tion, for ambiguity can take many forms. And yet again, the issues underlying these ambiguities do display certain consistencies: Is history germane to architectural production, or education? Or not? Is history an autonomous discipline or a "service"? If the former, is it nonetheless valuable as a source of critical insights into the position of architecture in society? If the latter, is it a trove of available forms, an array of formal paradigms awaiting transformation, a breeding and testing ground for architectural hypotheses, or ... ? Our theme is stocktaking at a purportedly epochal moment, an exercise the timing of which would itself be appropriate for historical deconstruction. Let this simply be a stocktaking, not a millennial one. And let us turn, very briefly, to reflect on architectural history in schools of architecture in two preceding eras: prior to, and during, the period of Modernism. Whether architecture was taught in academies, most notably in France after the Revolution, in polytechnics French or Germanic, in a professional association as in London, or in the university-based schools proliferating in the United States in the late nineteenth century, history was in some way integral. Architecture might be a discipline of remarkable autonomy, handed down through the classical tradition.' History might be a repository of both spatial and tectonic typologies available for use and transformation. History might reveal the rootedness of ways of building and being that inspired national or racial loyalties. One could not embrace all these ideas simultaneously, but from a time of the dominance of academic classicism around 1800, through all the historicisms and eclecticism of the nineteenth century, history was in some way intimately wedded to the practice and teaching of architecture. The first school of architecture in the United States was one of the five original departments (along with civil engineering, mechanical engineering, mining and geology, and chemistry) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as it matriculated its first students in 1865. The head of the school was William Robert Ware, the designer with Henry Van Brunt of Harvard's Ruskinian Gothic Memorial Hall (1868-1880). Yet Ware quickly brought his new school under the sway of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.2 A series of graduates of the Paris school taught at MIT, beginning with Eugene Letang in 1871. The other new American schools adopted the same standard. There was no independent discipline of history, but it was deeply embedded in the work at the drafting board.3 In England the hold of classicism was challenged early in the nineteenth century by the recognition of indigenous medieval architecture and the claims for its greater appropriateness to the land, climate, and mores of northern Europe. Later it became plausible to see these concerns as providing the root stock for the new, free architecture, especially of the English house, in the latter part of the nineteenth