• 1 Banister Fletcher, Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, edited by Dan Cruickshank, Oxfor (...)

2All but the very early and very late editions of Banister Fletcher testify to the long shadow the patent racism of the junior Fletcher, not to mention the institutional racism of the University of London, where he taught, and of the Royal Institute of British Architects, of which he was president, cast for much of the twentieth century across architectural education in much of what was once the British empire. Fraser is not the first to acknowledge this. For instance, the centennial twentieth edition, edited by Dan Cruikshank, addressed the architecture of various parts of the world, although the emphasis in later periods, clearly targeted at students in South Africa, Singapore and Hong Kong, remained very much on buildings erected by Europeans.1 This clarifies that Francis Ching, Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash’s A Global History of Architecture was not particularly novel a decade later, especially since both focused on formal description without offering the degree of cultural context commonplace in the field since at least the middle of the last century.

• 2 Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’architecture, Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899.

3The Fletchers’ approach targeted architecture students in programs where exposure to the liberal arts was uncommon. For the Fletchers, if not for all of those who edited posthumous editions, architectural history was largely a matter of illustrating historical buildings. Theirs was the British counterpart to Auguste Choisy’s Histoire de l’architecture, although Choisy’s pioneering use of axonometrics made his book much more compelling visually.2 Both handbooks provided basic compendia for architects working in historicist styles—essentially so that they could copy the illustrations, a common exercise in British architectural schools right up to the 1950s. Later editions did not include new plates in the characteristic style of the original, diagrammatic ones, with most nineteenth and twentieth century buildings instead depicted solely through black and white photographs, without the plans and sections that were originally one of the book’s most informative features. The text, which it is difficult to imagine that students ever read, although some of their instructors undoubtedly relied on its compendium of facts, is descriptive and dull as if intended to discourage anyone from thinking about why canonical buildings appeared the way that they did. The Fletchers and most of those who contributed to subsequent editions did not understand the question of how historical structures were designed, constructed or used, all central to the discipline of architectural history, to be part of the education of the architect.

• 3 Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, London: Harmondsworth Penguin Books, 1942 ( (...)
• 4 Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19 (...)

4In consequence, Banister Fletcher played little role in the intellectual formation of most architectural historians, and none whatsoever in mine. For me, the model survey was Nikolaus Pevsner’s Outline of European Architecture, whose geographic scope was clearly limited; Europe certainly ended for him well before the Urals or the Bosporus.3 By 1985, Spiro Kostof’s A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals offered a compelling cross-cultural alternative to Pevsner’s well-defined remit, although already by that time I had been required to study art from Asia, Africa or Latin America.4 I have always appreciated both volumes as examples of precisely the authorial authority Fraser professes to eschew. A strong point of view gives coherence to narratives that necessarily range broadly across time and space. It also enables one to weave together seemingly disparate examples of individual building types, identifying, for instance, the way that early modern palaces across Europe and Asia were designed to support the authority of the ruler, even if they relied on different spatial systems and styles of ornament to achieve this shared goal.

• 5 Christy Anderson, Renaissance Architecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 (Oxford history (...)
• 6 See, for instance, G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Cultur (...)

7Form alone can never tell the full story of the relationship between architecture and the society in which it is embedded. Thus, another key question will be how Fraser and his team treat style, which has—along with geography—provided much of the structure for Banister Fletcher’s twenty previous editions. Take, for instance, the Renaissance. Christy Anderson included both western European structures in which Gothic approaches and motifs still predominated over classical ones, as well as the work of the great Ottoman architect Sinan in her Renaissance Architecture.5 This approach redefines modernity according to chronology and purpose. It also makes ample allowance for the patronage of court women, such as Mihrimah Sultan, whom she did not include, and Margaret of Austria, whom she did. Addressing “European” styles as global phenomena is another way to write a more inclusive history.6

• 7 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of (...)
• 8 For their catalogues see Susanne Gaensheimer, Kathrin Beßen, Dorish Krystof and Kunstsammung Nordr (...)

9There are multiple reasons for writing global art histories. In the United States, research into the architecture of the Global South has often been anchored in Cold War efforts to learn about the rest of the world in order to influence it.7 More recently it has been a response to the increasing diversity of students, many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants. In Europe the inclusiveness of recent exhibitions in Berlin and Düsseldorf, in which art and design from the Global South was accorded the same respect as European and American modernism, is often tied to the search for global markets, including for international students (nearly half of the students at University College London, where Fraser teaches, come from abroad).8 Charged with up-dating a deeply damaged brand, Fraser and his team have the additional motivation to redress the enormous damage wrought by the junior Fletcher’s egregious Orientalism. Let us hope the task is not beyond them.