It should come as no surprise that modern architectural historians would approach the task of

analyzing the past from a variety of different perspectives given the varied intellectual and

institutional origins of academic modern architectural history. One of the earliest, most

established, and persistent solutions to this issue is the division of architectural history according

to a chronology governed by style and period. Architectural styles, including proportional and

ornamental systems, were brought into alignment with their historical origins, which in turn bore

a set of values, during the nineteenth century as a result of the convergence of stylistic, cultural,

social, and historical factors in the composition of contemporary buildings. This effort was made

by both architects and historians. The best aesthetic for a building in any particular setting was

carefully considered for the nineteenth century, when stylistic decisions no longer seemed given.

Thus, there were two different types of issues that the histories of architectural style that emerged

in the nineteenth century had to address. How could the past, on the one hand, be known and

represented? On the other hand, how could those architectural designs that represent

recognisable values be adopted or abandoned over the course of a protracted process of cultural

evaluation and assimilation? Architectural historians working at the end of the nineteenth century

were driven, at least initially, by questions of style and stylistic transformation, which were

fundamental to their disciplinary toolkit and cultural goals.

Approach

From the latter half of the nineteenth century onward, architectural historians have approached

the task of writing about the past in a variety of ways. Since different architectural historians
approach the issue of the "unit" of architectural history in different ways, it is useful to refer to

these approaches as "approaches" while also acknowledging that different historians frequently

combine frame, material, and method in order to best analyze a particular historical topic. The

term "unit" here refers to how the historian breaks down the "total history" of architecture into

manageable chunks. This is the hypothetical, but obviously unattainable, full past of everything

that has ever occurred anywhere at any time as it can be understood from all angles.

The past of architectural history is also organized using six different methods: style and period,

biography, geography and culture, type, technique, and theme and analogy. An architectural

historian wouldn't typically stick to just one of these approaches. Because of this, these headings

are much less a methodological map of the field of architectural history than they are a

condensed survey of historiographical approaches, where one is frequently moderated by its

combination with others.

 1. Style and period: The history

of art, more than any other

historical discipline, depends

more on style than on any

other historical tool. However,

rather than being a logic

extrapolated from the past,

style is a structure that

historians apply to history. For

both architectural historians, the building itself would serve as proof of a stylistic past.

The ornamentation, details, and visual organization of the building's façade provided by

the architectural order used in its columnation, as well as its form and massing, would be

considered the stylistic makeup. How does a structure strike a balance between continuity

and change over time? Why do fashions evolve with time? How can we distinguish

between different styles? Given that architecture is a category of the arts made up of

individual works, how can we identify stylistic periods and comprehend how they rise

and fall? The concept of style written by Peter Gay in 1974 (of styles of history-writing)

explains it as: “Style is the carpet's pattern, which gives the knowledgeable collector an

unmistakable indication of the carpet's location and date of creation. Additionally, it is

the butterfly's wing marking, which serves as its species' undeniable signature to watchful

lepidopterists. And the unintentional motion of the witness in the witness stand is the

unmistakable indicator of hidden evidence to the astute attorney. Therefore, to unravel

the style is to unravel the man” It is not sufficient to understand that fixed rules relating
 to

proportion, decoration, color, or any other aspect governing a building's appearance

accompany stylistic labels. Although the idea of a stylistic system for the history of

architecture has been soundly rejected by many, it is frequently awkwardly replaced by

chronological groupings that act as stylistic epithets in disguise. There have also been

discussions about the appropriateness of combining stylistic labels that architects used at

the time with periodic terms that were later used to categorize historical phenomena (e.g.,

Romanesque, Gothic, and Rococo) (International Style, postmodernism,

deconstructivism).

2. Biography: As an academic architectural history began to take shape at the end of the

nineteenth century, the custom of writing biographical portraits of artists—including

some individuals we now recognize as architects—offered one crucial model. Vasari is

responsible for the fundamental division of time into lifespan, trajectory, works,

repercussions, and relationships with other biographical entities. Despite how far modern

architectural histories that focus on the architect may have diverged from his mode of
writing history. A dependable method of accounting for a person's contributions to

history is the life-and-works genre in architectural history. Architectural histories that

chart the beginnings, goals, influences, and effects of a government or institution may

also resemble biographical architectural histories in some ways. In fact, a city or a

building can be said to have its own life, and the terms and structures of biography can

shape its histories: foundations, ascent to fame or prominence, pinnacle of importance,

and dénouement. These are literary strategies, dramatic even, but they are nonetheless

common to biography. However, our focus is on the organization of architectural history

in relation to a biological or analogically related entity. We will concentrate on the

arrangement of historical time in accordance with the life of the particular architect

because the history of architecture has long and closely associated itself with the figure of

the architect: the architectural history genre of the biographical architectural monograph.

This kind of history views the building as a representation of the architect's actions and

goals. According to this viewpoint, the lifework of an architect is related to that of

 another by way of the individual's development, motivations, influences (exercised by or

on the subject), settings, opportunities, and, in a more hazy way, professional and artistic

genealogies. It is important to recognize that biography is inevitably, to a greater or lesser

extent, a construction of its author.

3. Geography and culture: Similar to the limits borrowed from national, imperial,

regional, municipal, and other geopolitical borders, or those that map onto cultural and/or

linguistic territories, extra-territorial groupings and geographies, or diasporas, are the

characteristics of an architectural history shaped by biographical factors. Despite the

obvious difficulties and compromises that inevitably result from contemporary nations

sharing borders that have been subject to varying degrees of permeability, or that are

introduced by immigration and emigration, architectural history of a nation can be

studied as a distinct field of knowledge. For instance, the architectural history of a

modern nation may include formerly distinct territories or linguistic areas whose

development within a larger nationalist grouping has been coherent. A country in the 20th

century might be subject to colonization's mechanisms, which link one territory's history

to the history of the colonial party and ultimately to its other colonies. What do the

geopolitical and biographical divisions of architectural history have in common? One

thing they have in common is the need to balance the general and the particular: to what

extent can we interpret a particular architect's output as a barometer for his or her

generation? Alternatively, is the structure of a specific state, kingdom, or area an example

of larger transnational or international currents? This issue has particularly affected

modern movement historians from a biographical and geopolitical standpoint. How far

can architectural historians push their subject's specificity, the unreducible nature of the

biographical, or the importance of the national? Geopolitical boundaries typically provide

a helpful and convenient way to limit an architectural history. But these boundaries are

neither static nor natural. The way a historian constructs a region, a region's geography,

or a culture can reveal a lot about the historian's own context.

4. Type: The relationship between a building's form, personality, and organizational

structure and the function it serves led observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries to compare architecture to a wide range of other natural or man-made

phenomena. An empirical categorization of buildings into groups based on how they

appeared to function was combined

with the ideals of intellectual

pragmatism in a typological

approach to architectural history.

Thus, the category of "type" is

much more open-ended than

"model," enabling broad divisions

of buildings based on shared points

of reference that are frequently

linked to the function of the building. Architecture's genres can be thought of as having a

history, just like architecture as a whole. The hospital, the campus of the university, the

basilica, the factory, the museum, the high-rise apartment building, the opera house, the

presidential library, and the airport can all be imagined as having distinct architectural

histories. Each family is divided into sub-genres that are both figurative and functional,

and which are frequently suggested by the type itself. For example, ecclesiastical

architecture includes sub-genres shaped by liturgy, plan-form, or period. Convalescent

hospitals, insane asylums, and hospitals for communicable diseases can also lay claim to

their own architectural histories. Most contemporary histories of architecture that follow

cues of a typological nature do not do so in order to advance a strong theory of

 architectural genius. For most architectural histories type is a category of convenience

that combines well with other framing devices.

5. Technique: What have architects accomplished over the years that can be used to define

them historically as architects, their work as architecture, and the subjects of histories?

These histories notice coherence in the way architects have, knowingly or unknowingly,

used concepts over time. These kinds of histories might view this as the foundation of

architecture's disciplinarity, making productive the anachronistic use of the terms

"architecture" and "architect" to describe structures and people who weren't regarded as

such in their own eras. It links the present to the past, and allows the historian of

architecture to tell a story about architecture without the burdens of that term’s more

recent history as a concept and an institution. To benefit from the historical divisions that

his thinking has allowed the last few decades of historiography—the history of technique

within architecture and of architecture as a technique—architectural histories need not be

Foucauldian in their approach or tenor. Therefore, it is challenging to imagine a history of

the plan that is founded on a sound understanding of architecture. Even if one were to

confine the history of architecture to a Western tradition, one would still find that the

tasks, responsibilities, qualifications, and status of the figure of the architect have all

changed significantly over time. There is no unified definition of the term that has

endured changes in society, technology, or institutions, aside from a general definition of

"architecture" as "the art or science of building." What are the foundations for a

continuous history of architecture, Macarthur and Moulis enquire? The plan offers an

example of the kind of historical subject that might operate across other forms of

historical change. It can be understood literally and conceptually. It can be found in

 drawings and diagrams as well as in buildings themselves. From a drawn plan the

historian can extrapolate a ground plan of a building, either as a reality subject to scale or

as a figure reacting to the experience of a building by its inhabitants.

6. Theme and analogy: Contrary to the previous headings, this sixth and final grouping of

approaches to architectural historiography. An architectural history organized along

thematic or analogical lines refers to the relationships, concrete and abstract, between

architecture and its "exterior," whereas architectural history as the history of architectural

style, type, or technique relies on a historical continuity that can be constructed as

internal to architecture. A history of architecture that is organized thematically examines

coincidences between architectural activity and other historical activity, between

buildings and the purposes for which they are used or the significance they acquire, and it

also engages with architectural ideas and themes like inhabitation and representation,

which have effects that extend far beyond architecture. In contrast, an analogous

architectural history examines the conceptual tools available to architectural historians

that enable that field to offer fresh viewpoints on topics outside of architecture that

previously seemed to be beyond the purview of that discipline. The way in which

architectural histories are arranged corresponds to the literary form known as

architectural theory in late-20th-century architectural culture. The role of architecture in

extra-architectural historical and theoretical themes, or the congruence of architectural

interests and developments with those outside of architecture, would be included among

the thematic histories.

CONCLUSION

I could spend more time here discussing additional methods for the challenge of classifying the

history of architecture into historical units. Some of the options open to modern architectural

historians have stood the test of time, while others are relatively new and tied to the growing

relativist and contextualist tendencies of all types of historiography in the latter half of the 20th

century. They are all susceptible to intellectual fashion as powerful tactics. They describe many

of the organizational techniques used by historians to turn the vast, diverse past of architecture

into cogent histories as softer frameworks or approaches to writing architectural history,

tempered one by another, or by others. The next chapter will turn to the material from that past,

where this one has focused on the conditions under which historians can carry out this

translation. What remains from the past to serve as the raw material for architectural history

today? Now that we are discussing the content of architectural history, we must also discuss how

it relates to the available evidence.

HOW HAS THE PAST BEEN ORGANIZED

NAME: ADERINSOLA ADEBUKOLA ADEAGBO

EDMP21/22/H/0727

COURSE CODE: ARC 605