Evidence and Narrative

Abstract

At the seventieth annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held in Glasgow, we cochaired a session titled “Evidence and Narrative in Architectural History.”1 The purpose of this session was to discover some of the practices widely used in the discipline, especially those employed to manage two interrelated problems of particular interest: choosing evidence with which to make arguments and developing structures for telling stories. From the SAH session, as well as in future conferences and workshops on these topics, we hope to seed a conversation on writing history that will help the field become more self-conscious about its use of evidence and narrative. Ultimately, reconsideration of evidence and narrative will produce new and different histories of architecture as well as reimagined agencies for ourselves as writers, readers, teachers, and students. Issues of evidence and narrative have always been part of architectural history discursively, despite architectural historians’ general indifference. Yet there may be an institutional timeliness to the intertwined themes. For architectural historians in art history departments, focusing on narrative might foster alliances with scholars in similarly concerned fields, like history, literature, and philosophy, strengthening architectural history's identity and legitimacy within the humanities and the academy. For architectural historians in architecture schools, focusing on evidence can create links with the sciences and law, underscoring the field's validity for professional practices that rely on the legitimating capacity of objective knowledge. Insofar as architectural history sits between these two sources of institutional power, by considering the reciprocal dependencies of evidence and narrative in our writing, we can give our work the capacity to make this dynamic explicit. Architectural historians find evidence everywhere. We mine built and unbuilt projects alike, textual and visual documents of all kinds, and findings of other fields. Quantitative data, too, have recently entered the field—plural and …