hernández
claims, can help us to understand the architecture of reality, because the framework counts
every minor group in society, including migrants and homosexuals to name but two, and
therefore focuses on the architecture that responds to individuals not the whole society (Ibid,
20). Regarding outside influence that has long related to the study of modern architecture in
the non-western countries, Hernández employs the concept of “transculturation” coined by
the Cuban essayist, Fernando Ortiz, to explain the non-hierarchical relations between the
centre and the periphery – the so-called periphery that is independent but interacts with
others and by no means the hierarchically inferior to the centre (see Hernández, Millington,
and Borden, Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America 2005,
pp.xi –xviii).

PoCo is not only applicable for/in/to previously colonised countries around the globe, it also
reveals other histories within western metropolitan centres. ‘Postcolonial discourse is also
concerned with contemporary cultural relations, as well as with issues regarding cultural
representation and the construction of cultural identities in our increasingly globalised era.’
Felipe Hernández, Bhabha for Architects, Routledge, 2010, p.131.

14 Revisionist Histories

Consider the afterlives of projects mentioned earlier: Banister Fletcher, International Style
etc) Also consider Banister Fletcher’s ‘A History of Architecture’ as an on-going project,
being substantially revised and re-ordered. It’s a brand, with multiple authorship. The 18th
edition (we’re now up to the 20th) states on its fly-leaf:

‘Major changes in form and content have been made in the new (1975) edition. The
basic organisation of previous editions into two parts has been revised in the light of
new archaeological evidence which has left little case for a separation of the East
from that of the rest of the world, while the amalgamation of the ‘Comparative
Analysis’ and the ‘Architectural Character’ sections in each chapter has enabled the
contributors to provide a far broader conspectus of the world’s architecture. As a
result, wholly new chapters of the Far East (Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Tibet,
Burma, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia); of pre-Columbian Architecture…’ and
so on…[ have been added]

Similarly, in the 1967 edition of Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture: the growth of a
new tradition, he added examples of modern architecture from Brazil and Japan as
“regional” contribution to the Modern Movement with the proper adaptation to the climate
and the continuation of the local tradition respectively (Ibid, xxxviii - xxxix).

In addition to these ‘revisions’ to the existing books in the canon, other ‘revisions’ such as
Beatrice Colomina’s Privacy and Publicity, and Felicity D. Scott’s work on Ant Farm,
revise (or challenge) the canon by addressing various omissions.

15 Collaged histories

Andrew Benjamin (and others, such as Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin
and the Ecology of Design) on theoretical history: Spuybroek explicitly brings Ruskin out of
his historical context to see what relevance his thought continues to hold: ‘The Digital
Nature of the Gothic’ etc.

In his essay ‘Surface Effects,’ Benjamin explains how his work involves ‘theoretical
history’: ‘What occasions the introduction of theory is the presence of a space opened by a
relationship whose formal presence cannot be determined in advance.’ Andrew Benjamin,
‘Surface Effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos,’ in The Journal of Architecture, Volume 11,
No.1, 2006, p.2.

16 Collective Histories

Collectivist histories and practices, explicitly countering the ‘lone genius’ scholar/architect:
The New Architecture Movement (NAM) was founded in 1975 and arose out of a conference
organised by the more tightly knit Architect’s Revolutionary Council (ARC), and Matrix
Feminist Design Co-operative was set up in 1980 as an architectural practice and a book
group that grew out of the Feminist Design Collective, a group within NAM.
More recent examples of collectives writing history include The Aggregate Architectural
History Collaborative, Agency:
http://we-aggregate.org/
http://field-journal.org/

17 Other ways of writing (hi)stories

Katherine Schonfield, ‘Why Does Your Flat Leak?’ in Walls Have Feelings, (Routledge,
2000) or Katherine Schonfeld ‘The Use of Fiction to Reinterpret Architectural and Urban
Space’ in Borden & Rendell InterSections, 2000, pp.296.ff: Schonfield offers ‘fictions,
particularly in film and the novel, can be used in a number of ways to elucidate unseen
workings of architecture.’ p.296. This is an approach to doing history that collages and then
moves between various approaches or theoretical techniques. ‘By contrast [with official
history, with its vocabulary of specialist knowledge], the modern fictive voice starts from
the admission that its narrative is personal and one among many.’ p.302. Fiction may be
more appropriate and closer to the experience of living in the modern city.
‘The use of fiction within architectural theory assumes that the reader can, as when watching
a film, voluntarily suspend their own disbelief. Thus far-reaching structural connections can
be understood at one and the same time as fictional and, for the duration of the argument, be
accepted as absolutely true.’ Schonfeld p.303.

Sarah Wigglesworth, Around and About Stock Orchard Street is an interdisciplinary and
multi-vocal approach to writing the ‘history’ of a single project. Excessive histories (the
histories of the other, as disruptive to “normal” history). (In some ways back to architectus
verborum, Architecture continues after it has been designed and put together: occupation
and change.

18 History and You

‘History is not simply the repository of unchanging facts, but a process, a pattern of living
and changing attitudes and interpretations… History cannot be touched without changing
it… observation and what is observed form one complex situation—to observe something is
to act upon and alter it.’ Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, p.5
Bibliography

The Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative (http://we-aggregate.org/)

Andrew Ballantyne (ed.), Architectures: Modernism and After, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford,
2004
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, BBC Documentary 1972
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlZ0NbC-YDo&feature=gv)
Stuart Brand How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, 1994
Borden & Rendell, InterSections, Routledge 2000.
Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory, Edinburgh University Press, 2016
Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings, Thames & Hudson, 2000.
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Glossary of Terms

The (Architectural) Canon: those buildings, architects, competitions and texts that scholars and the
architectural profession (or its representatives) generally accept as the most important and influential
in shaping architectural culture. These projects and people were usually commissioned by the most
powerful elites in society.

chronology/ chronological: a method or arrangement that sets out past events in order of occurrence
(usually oldest first).

CIAM (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne): founded in 1928, it became the chief
instrument for disseminating Modernist ideas of architecture and town planning. It emphasized
functionalism and rational planning.

epistemology: study or theory of the nature and limits of experience, belief, and knowledge

genealogy: the descent of a person, family or group from an ancestor or older form

genius: a person (believed to be) endowed with extraordinary intellectual and/or creative powers

grand narrative: a totalizing, authoritarian, universalizing account of the history of the world written
(invisibly) from the point of view of a particular cultural/historical moment, such as Enlightenment
progress, British Victorian world Empire, or Modernist techno-cultural projects.

media (n), to mediate (v): to transmit something through an intermediary mechanism or agency,
particularly a book, journal, exhibition, radio, television, internet, webcast, tweet etc. This process is
not neutral: ‘the medium is the message’—Marshall McLuhan

MOMA NY: Museum of Modern Art, New York, founded in 1929

morphology / morphologies: the form or shape of a building, or the study of this.

profession/ professional disciplines: an occupation requiring specialized knowledge and training,

academic preparation, and usually a title protected by law (such as ‘Architect’) and by professional
societies.

Renaissance: (from the Italian word rinascimento, re-birth) used by C15th Italian (i.e. Renaissance)
writers to indicate the restoration and reintroduction of Ancient Roman standards and motifs, notably
the classical orders. Today, the term is used to group all (Italian, even European) art, architecture
and culture from around 1400 to 1700, though historians argue endlessly about the start and end
dates. In part, Renaissance is now used to describe a style, and also (confusingly) a period of
European history.

the Standards: (see the Canon): the standard and authoritative texts within the architectural canon.

tacit knowledge: knowledge or know-how that is implied or understood but not openly expressed.

treatise: A formal written work dealing formally and systematically &/or technically with a subject.

(building) typology: a way of classifying buildings according to general type (hospitals, housing,
museums and so on).

veduti: views (from Italian)

Wundercabinet or cabinet of curiosities: collection of objects gathered and curated because of their
curiosity value rather than a more ‘scientific’ typology or classification. Particularly popular between
the C16th and C18th.