The other day I was delighted to discover an Australian journal article about a country house that Romaldo Giurgola designed for himself in 2004, when he was eighty-five. As far as I know this was the first home he had designed for himself and I hoped to learn something about the house. Unfortunately the article was written by two history-theory docs. It had no proper plan, and little explanation of the actual design of the house. Instead, it was laden with long quotes from a bevy of architectural scholars. The usual suspects. Why do articles by history-theory types all have basically identical bibliographies? They start with the literature and build an argument through citation: Derrida, Foucault, Tafuri, Eisenman, Frampton, Rossi, Vidler, etc., followed by the same secondary literature about those figures. Why is the literature more important than the circumstances around the building itself? Citation is partly a form of professional positioning. If everyone in the field cites the same twenty-five authorities, citing those authorities signals that you are participating in the conversation. A newspaper article about the house, an interview, or an actual plan may be much more informative about the building but has less value as a marker of theoretical affiliation. What gets lost in this approach to history is the building itself, how, why, and for whom it was built. This is not a critique of architectural historians, but of an academic style of architectural history in which demonstrating command of the historiographical literature becomes more important than discovering new evidence about architects and the buildings they create.
