History is returning to design

Abstract

I looked up “history” in the dictionary. The definition I liked best was, “study of the past.” Now any number of things can be the study of the past. Archaeology is the study of the past; it has more specific definitions than “history” does. How you choose to study history - whether as mainstreams, as isolated events, as typologies, etc. - however you choose to study it, there is no first rate and secondrate history implied by how you choose to study it - Lawrence Speck. When any field is undergoing development, it invents a simplistic framework on which things are hung. Then as the field expands, as it develops, the repertory begins to expand. I think we are moving out of that central spine on which everything was hung. We are moving into the study of social relationships, political relationships, vernacular, etc., and beginning to absorb more. The profession of architectural history is expanding. Many of these problems are resolving themselves - Dora Wiebenson. Whatever you propose to do, you have to make your own slides. Which means you have to have money to travel. I am struck by the fact that I teach courses to hundreds of students each year - mainline, bread-and-butter courses that go on year after year - but if I ask the university for the opportunity to travel, to see the buildings I am supposed to know something about, and to photograph them in ways that are appropriate for use in my lectures, they think all I am after is a summer in Europe - Richard Betts. While I have questions about this characterization of past historical scholarship, I generally agree with the authors’ aims. The danger in their proposed method is that it threatens to pull the researcher away from the object toward an analysis of society, rather than bringing relevant data to the object under investigation - Stephen Tobriner.