What Is Architectural History? - 9780745644578

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

'In this remarkable book, Andrew Leach makes the complex topic of historical knowledge in architecture accessible to a wide audience. He examines the discipline from multiple perspectives, considering the shifts in theoretical and methodological positions and situating them in their historic contexts. He reveals the richness of the field by highlighting its strategies, ambiguities, engagements with other disciplines, negotiations between polarities (high culture / low culture and the general / the particular), and relationship to architectural practice. Through a careful analysis of key texts, Leach leads the reader to the ultimate question of the meaning of architectural history today.'-Zeynep Celik, New Jersey Institute of Technology

'This is a very welcome addition to the sparsely populated field of studies on the historiography of architectural history. It is written in a clear, engaging and jargon-free language, but offers advanced undergraduate and graduate students an intellectually very sophisticated grounding in the origins and development of architectural history. By defining architectural history not as a purely academic pursuit, but as a cultural practice taking as its subject the multiple cultural agencies architecture exercises, it solidly places writing architectural history at the centre of today's reflection on culture.'-Caroline van Eck, Leiden University

What is Architectural History?considers the questions and problems posed by architectural historians since the discipline's emergence in the late nineteenth century. How do historians of architecture organize past time and relate it to the present? How does historical evidence translate into historical narrative? Should architectural history be useful for practising architects? If so, bow? Leach treats the disciplinarity of architectural history as an open question, moving between three key claims upon historical knowledge of architecture: within art history, as a historical specialization and, most prominently, within architecture. l le suggests that the confusions around the question posed in his title have been productive, ensuring a rich variety of approaches to the project of exploring architecture

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. ta-aduate students and established architectural historians ;e this boa- to fuel discussions over the currentnt state of the field is which they work.