The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians is one of the stalwart institutions of postwar architectural culture. Though founded along with the Society during World War II, the Journal began to publish on a regular basis and operate on a firm footing only in 1947, when the Society itself was incorporated and dropped "American" from its name. Since that time, JSAH has produced four numbers annually without interruption?a distinguished record of achievement in itself. The year 1997 therefore marks an anniversary of sorts: fifty years since the Society officially broadened the compass of its concerns and membership and began regular publication of the Journal.  Both impulses--to expand the purview and sponsor the dissemination of research in architectural history--can be understood in the context of postwar efforts among architects and architectural historians to identify a more active role for research in understanding and sustaining an architectural fabric ravaged by war and apparently threatened by an architectural practice that seemed to focus on corporate clients and to reject academic history and vernacular tradition. 

Yet at its inception in 1941 the Journal itself professed modest ambitions.  Introduced in the first issue as "an unpretentious journal which would keep the membership in closer contact through the academic year and which would disseminate the results of research in the history of architecture," it aimed to maintain contact and provide a forum for the discussion of historical research to a "high standard" of scholarship among colleagues, who were broadly conceived as "all those whose special interest is the history of architecture."  In many respects the Journal has remained true to its founding conception, and has retained not only its commitment to standards of scholarship, but also its pluralism and understated character. These qualities, I would argue, have contributed considerably to its resiliency as an institution. 

Though the Society's membership is now predominantly academic, it is not exclusively so, nor is it composed entirely of architectural historians.  It includes preservationists, museum curators, archivists, bibliographers, critics, urban planners, architects, and other professionals, in design and in related and unrelated fields.  Academic membership cuts across boundaries to include almost every branch of academic study: archaeology, art history, urban geography, sociology, philosophy, history of science and technology, film, cultural history, literature, music, religion, sociology, economics, government. As its journal of record, JSAH represents the disciplinary spectrum of the Society, in the articles it publishes, but especially in the books and exhibitions reviewed in its pages, which reflect the extraordinarily wide range of interests and critical concerns of the readership. 

Equally characteristic of the Journal has been its traditionally muted editorial voice.  This is built into the dialogic structure of the magazine itself.  In a refereed journal, in which each article submitted for consideration is reviewed by at least one other scholar, editorial authority is necessarily plurivocal.  Though driven by its contributors (Elizabeth MacDougall noted in her editorial of March 1987, "I was always at the mercy of what was submitted"), discourse within the Journal itself is structured as a dialogue among authors, editors, and readers.  This is a durable structure, one that has perpetuated and reinforced exacting standards of scholarship, fostered continuity, resisted novelty and fashion, and ensured consistency and coherence of editorial voice and policy over time, despite regular changes of the editorial guard.  It is a structure that has made the Journal slow to register change, but that has also kept it open to new ideas. 

Indeed, JSAH has absorbed a great deal of change in the last two decades as the parameters of architectural history itself have expanded into other disciplines.  The Journal has become correspondingly broader in the subject matter of articles and reviews and more diverse in the range of critical methodologies employed by authors.  Over the last several years articles have encompassed a wide cultural field, addressing theoretical as well as historical issues, intercultural problems, and questions of practice and discourse. 

Four years ago, when he assumed the editorship of JSAH, Nicholas Adams called for an activist role for the Journal, one in which it would "reach out . . . and shape the intellectual landscape."  The Journal itself, he suggested, "must seek to engage the margins as well as the center, the new-fashioned, as well as the traditional," and furthermore had the responsibility to draw on "the best possible examples of our diversity" and to stay "abreast of new developments."  As editor, Nicholas Adams fulfilled his own mandate of "enlivening the conversation within our field" admirably and with flair--adding topical editorials and exhibition and conference reviews, encouraging debate and impassioned discourse, introducing color illustrations, and undertaking a courageous redesign of the Journal itself.  He, like his predecessors, has left big shoes to fill. 

It is therefore not only an honor and privilege to take on the editorship, but also a challenge to follow in his footsteps. As I begin my term as editor, my first concern is to maintain the broad range and high quality of the articles submitted.  I see the articles as the core of the Journal, a core that represents the intellectual scope and measure of the discipline as well as its standard of scholarly excellence.  The articles in this issue are exemplary in this regard, spanning two hemispheres, nine centuries, and a range of historical questions, including the transmission of masonry building techniques in Precolumbian architectural culture; intertextuality of building fabric, written record, and interpretive literature in the (re)construction of the building history of late twelfth-century Canterbury Cathedral; the theoretical underpinnings of Le Corbusier's use of rhetorical figures in his late work; and sources for eighteenth-century Dutch South African colonial architecture. 

At the same time I want the Journal to continue to engage the moment in reviews, extended review essays, and invited commentary.  For the last three years I have participated in this effort: as exhibition review editor it has been my concern to consider issues of cultural representation not otherwise addressed in the Journal.  Architectural exhibitions, rare a decade and a half ago, have become popular in recent years, and are now one of the primary vehicles for the dissemination of architectural knowledge to general as well as scholarly and professional audiences.  They have also become sites of methodological innovation.  As events in place and time, architectural exhibitions not only engage their historical subject and its representation, but also reflect the politics and economics of their conception. 

During my term as editor I would like to take the Journal further in this direction, expanding the forms of publication and representation reviewed to include film, video, and computer software and including new voices, contributions from outside North America, and a wide range of practices--academic, museum, design--that engage historical questions as urgent issues of the present. 

Another and even more important way in which the Journal can and should engage the historical moment is by examining architectural history itself. As the discipline has expanded, informed by post-structural theories and the critical and historiographical methods of cultural and intellectual history, it has become richer in terms of issues (class, gender, race, ethnicity, colonialism, the body, death, illness, public and private, etc.), more rigorous and self-aware methodolgically, and farther-reaching in the philosophical questions it poses. This growth has led to a new focus on epistemological questions, on examination of the ideological underpinnings of different methods of historical analysis, on modes of historical thought and discursive practices, and interdisciplinary critiques.  As a result the disciplinary boundaries of architectural history have become increasingly indistinct.  It seems both timely and appropriate--particularly as we approach the end of the century/millennium--to assess and reflect upon these changes and to consider not only the distance traveled, but the destination reached: the current and future status of architectural history as a distinct discipline within the field of cultural studies. 

Such reflection has precedents of long standing within the Society.  The first issues of the Journal in 1941-1943 contained a series of articles by Carroll L. V. Meeks, John Coolidge, Turpin C. Bannister, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock on the practice and teaching of architectural history.  In recent years practice, methodology, disciplinary identity and boundaries, and the intersection of historical, theoretical, critical, and design practices in the teaching, study and production of architecture and architectural knowledge have been the topics of sessions at the Society's annual meetings.' For example, at the annual meeting in Boston in 1990 Stanford Anderson chaired a session "Historiography and Architecture." The papers were published in the Journal of Architectural Education 44, nos. 3 and 4 (May/August 1991).  In 1994 at the annual meeting in Philadelphia, Mark Jarzombek chaired an Education Committee Roundtable on the Roles of Theory in Teaching Architectural History, and in 1997 at the meeting in Baltimore Christian Otto and Roberta Moudry chaired a session entitled "Confronting the Canon: Teaching Architectural History."  For a recent critique of the discourse of the JSAH itself, see Greig Crysler, "Silent Itineraries: Making Places in Architectural History," in Anthony B. King (ed.), Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st-Century Metropolis (New York, 1996), 203-226.'  These discussions have been often compelling, usually contentious, and always open-ended.  It seems appropriate to carry them forward in print, in the Journal. One form for such discourse, that is already in place, is the extended review essay, in which current scholarship in a field is considered in a group review of several books (or exhibitions), a format that foregrounds the disparate interests, critical methods, and theoretical commitments of the authors. Other possible formats include extended multiple-voice editorials and special thematic issues dedicated, for example, to consideration of the role of history in schools of architecture; historiography and discursive practices in historical writing on architecture; the emergence and impact on architectural studies of new institutional settings for research, exhibitions, and conferences in architectural history (the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Heinz Architectural Center, Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, to name just a few); the nature of book and magazine publishing; and the impact of new technologies of communication. 

I submit these reflections on the Journal and the direction in which I would hope to accompany it during my term as editor as thoughts in progress and part of the ongoing dialogue among editors, authors, and readers that has sustained JSAH over fifty years. I look forward to working with you in the next three years to shape the discourse of our journal. 

-- EVE BLAU