The comparisons include some buildings which are neither
beautiful nor great, and they have been lifted abstractly
from their historical context because I rely less on the idea
of style than on the inherent characteristics of specific
buildings. Writing as an architect rather than as a scholar,
my historical view is that described by Hitchcock: "Once,
of course, almost all investigation of the architecture of the
past was in aid of its nominal reconstitution-an instrumerit of revivalism. That is no longer true, and there is
little reason to fear that it will, in our time, become so
again. Both the architects and the historian-critics of the
early twentieth century, when they were not merely seeking
in the past fresh ammunition for current polemical warfare,
taught us to see all architecture, as it were, abstractly, false
though such a limited vision probably is to the complex
sensibilities that produced most of the great architecture of
the past. When we re-examin~dri scover-this or that
aspect of earlier building production today, it is with no
idea of repeating its forms, but rather in the expectation of
feeding more amply new sensibilities that are wholly the
product of the present. To the pure historian this may seem
regrettable, as introducing highly subjective elements into
what he believes ought to be objective studies. Yet the pure
historian, more often than not, will eventually find himself
moving in directions that have been already determined by
more sensitive weathervanes.