What is Architectural History? / Edition 1

by Andrew Leach

Overview

What is Architectural History? considers the questions and problems posed by architectural historians since the rise of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. How do historians of architecture organise past time and relate it to the present? How does historical evidence translate into historical narrative? Should architectural history be useful for practicing architects? If so, how? Leach treats the disciplinarity of architectural history as an open question, moving between three key approaches to historical knowledge of architecture: within art history, as an historical specialisation and, most prominently, within architecture. He suggests that the confusions around this question have been productive, ensuring a rich variety of approaches to the project of exploring architecture historically.

Read alongside introductory surveys of western and global architectural history, this book will open up questions of perspective, frame, and intent for students of architecture, art history, and history. Graduate students and established architectural historians will find much in this book to fuel discussions over the current state of the field in which they work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745644578
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	07/13/2010
Series:	What is History?
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	5.52(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Andrew Leach is an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Griffith University

Table of Contents

List of illustrations vii

Acknowledgements x

How to use this book xii

Introduction 1

1 Foundations of a modern discipline 9

Architectural history as the architect's patrimony 13

The architect as artist 19

Architecture and empirical knowledge 25

Architecture and culture 31

A Modern discipline? 36

2 Organizing the past 41

Approach 43

Style and period 44

Biography 52

Geography and culture 57

Type 61

Technique 66

Theme and analogy 71

3 Evidence 76

4 How useful? 97

5 History and theory 115

Notes 134

Further reading 156

Index of names 164

Editorial Reviews

"A remarkable book which should prove extremely useful to anyoneinterested in the place of architecture in society, and in thequestions faced by architects and historians when addressing theinheritance from the past or the practice of the present."
Architectural Research Quarterly

"Though the book is aimed primarily at students in schools ofarchitecture and departments of art history, the clarity of Leach'sprose and his penetrating syntheses make the book useful even for amore senior audience."
Journal of Architectural Education

"A timely arrival in the wake of claims for architecture's'critical' and 'post-critical' status, this concise little bookwill prove a valuable compass to the on-going debates over thenature and future of architectural history. In a series of catholiccross-sections, Leach offers an erudite and even-handed account ofthe main lines of the discipline's (often divergent) developmentseven as he asks difficult questions regarding architecturalhistorians' most basic assumptions."
John Harwood, Oberlin College

"In this remarkable book, Andrew Leach makes the complex topicof historical knowledge in architecture accessible to a wideaudience. He examines the discipline from multiple perspectives,considering the shifts in theoretical and methodological positionsand situating them in their historic contexts. He reveals therichness of the field by highlighting its strategies, ambiguities,engagements with other disciplines, negotiations between polarities(high culture/low culture and the general /the particular), andrelationship to architectural practice. Through a careful analysisof key texts, Leach leads the reader to the ultimate question ofthe meaning of architectural history today."
Zeynip Celik, New Jersey Institute of Technology

"This is a very welcome addition to the sparsely populated fieldof studies on the historiography of architectural history. It iswritten in a clear, engaging and jargon-free language, but offersadvanced undergraduate and graduate students an intellectually verysophisticated grounding in the origins and development ofarchitectural history. By defining architectural history not as apurely academic pursuit, but as a cultural practice taking as itssubject the multiple cultural agencies architecture exercises, itsolidly places writing architectural history at the centre oftoday's reflection on culture."
Caroline van Eck, Leiden University

From the Publisher