In recent years, our inherited architectural culture, which privileges the autonomy of form and the paradigmatic status of the western tradition, has been contested from a range of critical perspectives. In this article I address some of the new challenges that architectural history faces today and contemplate two questions with important implications for teaching survey courses. First, how does one make architectural history less Eurocentric and more cross-cultural without either naturalizing the cultural difference of “others” or essentializing these differences into incommensurable categories? Second, how does one talk about the politics of architecture without reducing architecture to politics?