Political Histories

How are politics embedded in the writing of architectural history? This issue of gta papers confronts and critiques the hidden political motivations which have inflected canonical writing. These motivations are not always explicit in the texts themselves, making biography just as important as bibliography in seeking out the contingencies which underpin the discipline. Besides this careful interrogation of established histories, the issue also asks who gets to write history. Through a number of case studies, it expands the scope of architectural history to include political writers who are not historians or architects but whose writing addresses themes related to architecture.