Guides to recording and interpreting the fabric of buildings

Dragon carving on misericord, St Botolph's Church, BostonProducing a useful record of a building entails more than simply taking a bunch of photographs of it, with no indication of the parts of the building shown, or the date of the photograph. Even the most basic type of record therefore needs some words or figures attached to the images, to be helpful to others. An annotated plan is particularly helpful. 

In general a visual record is accompanied by written commentary and analysis, aiming to make sense of the building - its original date, use and plan, together with subsequent changes. So some of the works listed here focus particularly on recording techniques, while others provide glossaries of architectural terms, or guidance on reading a building. Some techniques of detecting different phases of building have been borrowed from archaeology in recent decades, while dating by style has long been in use by art historians. Click through to those pages for more information. For works on specific building materials and their use see materials.