Paradigm hunting: architectural and argumentational decorum in Marvin Trachtenberg's research

A doctoral student in history of architecture of Richard Krautheimer, Wolfgang Lotz and Richard Pommer at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in the 1960s, Marvin Trachtenberg published his thesis on the Campanile of Florence Cathedral, known as 'Giotto's Tower,' with New York University Press in 1971-72. This, his first book, won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, given by the Society of Architectural Historians for the outstanding book on an architectural subject by a North American scholar. In what follows I explore aspects of Trachtenberg's work that occasionally cross with my own work in art history. My subjectivity is freely admitted because it's a precondition of what I am able to see in Trachtenberg's words.