As the following chapters attest, whether this traffic of ideas was driven by the historian or fostered by the architect, the century leading up to the various postmodern declarations for the new historicism that emerged around 1980 evidences a long process of sifting through historical research and distilling from it moments – be they forms, concepts or models of the architect’s practice and its scope – against which to calibrate the ambitions of architecture across the modern era. By considering the many examples presented here and the sometimes surprising extent of their inter-referentiality and their shared dependence on certain sources – even when put to drastically different uses – this book interrogates an historiographical phenomenon that is widely appreciated but rarely called to account.