Practice, discourse and experience: The relationship between design history and architectural history

Abstract

This Special Issue explores the relationship between architectural history and design history; two disciplines with close subject areas and methodological links, but which have developed distinct institutional and academic identities that often separate them. This introduction frames the articles contained in the issue—which in different ways demonstrate the compelling nature of research that straddles these disciplines—through an examination of the roots such research approaches have within the recent past of each field. Through a re-reading of key moments within the historiography of each discipline in the UK and USA since the Second World War, it is possible to understand how architectural and design history have evolved in relation to each other, and how the expansion of each into the territory of the other has emerged.