Rethinking Architectural Historiography by Dana Arnold

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Even the most utilitarian building usually seems expensive for the person who pays for it, but utilitarian buildings are not usually what people choose when they can afford something more than the basic. Buildings can be used as a way of raising our status in a society, and this use of buildings as a form of cultural capital usually goes hand-in-hand with the buildings costing a good deal more than the most utilitarian alternative. Buildings that elevate our status in a society can be very expensive, indeed they must be more extravagant than the norm if they are going to have the effect of enhancing status.

Perhaps fearing the introduction of a PPG15 emulating the archaeological PPG16,5 the RCHME responded with a conference to complete the kill. Though I would count myself as an archaeologist, I was and am in broad agreement with the response of architectural historians on this issue. My first encounter with the detailed archaeological recording of buildings was in Bristol, where the then museum-based Archaeology Unit had in the late 1970s embarked upon building recording. The building being recorded was an early seventeenth-century lodge of hall-parlour plan.

First, the basic questions are: what do you want to understand, and what disciplines do you need to do so? Second, if we want to define territories we should only do so for ourselves and not for others. In other words, our definitions of our territory do not exclude other investigators; they merely describe what we think we are doing. It is the questions that should drive our investigations, not the kinds of scholars we are or think ourselves to be. Art history and architectural history 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5222 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111 23 Notes 1 2 3 H.