Even though the buildings of Antiquity have been studied many times from the Architectural point of view, we still slightly know about their building procedures.

Auguste Choisy

After a gap of five years, the Fourth National Congress on Construction History is now being announced for the 27th until 29th January, Cadiz, Spain. (The third one was held in Seville in 2000)

The main reason of this meeting was the great success obtained by the First International Congress on Construction History (January 2003, Madrid) organized by the Spanish Society of Construction History (SEHC).This last congress gave prestige and international recognition to this institution and now is contributing to the completion of other meetings in the next five years. 

Nevertheless, the SEHC proposes to continue with the achievement of national conferences that have been very effective on promoting and diffusing the Construction History studies in Spain.This next convention will collect research works done during the past five years and it will update the Spanish data on this subject.

 With this aim, every contribution about the theme will be considered important in this congress. There is a classification that may serve as an orientation. However, the last proceedings’ index may be consulted in order to get an idea of the field covered by this subject.

 For this meeting the theme is very specific  "The sources of Construction History" because it is actually one of the major problems found by the researchers that have difficulties on identifying and accessing these documents.

 The primary sources are the own buildings and the existing documents with significant information. But even the more important buildings have no systematic descriptions about their interior structure and their construction process. And concerning the documents, although the technical treatises on architecture and civil engineering are collected in some bibliographies, the main critic editions and detailed studies that permit to have a deep knowledge about them are missed. Besides, there are other types of documents that are extraordinary interesting but inaccessible, as, for example, the conditions of the construction treatises or the specialists’ reports. 

The secondary sources, specially books and articles published about Construction History are also difficult to find.In this case, a person interested in Roman Construction will have to look on magazines and books of the following traditional subjects: Archaeology, History of Architecture, History of Techniques, Civil Engineering and Hydraulics, etc.

 At last, the third sources that comprehend bibliography, reference guides, encyclopaedias, etc.are missed.The lack of specific bibliographies about particular themes is another big difficulty found by the investigators. The elaboration of selected and commented bibliographies (not just a list of works) organized by specialists in each field would be of strong help to future studies. 

Finally, in this congress it will be discussed, as in the last International Congress, the problem of the subject definition and its academic implantation.Questions such as what is Construction History and what defines it from the other traditional subjects (History of Architecture, Archaeology and Monuments Restoration) might be answered. 

The death of each subject is its excessive generalization; the identity of something defines a certain point of view. The History of Construction analyse works of Architecture and Civil Engineering with a technical point of view.This vision complements the archaeologist’s opinion, and also the architectural historian’s and the sociologist’s, but each one of them is different.

 The observation mentioned in the beginning made by Choisy in 1873, is still current.He also adverted the difficulty of this task and the facility of formulating false theories because of the lack of information or not having it enough checked. This must be the other goal of the present congress: to rise the relevance, the accuracy and the quality of papers (the main objective of our scientific committee). 

The enthusiasm of the first symposiums allowed the criterion to be very liberal in the papers’ selection process because of the aim on exploring the variety of approaches.But now, there must be a more strict one with the pass of time.Truly, we want Construction History to became an academic subject with all the rights that it concerns.