The History of Contemporary Architecture: from Narrative to Professionalization. Reflect on Fifty Years

From the 1970s, the history of modern architecture has experienced two fundamental theoretical and historiographical turns. This paper concerns, the European contexts of historiography. The first turn is linked to a form of professionalization that brings the history of modern architecture closer to the history of modern art, such as writing, philology, and narrative forms. The second occurs in the early 1980s. It gives a prevalence to the literary genre (biography and monograph), and later specializes not only on temporal characteristics (e.g., the history of modern architecture which is distinct from the contemporary history of architecture), but also on different sources: the drawings, the construction sites, the texts. After the new millennium, the history of modern architecture follows a “turn” process which is a characteristic of the social sciences. The paper outlines the characteristics and specificities of the two theoretical and historiographical turns, and underlines the cultural geographies, the historiographical schools, and the most influential figures.