Resuscitating the author: implications of Danto's philosophy for historians of trend-defying architecture

The paper revisits the often-contested terrain of historiography that is reliant on meta-narratives with specific reference to the writings of philosopher Arthur C. Danto. Architectural historians of-ten position their subjects according overarching views of history (commonly known as meta-narratives), an approach that seems incongruous to the study of architects who defy historical trends in the pursuit of shocking or iconic works. The paper argues that historians of trend-defying architecture can simply index the facts (telling small, unconnected and potentially banal stories), or else follow the lead of an historian like Danto (who is also a philosopher of historiography), who has abandoned the poststructuralist catch-cry 'the author is dead' to pursue a sophisticated kind of indexing that seeks to penetrate the thoughts and words of artists and architects. His approach is a fitting response to an art world that, he argues, exhausted its meta-narratives. The paper discusses Danto's texts in this light, while referring to a recent interview between Danto and the present author, about the implications, for architectural historians, of this seminal work on the analytical philosophy of history.