Valences of Historiography: Essays on Architectural History

The compiled essays offer various themes and ways of approaching historiography. Each chapter probes the state of contemporary theorization of architecture histories, working toward the theme of critically re-writing history. Essential to each author's contribution are specific traditions created by the mole of history burrowing through the past. This book concerns the historian's conjectures towards capturing the past and present zeitgeist.

Temporality is the theme running through the narrative of this volume. It raises the question of whether the ever-growing body of work on architectural history should be considered as history. More specifically, what is the intersection between history and architectural history? Furthermore, can every text focused on architecture's past be considered categorically historiographic? In what capacity does architectural history index history beyond contingencies and without reducing the text to empirical realities and the historian's interest in a specific subject, including those collected through archival research, itself an emblem of textuality? This book upholds the conviction that the past should be recalled accurately and that there is no history but historical criticism, the scope of which exceeds the historicity of Humanism. Dialectically, the timeline experienced across contemporary techno-economic and cultural domains (aesthetics) offers an opportunity to explore architecture produced outside the Euro-American continents.

Valences of Historiography offers a fresh take on architectural history that is useful for academics, researchers and architecture students.