ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Alberto Perez-Gomez's attitude to four key characteristics of contemporary professional historiography: secondary scholarship, archival documentation, the scholarly apparatus, and image analysis. Perez-Gomez writes history in opposition to instrumental and formalist methods. Indeed, Perez-Gomez's historical propositions will make sense only if the reader develops a sophisticated understanding of a wide range of phenomenological thinkers. Perez-Gomez's approach obliges the interested reader to actively read Crisis alongside the thinkers he recapitulates but does not elucidate. In particular, Perez-Gomez sees the development of French architectural theory from roughly 1500 to 1900 as "normative for European culture during this period". Although Perez-Gomez argues for the importance of epistemological contexts he has an unconventional attitude to original research in archival materials. He argues that architecture can be "locally significant and universally eloquent", and so can historical writing.
