ABSTRACT
The following chapter will critically examine themes particular to the early historiographies of modern architecture, starting with the question of the discursive formation of architectural history. My argument here has two central objectives. The first is to demonstrate the ways that architectural history differs from the traditions of art history; even though the discourse of art history has changed during the last three decades, its traditional influence on architectural historiography has not yet diminished. The second is to explore what is particular to the subject matter of architectural history, charting its capacity to problematize the autonomy of text, i.e., the historiographic narrative. This last point is important because the theme of autonomy was celebrated through structuralism and post-structuralism, to mention two discourses influential for contemporary theoretico-historical work. In addition to architecture, written text plays a crucial role for the mental life of the architectural historian. However, essential to the canon formulated by the historians of the early twentieth century was the work of architects, and the urge to contextualize the work in the purview of events, dates, and objective and subjective transformations without which the particularities of “modern architecture” would have evaporated either in the author’s over-emphasis on a chosen methodology, 1 or else the history of modern architecture, i.e., the time when the modernity of architecture was established, would have been presented primarily as a mirror image of a general historiography which is in itself still difficult to establish. 2
