Construction History and the History of Science – An approach to the Scientification of Building Knowledge

Oscillating between different approaches based on engineering as well as humanities, Construction History reflects an openness with respect to academic disciplines. It functions thus as a movement rather than an academic discipline on its own. Despite this categorical openness, certain barriers remain: specifically, there has been little interest in reflecting and integrating new approaches from the History of Knowledge and History of Science. In our opinion such restraint is neither appropriate to the scientific self-understanding of Construction History nor sensible in an epistemic sense. We argue that Construction History can benefit especially from the integration of current concepts from the History of Science and the Sociology of Science. By integrating such concepts, Construction History would catch up with the current discipline-spanning research on “knowledge” and could contribute substantially to this discourse. Notably, Construction History focuses on both material and immaterial sources, which represent explicit and implicit knowledge systems respectively. Thus it would bring source material into the focus of the recent debate that otherwise would not be considered.