Looking at world architecture in a post-colonial light, what is the possibility for a ‘world history of architecture’? This question is approached through thoughts on east-west plunderings in architectural history and in the strange double image of world history portrayed in Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture , which (in all but the earliest and very latest editions) divided the world into ‘The Historical Styles’ and ‘The Non-historical Styles’.

Resonating throughout this text, which began as a paper to a conference on ‘Globalisation and Representation’,1 is the knowledge that the author has been commissioned to undertake a completely new text for the next edition of Banister Fletcher, for which work started in November, 2005. Pointers to how that project might proceed include its becoming a dual work, aware of the unspoken space between:

• a narrative with stress on points of cultural intersection and articulation of hybridity (after Homi Bhabha) rather than on the ‘constituent’ as opposed to ‘transitory’ facts of architectural history (after Siegfried Giedion), and:
• an archive of illustrated places, itself a social construct but one which recognises the role of viewer/reader in its [re]construction—for images are there to be plundered and misread, which is always their fate in the hands of creative designers.