Fischer auf der Reise nach Stonehenge

On 26 July 1721, the Wiener Diarium informs its readers that a new book by the general surveyor of constructions, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, is ready and that the ones who had pre-ordered their copy could go and pick it up at the architect’s place. The book is titled Entwurff einer historischen Architektur2 and is a collection of eighty-six folios promising to illustrate the architecture of the Jews, Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Siamese, Chinese and Japanese together with some projects by the author. The title of the book is curious. Literally translated into English, it would read “Project of a Historical Architecture”. The difficulty here is not only the interpretation of Entwurff – which can be understood as “project” but also as “essay”, “draft” or “sketch” – but also the fact that the semantic realms of “architecture” and “history” are not combined the way we might expect. Fischer does not speak of architectural history; he speaks of historical architecture. If nouns and adjectives mean anything, then the book is not, as Hans Sedlmayr suggested, “the first ever monumental history of architecture in images”. The title does not announce a “history of architecture”. Rather, the Entwurff is a book about “the architecture of history”.