## SLIDE-LECTURES SOCIO-TECHNICAL PRACTICE

Putting together a lecture about architecture in the twenty-first century has become a thoroughly digital affair. Perhaps this should be unsurprising given the wholesale and society-wide shift from ‘old’ analogue to digital ‘new’ media, that has taken place in recent decades.<fnref n="5" /> The ubiquity of desktop computers and software platforms readily ‘operated by one multi-skilled person, using one interface, [and] one mode of physical manipulation’ make it straightforward for an individual to put together a slide-lecture without every encountering a building, a camera, or even another person.<fnref n="6" /> ‘Google’ searching for images, downloading from online repositories, and placing into a digital presentation all happen with just a few clicks and an internet connection. This technological shift to digitality encourages what linguists what term multimodal discourse because with computers a visual presentation can be seamlessly combined with writing, 3D models, video footage, or music.<fnref n="7" />

Not that long ago, a slide-lecture was a very different affair, enrolling different forms of discourse, material relations, and social practices. Assembling a 35mm slide-lecture meant getting off your arse and talking to people: walking downstairs to the slide room, chatting with specialist staff responsible for caring for the shared slide libraries (for us, a nice man called Raymond), bumping into, or avoiding academic colleagues trying to access the same cramped space, finding the right drawer from which to prise a slide sheet, and holding up the light to quickly scan the twenty-four slides for the one you wanted. Then on the shared space of a communal light table, the 160 slides required for a double-slide lecture would be spread out panoramically prior to moving them to the circular form of the Carousel. The social and academic hierarchy that controlled access to the slides and the light-table would see more junior staff members retreating to their offices, to put together their lectures on much smaller light tables.

## MINOR COLLECTIONS

In addition to the general slide libraries administered by institutions (like the one Raymond looked after) many architecture academics held personal collections—little cabinets packed with careers' worth of precious, 'mediated memories' accumulated from holidays, grand tours, and sabbaticals.<fnref n="8" /> Since 2018, we have been gathering redundant personal collections of 35mm slides from the School of Design at the University of Western Australia. Read as both visual texts and traces of socio-material practices, these minor collections provide a grounded way to look at how slides have been

enlisted in architecture's didactic practices. Particularly salient for us have been the personal slide collections of Michael Hugo-Brunt (1924–1988), Ruth Durack (1951–2011), and John White (1927–2020): three individuals who operated on the periphery of global centres but were central to local architectural discourse, between them teaching generations of architects, urban designers, and academics in Perth, Western Australia, the most geographically isolated capital city on Earth.

A small brown and yellow metal cabinet with two drawers holds the amassed slides of Hugo-Brunt, a highly mobile, self-described orientalist who made his way to Perth via New York, Toronto, Hong Kong, and Cape Town bringing images of global architecture with him as he travelled. The period of the slides' accumulation is reflected in the shifts in technology from rudimentary printed glass slides to cheap commercial transparencies, augmented by those made by the various universities that employed this peripatetic character. With no index, the detailed density of the metadata of the slide mount allows us to speculate on their origins, production, and use.

Four white-painted timber shelves units and thirty-one removable metal files house the 22,500 slides gathered by Durack a materialisation of her professional work and travel as an expatriate urban designer in North America, with teaching 'utility' slides labelled to distinguish them from main body of the personal collection. Ordered post-facto to suit the spatial constraints of their housing, the addition of a numbering system and a customised index card serve as a reference for collection. The sparsity of detail on the slide and index points to their status as an *aide de memoire*, rather than the individual image's importance in a narrative history of a discipline.

One dense, bottom-row drawer of the school's collective slide library holds White's archive of almost 3600 images– a pedantic, parochial determination to document Western Australia's towns and buildings (with one incomplete sleeve of snapshots of the Sydney Opera House). The collection is split: half are colour 35mm slides fastidiously documenting the state's buildings and the other half are rephotographed reproductions of an equally extensive but older archival collection of black and white prints. Custom-made slide sleeve stickers accommodate crampedly handwritten information with scant text on the mount pointing to the reliance on the intervention of White as author/ producer to make sense of the images and their combinatorial logic in the lecture performance.

## PERFORMING THE SLIDE-LECTURE

The visual assemblages of Hugo-Brunt, Durack, and White, might appear to us now as precious, fragile objects but to the people who used them they were the everyday media required to construct performative narratives about architecture. The audience they were intended to reach is not altogether different from the PowerPoint presentation sitting on my desktop

<footnote n="5">5 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Leonardo. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001), 20.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Gunther R. Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, *Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication* (London: Arnold, 2001), 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Kress and Van Leeuwen, *Multimodal Discourse*.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 José Van Dijck, "Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory as Object of Cultural Analysis," *Continuum* 18, No. 2 (2004): 261.</footnote>
for my own slide-lecture tomorrow, but the technology imprints itself
differently in each case. As Eisenhauer puts it '[d]iscursively, PowerPoint is
not a slide projector without a slide tray'.<fnref n="9" /> Both digital and analogue slide-
lectures rely on visual grammars and an authoritative presenter to get their
message across—but they do so in different ways. Our broader project is
identifying identified important differences but, in this essay, we are able to
focus on just two: semiotic multimodality; and social practices of collection,
assembly, and performance.

In the three collections we study, the slides themselves are monomodal
media (images without writing). Any descriptive writing that supplements the
visuality of the slide image is handwritten or typeset marginalia on either the
slide mount (Hugo-Brunt), slide sleeve stickers (White), or in an adjacent
index (Durack). These written texts were not projected to the slide-lecture
audience, visible only in the process of assembly. Analogue slide-lectures
encourage a kind of distributed and networked intertextuality rather than
synthetic multimodality. Written texts are not found in the image, but they
are elsewhere in the assemblage: assigned readings, typed lists handed
to an audience, or handwritten on a board alongside the lecture screen. In
the process of creating a projectable image from an existing image, the
analogue slide indexes the semiotic modes of the source media. White's
slides generate an analogue slide twin of his equally extensive print archive,
Hugo-Brunt recorded pages from books, sometimes his own publications,
while Durack meticulously applied tape to the slides to mask out any
vestiges of the antecedent media.

We might say that the analogue slide-lecture *resists* the synthesised and
seamless multimodal discourse that digital slide-lectures seem to *encourage*.
In the analogue slide-lecture there was little textual information—just images
organised in choreographed sequence with the presenter's voice-over as
a soundtrack. This ad-lib or scripted verbal information is now severed from
the images and their sequence. With this permanent separation of lecture
text and from the visual choreography of the slide-lecture we can only
imagine how the didactic presentation on French utopian planning (Hugo-
Brunt), outback Kalgoorlie (White) or New Urbanism (Durack) that might be
constructed from these visual resources.

Our second point focuses on changing social practices afforded by the two
kinds of slide-lectures. The analogue lecture mobilises a network of local
actors and technologies that work together to create the performance. After
the negotiation and assembly at the light table, carousels were carried
carefully to a lecture theatre and loaded on the projectors by an assistant.
The room would be darkened and the voice of the presenter (either reading
a prepared script or responding to the slides) provided a verbal backing
track to the visuality of the slides. A timber pointer might be used to draw
attention to a detail on the screen, casting a shadow across the slides.

The advance of the slides was accompanied by the telltale sound of the
slide being lifted out of the projector, the plastic rotating and the
next slide falling into place. The ominous clunk of a jam would necessitate
a pause in the lecture while the offending slide was removed and righted.

An analogue slide-lecture was a multi-party choreographed performance
that had to negotiate the demands and fragility of the various media
technologies (mount, sleeve, drawer, light table, slide, carousel, projector,
lectern controls). But also importantly, it also involved a cast of other
people. Hugo-Brunt, Durack, or White couldn't make a lecture without
talking to Raymond or enlisting a projection assistant. Colleagues might
borrow personal slides or negotiate the use of the shared light table. While
the buildings pictured by of Hugo-Brunt, Durack, and White were distant
from the audience, the forms of sociality encouraged by the analogue
slide-lecture are characterised by spatial co-presence and interpersonal
connection. While the cliché of the well-travelled professor is codified
into these images encouraging the familiar narrative of an academic
with privileged access to the canonical buildings as the constructor of
architectural history, as we argue elsewhere, the contingency of these
personal images also allows other actors into the frame.<fnref n="10" />

CONCLUSION: SOMETHING LOST | SOMETHING GAINED

With the digital slide-lecture in architecture, we have gained seamless and
synthetic multimodality where slide lectures have moved from primarily
visual to a multimedia construct. The ease of access to professional
architectural photographs, image-centric emphasis of web-based
architectural publications, and visual social networking sites all encourage
downloading and online sharing. At the same time, the additional work
needed to scan an image from a book or even to transfer from the memory
card of a digital camera discourages the inclusion of analogue media. What
has been gained in the digital slide-lecture is a kind of ease and immediacy
in collection, and the synthetic multimodality afforded by the digital screen
and software platforms. What is lost is a direct connection of the presenter
from the content of the slide, and the co-presence of a complex local
network of embodied actors working together to assemble the slide-lecture.

<footnote n="9">9 Jennifer F Eisenhauer, "Next Slide Please: The Magical, Scientific, and Corporate Discourses of Visual Projection Technologies," *Studies in Art Education* 47, No. 3 (2006): 211.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Philip Goldswain, Mia Kealy, and Mark Sawyer, "Performing the Portmanteau: Slides, plurality, and architectural history in the making", *Charrette* 9, No. 2, (2023): in press.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_58.png" /><figcaption>The dialogic mapping that shows the relationality and formation of the three discursive axes in Mimarlık.
Courtesy of the author.</figcaption></figure>

# Revealing Archives via Dialogic Mapping: Explication of Discourses on Architectural Education in Mimarlık Journal<fnref n="1" />

## INTRODUCTION

The discourses on architectural education in Turkey have undergone many changes since World War II. As a sensitive topic with social and political aspects, it is associated with unresolved issues discussed in architectural journals and guided by discursive debates. Especially before the digital era, published media played an important role in shaping architectural discourse, and most architectural journals served as the only platform for textual and visual communication between architects, students, and scholars.

The institutionalisation of architecture through professional associations and the establishment of schools of architecture cannot be separated from the publication of architectural journals, which served as channels of communication between those involved in practise and education. In this context, the archived data of the journals represent both explicit and tacit knowledge, ideas, meanings, and intertextual relationships among a variety of voices, some of which became popular and were widely disseminated while others remained hidden and suppressed during their time.

For all these reasons, archival studies of architectural journals can be an important source of data for understanding the discursive shifts in architectural education, with its causes and effects regarding to time and culture. However, the educational discourse published in architectural journals has been understudied which requires more attention than ever before as they provide a window into our evolving understanding of architectural education.

This study focuses on discursive practises published in *Mimarlık* journal which has been an example of a pioneering architectural journal in Turkey since its first publication in 1963. As the official publication of the Chamber of Architects of Turkey, *Mimarlık* has access to a wide readership, including professionals, academics, and students. Despite the political instability and economic difficulties Turkey has gone through over the years, the journal

<footnote n="1">1 This paper is based on the ongoing PhD research conducted under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aslıhan Şenel in Istanbul Technical University.</footnote>
has managed to endure and reach its readers to this day. The archives of
the journal offer a rich source of information on the changing landscape of
architectural education. This paper is an overview of an ongoing dissertation
study searching 296 issues of the journal to examine the evolution of
pedagogical discourse through the textual material published in *Mimarlık*
between 1963 and 2000. The time period of this research was chosen to
capture the most significant changes in architectural education in terms of
how they are perceived, represented, problematised, and discussed.

DIALOGIC MAPPING IN ARCHIVAL STUDIES

The challenge of extracting and visualising tacit knowledge from archived
data is driving us to innovate the way we collect, sort, and share data, which
also creates opportunities to explore and uncover new connections between
resources. The evolving relationships between dynamic datasets require
‘dialogic mapping’, a participatory approach to mapping that emphasises the
inclusion of diverse voices. The idea of mapping in this study differs from
the traditional contexts of cartography, which, as with maps of geographic
or political regions, usually focus on the accuracy and objectivity of the
represented geography or any kind of physical appearance. Despite their
scientific rigour, however, maps can also be used to represent personal
perspectives and serve as a means of interpretation and expression on
a particular topic.<fnref n="2" /> Dialogic maps are typically created through a process of
dialogue and collaboration between the different participants. This process
helps to ensure that the map is accurate and representative of all of the
different perspectives, unlike diagrams that are often used to show the
basic structure or layout of something that can be based on assumptions or
inferences. <fnref n="3" />

Dialogic principles borrowed from Bakhtin's theory of dialogism can be
applied to the concept of mapping to explore and discuss new participatory
mapping strategies in archival studies.<fnref n="4" /> This approach can be used to
develop an argument on mapping discursive practises that consists of
opening, unfolding, and explaining the textual material. Dialogic maps
would create an open system for knowledge exchange, allowing for the
identification and sharing of new perspectives, tools, and approaches in
architectural education among architects, students, faculty, and other
decision-makers. By adopting dialogic principles,<fnref n="5" /> this study explores

a dynamic, multidisciplinary approach to mapping relations that can be
established between discourses and their authors by including diverse
voices from different time periods from the journal's archive. Dialogic
interrelation refers to the interactions between participants in a dialogic
activity, which cannot be limited to linguistic principles alone.<fnref n="6" /> Bakhtin
argued for this pluralistic understanding of dialogue that emphasises
diversity and constant movement. This distinguishes dialogic mapping as
a unique method for exploring and understanding complex social systems
from actor-network theory (ANT) and hermeneutical analysis, which place
a greater emphasis on language and interpretation. Dialogic mapping is
a participatory method that focuses on the relationships between human
actors and the meaning-making process, in other words, the practical
task of mapping relationships using and combining elements of ANT and
hermeneutical analysis. By mapping the relationships in their system,
participants can identify opportunities for intervention and change. Dialogic
maps are not just representations of the phenomenon, but tools for changing
the phenomenon.<fnref n="7" />

I believe that the most interesting part of this archival study is to show the
relationality between textual materials, rather than treating them as singular
and independent acts. In this way, it is possible to identify multiple material-
discursive practises that produce arguments about architectural education
as professional training, disciplinary action, or institutional practise that are
shaped around particular domains of knowledge and power, and to examine
how the assumptions that connect the contexts and concerns of discourses
on architectural education influence the practise of education as a field of
knowledge and activity.

MAPPING THE THREE AXES OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION
IN MIMARLIK

Deciding on the content of a map requires several preparatory steps that
determine the methodology of the mapping process. One of the most
important steps is the elimination of certain information, which is necessary
to highlight the information that represents the voice of the cartographer.
This process inevitably leads to a hegemony of certain concepts, ideas,
or visions over suppressed information that is excluded from the content.
As with mapping, journals, with their editorial boards and decisions, have
the potential to produce suppressive or highly politicised voices in favour
of a particular perspective. In the 1970s, for example, many articles and
statements<fnref n="8" /> authored by editorial board were published in support of

<footnote n="2">2 John Brian Harley, "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," in *Geographic Thought: a Praxis Perspective*, ed. George Henderson and Marvin Waterstone (New York: Routledge, 2008), 129-148.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Alan MacEachren, *How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design* (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Mikhail Mikhailovic Bakhtin, *Speech Genres and Other Late Essays*, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 103–13.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Per Linell, *Approaching Dialogue: talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives*, (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2001), 67–90. Linell identifies three main principles of Bakhtin’s dialogic approach: (1) Sequentiality refers to the sequence of interactive conversations that relate to each other directly or indirectly. (2) Joint construction refers to the fact that dialogue is co-constructed by participants through their coordinated actions and interactions. (3) Act-activity interdependence refers to the fact that actions (or interactions) in discourse are always situated in an</footnote>

<footnote>activity (dialogue, encounter) that is jointly produced by the interactants.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Per Linell and Ivana Markova, "Acts in discourse: from monological speech acts to dialogical interactions," *Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour* 23, No. 2 (June 1993): 173–195.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Gizem Özger Özgür, "The (re)production of space with a practice of everyday life in the layers of the city Istanbul; The case study of 'Conversation space' Çorlulu Ali Paşa Madrasah", *A|Z Itu Journal Of The Faculty Of Architecture* 15, No. 2, (July 2018): 107–123, https://doi.org/10.5505/ituja.2018.73693</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Issues such as No. 69, 87, 94 and 110 especially represent Chamber's political perspective on educational policies of the government focusing on the problems of higher education in Turkey.</footnote>
the Chamber's political views on government policies to privatise higher education in Turkey. However, the change in editorials over the decades also leads to a change in the oppressive voice by allowing contradictory arguments within the same platform.

Following dialogical principles, this study began with the creation of a reading list of discursive practises on architectural education based on *Mimarlık's* textual production published in selected years. In order to establish a dialogical relationship between the texts of the journal, all data (titles, keywords, concepts, articulations, etc.) were linked to their socio-political and historical contexts, following the principles of sequentiality, joint-construction, and act-activity interdependence.<fnref n="9" /> The three axes that emerged from the selected material are professionalisation (I), disciplinarisation (II), and institutionalisation (III), which are developed in the discourses on architectural education through the changing role of the architect:

**Professionalisation:** refers to the vocational approaches in architectural education, which sees educational institutions as a tool to train 'coordinating' and 'competent' professionals with a high level of technical knowledge, management skills, and multitasking abilities.

**Disciplinarisation:** refers to the 'scientification' of the design process and methods in architecture, defining the architect as a multidisciplinary 'researcher' who collects unbiased data and develops rational solutions to specific problems.

**Institutionalisation:** refers to the process of 'globalisation' and 'standardisation' of the curriculum to meet industry expectations by training 'qualified' and 'authorised' professionals.

To briefly explain these three axes, it is important to note that the first description of the word 'coordinator' and 'competent' in the journal was based on the Western idea of modern architecture.<fnref n="10" /> The various versions of this ideal figure have clearly dominated the discourse on architectural education for a long period of time. During this period, critical questions about education have focused on the training of competent architects with the skills necessary to perform adequately and to supervise other professionals in designing and building. Educational discussions along the axis of professionalisation inevitably evolve in accordance with Turkey's sociocultural environment. It can be stated that this definitive role of the architect changed in the 1970s with the widespread disciplinary approaches, the emergence of new disciplines, and the politicisation of the journal under the influence of the student movements of the time.<fnref n="11" /> During this period, the discourse on architectural education sought new methods of architectural

design research and attempted to describe architecture in the realm of science, free from personal judgments.<fnref n="12" /> After the military coup in 1980, the pace of Turkey's "Westernisation" was supported by its application for full membership in the European Union in 1987, and accordingly, debates about the 'globalisation' and 'standardisation' of architectural education gained popularity in *Mimarlık*.

In the 1990s, the notion of 'training the competent' in conjunction with educating the 'authorised' and 'competent' became one of the main arguments for criticising the current educational agenda. The voice of professional associations dominates the critical discourse, accusing universities of providing inadequate training and incompetent professionals. As a result of this argument, terms such as 'standardisation' and 'accreditation' became widely used in discursive production, institutionalising the discourse of professionalisation.<fnref n="13" />

Throughout the study, the process of critical reading of the articles is followed by coding the titles, wordings, and expressions that convey explicit and hidden messages that show the authors' approach to the problem of education. The 218th issue of *Mimarlık* is one of the thematic issues on 'architectural education' which can be examined to understand dialogical interrelations between discursive practises. In this issue, Aydan Balamir begins her argument in a linear perspective by drawing a comparison between Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus, highlighting the two different approaches in the history of institutional education.<fnref n="14" /> According to the author, Ecole des Beaux-Arts represents the traditional master-apprentice relationship in education that considers architectural education as a part of professional training, while Bauhaus represents an educational model that breaks away from the traditional ideas and formations and emphasises on creative productivity. She explains these shifts in the context of other social aspects that affect the discursive transformation of the architect's role. In the same issue, Necdet Teymur makes another comparison, between two different perspectives on architectural education that are represented by profession and the university. He points out the differences between architectural practise and education in terms of their goals and priorities.<fnref n="15" /> From a dialogical perspective, these two separate articles can be viewed in a dialogical relationship. Their arguments and approaches may differ, but together they construct a dialogue that highlights the tensions between two institutional voices: professionalisation and disciplinarisation.

Reviewing *Mimarlık*, it becomes clear that as the role of the architect changes over the years, the discourse on education have eventually adapted to the new positions of the profession. The roles, tasks, and goals describing

<footnote n="9">9 Linell, *Approaching Dialogue: talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives*, 69.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Siegfrid Giedion, "Mimarın Eğitimi Üzerine," trans. Yıldız Sey, *Mimarlık* 10, No. 4 (April 1964): 12-13.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Christopher Alexander, "Sistemler Üreten Sistemler," *Mimarlık* 114, No. 4 (April 1973): 29-31; Atilla Yücel, "Mimarlıkta Metodoloji/Sistemli Yaklaşımlar ve Mimarlık Eğitimi," *Mimarlık* 114, No. 4 (April 1973): 22-28.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Murat Nişancıoğlu, Süha Özkan, and Mete Turan, "Mimarlık Eğitiminde Çağdaşlaşma Demokratikleşme ve Bilimselleşme Koşutunda Olacaktır," *Mimarlık* 155, No. 2 (February 1978): 26-28.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Feyyaz Erpi, "Nasıl Bir Mimarlık Eğitimi?," *Mimarlık* 264, No. 4 (July 1995): 17-18; Orhan Hacıhasanoğlu, "Mimarlık Eğitimi ve Forumu," *Mimarlık* 264, No. 4 (July 1995): 15-16.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Aydan Balamir, "Mimarlık Söyleminin Değişimi ve Eğitim Programları," *Mimarlık* 218, No. 8 (1985): 9-15.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Necdet Teymur, "Mesleki Eğitimde Sorunlar," *Mimarlık* 218, No. 8 (1985): 18-19.</footnote>
the profession through the discursive practises change from 'multi-tasking' and 'coordinator' identity in the 1960s to a rational scientific figure of a 'specific discipline' in the 1970s. After the first years of the 1980s, the 'competent' multitasking figure with interdisciplinary working skills returns to the arguments, leaving its leading, coordinating role behind. Now the new tasks of architecture are no longer determined by the social priorities and the unique skills of the architect, but the new dynamics of the global economy. The transforming definition of competence and rationality into professionalisation, introducing new global standards into institutions of education and profession.

FINAL REMARKS

Overall, it is important to note that the process of dialogical mapping characterised by discursive practises is based on a participatory process of discourse production that involves reference dependence and sequential occurrence. This shows us how a connection is made between the discourses and the sociocultural environment, and helps us to present the dialogical relations of discursive practises on architectural education.

Architectural journals are extremely important archival sources for understanding the transformation of architectural education in relation to various socio-political aspects that shape the role of the architect in society. However, in the search for new approaches to education, the interrelationship between different archival studies is still very limited to paint the overall picture of architectural education. The dialogic mapping approach can be adapted to emerging digital technologies to promote participatory mapping strategies in archival studies. Structuring interactive open systems to visualise and verbalise complex datasets can help us share our insights and explore new perspectives for the future of architectural education. In this way, I believe, future researchers can participate in exploring the unmarked voices within the exponential possibilities of dialogic access to archival data. There is no question that the changes that will occur in education can reflect the crucial insights of sociological, cultural, and theoretical research. In this sense, remembering the ethical position of architecture is important to rethink the mission and vision of architectural education.

<figure><img src="image_59.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_60.png" /><figcaption>Screenshot of BiDiRIA, a prototypical database of Italian architectural journals.</figcaption></figure>

# Journals as Maps: Reconsidering BiDiRIA

## BiDiRIA

Developed in one semester in the second half of 2021 within the departments of Architecture and Urban Studies and of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano, the BiDiRIA (Towards a Digital Library of Italian Architectural Periodicals) project aimed to verify the possibility and potential of a new retrospective approach to 20th-century design-centred journals.<fnref n="1" />

At the time the call for projects was launched, Italy was experiencing one of the most critical peaks of the last pandemic and a rigorous lockdown: teaching was only taking place in distance mode and libraries and archives were inaccessible. In these conditions, the gap between the rare initiatives of digital sharing of periodicals and, more generally, of knowledge undertaken in our country and some foreign experiences (above all, the Swiss portal *e-periodica*, but also important French cases such as *Gallica* and the digital library of the Cité de l'Architecture, to mention only to the contexts geographically closest to us) was particularly evident. This worked as a stimulus.

Funded by the Italian Ministry of Research through a competitive call aimed more at the hard sciences than the humanities, the project was required to produce a prototype to be developed in an eventual second phase.<fnref n="2" />

This prototype consists of a query system through which different searches can be made on a database grouping the issues of seven different Italian periodicals published in 1959. These are *Casabella continuità*, possibly the most celebrated postwar Italian architectural journal that resumed its activity at the end of 1953 under the direction of Ernesto Rogers, *L'architettura: cronache e storia*, founded in 1955 and directed by Bruno Zevi, *La casa. Quaderni di architettura e critica*, a lesser-known journal founded that same year and directed by the Roman architects Pio Montesi and Paolo Portoghesi, *Edilizia Moderna*, *Zodiac*, a journal promoted, since 1957, by Adriano Olivetti, *Urbanistica*, the organ of the National Institute of Urban Planning and, finally, *Civiltà delle Macchine*, founded in 1953 by Leonardo Sinisgalli and supported by the Institute for the Industrial Reconstruction.

<footnote n="1">1 The research team includes Federico Deambrosis (PI), Andrea Gritti and Luka Skansi from DASTU, Piero Fraternali and Federico Milan from DEIB. Marco Voltini, Pierfrancesco Sacerdoti, Federica Deo, Michele Porcelluzzi and Vittoria De Franceschini collaborated to the project.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Call "MIUR FISR 2020 Emergenza Covid-19", decree DD nr. 562 of May 5, 2020. The fact that, almost two years after the conclusion of the project, there is no news of the evaluation of the first phase and the projects funded for the second, could be the subject of further reflection.</footnote>
As an informed observer will realise at first glance, this is a heterogeneous sample, made up of well-known and almost forgotten journals differing in their periodicity, target audience, subjects, style, and manner of communication. Equally glaring are some absences, starting with *Domus*, which we excluded in this phase as it is perhaps the only Italian architectural periodical with a digital archive accessible via the web, albeit rather conventional in its search methods.<fnref n="3" />

Due to the short time available to us, we concentrated the prototype on a single year: 1959. At the height of the so-called economic boom, Italian architecture appears in one of its heydays and the scene of architectural periodicals is extremely vibrant.

Therefore, BiDiRIA stands out as a dual observatory. On the one hand, it aims to study architecture and its evolutions and hybridisations through the traces left on the pages of periodicals; on the other, it is also extremely interested in journals as autonomous objects, themselves the outcome of design thoughts.

## THE MACHINERY

The construction of the prototype started, of course, with the digitisation of the issues of the diverse journals. Each article or, more precisely, each item (considering by this term also the editorials, news, reviews and the other kind of columns that populated the periodicals of those years) corresponds to a file. Journals were thus exploded: the logic that guided the construction of the indexes or structured monographic issues is now barely intelligible. In fact, each item is visualised as a dot, feeding the cloud of articles originally published in the seven different journals in the semester of reference. Each dot contains a link to a copy of the article, which can then be quickly displayed and, in theory, by moving the cursor from one dot to the next, it would even be possible to browse through a single issue in its entirety. But these dots change colour, from dark blue to light purple, if the referring item meets the requirements that can be set in the right-hand column.

Therefore, BiDiRIA makes it possible not only to browse through single periodicals from remote but also to use them as a map of the architectural discourse. This kind of map is reliable to the extent that subjective elements are minimised by a selection of journals of different orientations and approaches. In other words, it also provides quantitative elements such as the number of references to the production of a given foreign country, the space granted to residential architecture in relation to public or production spaces, rather than the relationship between buildings made of wood or reinforced concrete. Obviously, it is also possible to use the prototype to map the fortunes of individual designers or the consistency of the work of individual authors.

The criteria we have introduced in the query column are as follows.

* 'Journal' allows to focus on a single periodical, excluding the others.

* 'Category' deals with the different kinds of contents journals are made of: 'projects', 'opinions', 'essays', 'reviews', 'news', 'columns', 'art' and 'other'. Some of them open a second level of query: it is possible to search for built or unbuilt projects, essays can be historical or of another kind.

* 'Authors', 'Designer/Artist' and 'Geography' are obvious.

* 'Function' allows to select one of the following ones: 'commercial', 'product design', 'institutional buildings', 'exhibitions', 'workspaces', 'mobility', 'leisure', 'residence', 'facilities', 'urban spaces'; facilities are further divided into different categories (administration, cult, culture, education, restaurants & hotels, health, others).

* 'Scale' is perhaps a less common and conventional criterion. From the bigger to the smaller, we used 'XL' for planning, 'L' for urban design, 'M' is the scale of buildings, 'S' is that of interiors, 'XS' is used for objects, furniture, and details.

The following criteria, 'building types' and 'building elements', proved to be problematic. In many cases, the role of the compiler is hard because the characteristics of the buildings or projects described are, with respect to these categories, difficult to define and often ambiguous. In fact, if most of the time a bridge or a city plan are easy to identify and define, categories such as 'multi-storey building' can be applied to very different cases lacking therefore precision, if not sense. Similar situations can occur when one focuses on building materials and techniques. On the other hand, these criteria allow the more proper architectural aspects of the discourse to be explored in depth and represent perhaps the most challenging frontier.

In this first phase, a series of types were identified and the eighth criterion focused on the building materials and construction techniques adopted. The ninth and final criterion concerns representation, indicating the typologies (photographs, technical drawings, models, photomontages, maps, historical maps and graphs) used in each article.

Each search highlights chromatically a sample that meets the criteria introduced; within this, it is possible, by moving the cursor, to receive information on each article and, eventually, to visualise it.

## OPEN ISSUES

Even from the succinct and somewhat cold description we have proposed, it will probably have become clear that the content of the journals we have analysed offers a kind of resistance and adds much to the traditional cataloguing based on pre-established categories. The analytical tension

<footnote n="3">3 See: https://archive.domusweb.it/detail/publication/414.</footnote>
and synthetic requirement that underlie this project are difficult to bring to
a satisfactory mediation. When the former prevails, the categories become
many in number, articulated in multiple levels, pursuing a complexity that
they, still, will not be able to reach. The second, on the other hand, implies
a level of simplification that seems inadequate, if not mortifying, to describe
an extraordinarily articulated series of experiences and projects.

Facing this seemingly insoluble, but only mediatable and recalibratable
alternative through trials and errors, the project, also on the basis of past
experience,<fnref n="4" /> has constantly been reasoning about a sharable and exportable
data storage and cataloguing system.<fnref n="5" />

It is evident how few steps have been taken to date in defining Thesauri related to design culture. This observation is valid at the international level, where, for example, the Avery Index proposes five document types, some twenty features referring to iconography and almost fifty languages but entrusts the development of further investigations to free research, possibly correlating two entries according to logical AND, OR, or NOT relations. Also, on a national and regional level, databases such as ‘Archinet’ and the European network ‘Urbadoc’ allow queries by title, subject, authors, and places, delegating, in fact, the majority of topics to the free search, which is also the only modality used by important private initiatives such as the digital archive of *Domus* mentioned above.

Free research is thus generally entrusted with the task of compensating for the gaps and rigidities implicit in any Thesaurus. This irreplaceable role of correction and integration, usually developed with OCR systems, could be preceded, upstream of the full-text access, by a system of querying and displaying quantitative data relating to the variation, over time and in different geographical contexts, of basic indicators. In this sense, the prototype provides its users with maps capable of spatialising data deduced from a codified and integrated query system.

Moreover, the reasons for the interest in architectural periodicals, among the
most authentic expressions of the zeitgeist of those years, largely transcend
the content sphere. They in fact also concern the tools and forms through
which contents and messages are conveyed.

HORIZONS

BiDiRIA is also a place for the incubation of hypotheses and alternatives that, even when not immediately applied to the prototype, take on value as perspectives.

Journals are the product of a large but controllable number of actors who intervene in the creative and production process with different roles and intensities (directors, editors, correspondents, stable or occasional collaborators). In the case of architecture journals, actors configure a network that proposes multiple entanglements between one title and another and is articulated in a second level, referring to designers. Not infrequently, these levels contaminate each other, and architects published as designers in one journal reappear as authors in the same or another in multiple cross-references not unrelated to mutual promotion and censure. This ‘social’ look at magazines will be developed from some pioneering experiences, such as the “Global Journals Portal”, which has dedicated one of its five sections to the ‘Actors’ network’.<fnref n="6" />

A broadened look at architectural periodicals makes it possible to map
the epicentres of architectural practice and debate and their variation over
time, making it possible to localise the geographical location of the content
of the journals. Thus, alongside taken-for-granted centralities (Milan and
Rome above all), unexpected polarities emerge that for different reasons
(patronage, individual designers, public programmes, disaster reconstruction
programmes, etc.) assert themselves on the national scene, at least for
a season. At the same time, journals provide a precise indication of the
international references of the Italian debate, recording how the attention
along given geographical lines varies over time and by which interests and
reasons it is driven. These observations will result in various maps, also
animated, visualising the geographical implications at very different scales,
from the local to the global.

The journals we have considered are structured by strongly hierarchical indexes containing differentiated but recurring elements. These settings that distinguish or unite one journal from another are reflected almost linearly in the graphic cages that organise the contents of the different pages and their reciprocal relationships. An in-depth project on periodicals cannot disregard this ‘structural’ vision, the study of which will benefit from the analytical tools and visualisations with which the digital humanities will endow it. This interest in the journal as an object, in the rules and criteria that determine and distinguish it, can be focused on specific aspects.

It is, for instance, conceivable that the development of the prototype will be
characterised by the use of lexicometry tools to corroborate the results of
the queries with analytical indexes, word clouds, data capable of highlighting
hapax and recurring terms, or rather to analyse semantic units. In particular,
diagrams can be automatically extracted from the index repertoire, which
can help the user to refine or reorient the interrogation systems of the
digitised sample.

The prototype was constructed using the so-called facet classification.
Each individual item was classified on the basis of a set of criteria, splitting

<footnote n="4">4 See: http://atlante.iuav.it/index.php.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 A key step in this reflection was the internal workshop held on 26 November 2021 at the Historical Library of the Politecnico di Milano, which was attended, among others, by Angela Windholz and Elisabetta Zonca from the Library of the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 See: https://sismo.inha.fr/s/en/page/welcome.</footnote>
it into a set of properties that allow it to be included or excluded from the
result of a specific query. The query interface allows the selection of the
characteristics of interest (facets). The selection corresponds to the display
of the subset of contents (typically pages) that satisfy the highlighted
selection criterion within the entire corpus of the digital collection. A further
interaction allows the display of the details of each result, thus enabling
the individual element and the whole that makes up the query response
to be controlled. Future developments include the design of digitisation,
querying and consultation modes that go beyond structured metadata
and faceted searching. The idea is to realise computer vision components
based on convolutional neural networks capable of extracting and indexing
also structural, compositional and graphic elements of the page to enable
innovative forms of querying that also exploit information such as the
position of textual and iconographic components on the page, the style
of composition, the use of specific fonts or compositional formats.

<figure><img src="image_61.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_62.png" /></figure>

The index card accompanying the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Berlin. Photo by Egon Eiermann estate describing the competition materials of the Mechtild Ebert, saai archive for architecture and engineering, KIT Karlsruhe.

Mechthild Ebert (KIT/saai Karlsruhe)
and Anna-Maria Meister (KHI, Max Planck Institute, KIT/saai Karlsruhe)

# The Powers of Metadata:
## Stories of Archival
## Knowledge Constructions

### WHO SHOULD WANTS TO BE IN THE ARCHIVE?

In the holdings of the saai, the archive for architecture and engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a seemingly innocuous index card accompanying the Eiermann estate holds the data of an architectural design competition. An index card like many of its kind, used in the 19th century format of the categorisation of universal knowledge, used for later generations of scholars to sort through the archives of German architect Egon Eiermann, or simply used to capture metadata. The object in question – no less than the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin – became one of Eiermann’s most famous buildings, a symbol of post-WWII Germany, site of several political events, an annual Christmas market and, not so long ago, of a deadly attack. On its index card, the third line in the metadata field for the object after name and place is design (Entwurf). Design here describes neither the shape nor form of the architectural structure, but demarcates its creator. At least that is how this index card presents its information: Egon Eiermann is named as the sole author. And yet, we find another name on the card in close proximity: that of his long-term office partner Robert Hilgers, namely in the added reasoning behind Eiermann’s name. In brackets someone typed that ‘Hilgers should not be named’, and, maybe someone else, maybe the same person, crossed out the ‘should’ by hand and replaced it with ‘does not want’ in blue on top of it: ‘Hilgers soll will nicht genannt werden’.

This text explores the tension held in these layered deletions and additions of information both temporally and indexically: it dives into the space between them. From someone who 'should' not be named to personal decisions playing into a posterior not-wanting-to-be-named narrative. Who recorded which name at which point in time with what kind of intention, manipulation or framing is precisely where archival knowledge is written, recorded, confirmed, changed and interpreted - forming, ultimately, a palimpsest of (sometimes fragile) 'facts' preserved in the saai database.

If one were to browse the entire catalogue of the saai – one of the largest architectural collections in Germany with estates from Frei Otto, Rolf Gutbrod and Günter Behnisch, to name the best known – one would find works from over 200 offices and architects. They would be sorted by name, referenced by material and medium, size and date, catalogued according to pre-defined categories and stored for future visitors. One would not find
many women, their practices, or spaces for or by marginalised groups or diverse practices. As many institutionalised archives in the Western world, this speaks to the long-standing conventions of a discipline constructed through so-called canonical figures – and their oeuvre. But the metadata of the archival catalogue does not consist of objective, stable categories. Hence what this text wants to explore are the powers of metadata as verb: the active usage of archival methods and techniques to uncover how histories are lost, and how to write alternative ones through them.

## THE CASE OF ROBERT HILGERS
(OF LOST OFFICE PARTNERS AND HIDDEN COLLABORATORS)

One would discover office partners removed, hidden in or dropped from estates, such as aforementioned Robert Hilgers, whose partnership with Eiermann does not appear in the posterior presentation of Eiermann's projects. Partners or collaborators are marked temporarily on drafts or caught on camera, mentioned in letters or on office letterheads, but never make it into the metadata of the estate, despite their significant contribution to the office (and its success). Hilgers was Eiermann's office partner from 1946 to 1966, a period where the office worked on more than 100 projects, and contemporaneous publications sometimes list Hilgers using the wording 'Egon Eiermann with [mit] Robert Hilgers'. Following Eiermann's death in 1970, a contract between his joint heirs and Hilgers names the latter explicitely as co-author, even if not for all the projects (one exception being for example the estate's furniture). Similarly, there never was any doubt that the German Pavilion for the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels was a joint project of Eiermann and Sep Ruf – and yet, the project is solely filed under Eiermann's estate and name.

The transferred collection is often referred to in documents as the 'Nachlaß [Estate] Egon Eiermann'. Subsequently, the objects were roughly arranged for the first time, recorded, and in some cases given a stamp of the Institute for Architectural History (Institut für Baugeschichte). Each project known at the time was given an index card in which various basic data such as location, project name, abbreviation and design were recorded. These index cards were supplemented by a project list signed by both Hilgers and the representative of the joint heirs of Eiermann in 1975, naming multiple designers of a large part of the projects.

But the emphasis on the 'oeuvre' of a single architect as governing principle for the saai's archival structure proved pervasive: signatures – a fairly permanent attribute of an archival object – were assigned, where the names of the architects and offices are used to create a maximum five-digit sequence of letters. 'EE' stands for Egon Eiermann (or, as another example, 'BuP' stands for 'Behnisch und Partner'). The donation contract as 'Werkarchiv' further enforces the idea that the production of an architect is always a 'Werk' (oeuvre), replacing the earlier used denominator 'Nachlaß'. The term 'Werkarchiv Egon Eiermann' is also imprecise regarding the actual archived

objects: it includes objects that were handed over after 1974 by Hilgers, Rudolf Büchner, Immo Boyken or Brigitte Eiermann and contains joint projects with Ruf, Fritz Jaenecke, Hilgers, and posthumous projects. Despite these complex genealogies, the denomination in the archival records and their digital entries reinforces the impression within (and from) the archive of Eiermann as the sole author of these projects.

## THE CASE OF MARIA VERENA GIESELMANN
(OF WIVES AND DAUGHTERS)

Maria Verena Gieselmann (née Fischer), is one of the few women represented in the saai with their own estate. Looking more closely, however, one will find that her estate consists only of a few documents (a diary, a photo album and correspondence) despite Gieselmann's profile as international and independent architect. Her materials in the saai stem largely from a scholarship in the beginning of the 1950's, when she travelled to the US to participate in the 'Women's Affairs Program', a program sponsored by the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labour. Additionally, in 1957, she was noticeably not merely in an office partnership with her father Alfred Fischer and Reinhard Gieselmann, her husband, but was an experienced freelance architect in Karlsruhe.

Her estate however holds no record of her own architectural activities. Taking a look at the estate of her father reveals projects she worked on with him and her husband in a photo album both gifted to him on his 75th birthday, which consists largely of photos showing completed projects. The name of the project, the date of completion or the planning and construction period and, if existing, the co-authors are written on narrow, typewritten strips of paper. Only when looking more closely it is revealed that several of these projects filed in the estate of her father in a photo album (an object associated with private life rather than professional achievement) are the very projects during Gieselmann's time as a freelance architect – projects missing from the records of her own estate. Similarly, the records of her husband's estate are already much more extensive than Gieselmann's own despite being not yet fully inventoried – not least because it holds all their collaborative projects. The size and volume of his estate demonstrates the overwriting process of archive sorting logics and historical bias toward the male partner as author. Both, archiving and documenting, pushed her work into the fringes, the private, the domestic, thereby suppressing volume and visibility of her production as an architect. And the archival logic confirmed these hegemonies: the difference in texture and composition of estates by women requires a difference in their archival handling and processing. In reality the structures and infrastructures of archival processes reproduce existing archival hegemonies, as historically, archives were conceived and built with the male estate and 'oeuvre' as mold.
OTHER ARCHIVES ARE POSSIBLE
(OF METADATA ACTIVISM OR CONSERVATIVE CANONISATION)

While new structures and categorisations are urgently needed, the question of how to reevaluate the existing metadata of the archive requires operations on a different plane altogether. Retrospectively changing already assigned or existing signatures cannot be the solution, but expanding metadata to be recorded might be a powerful tool with lasting impact: one that might be employed in the course of large digitisation projects such as the one at saai for the digital catalogue of Egon Eiermann's work. By drawing together and cross-analysing collections and convolutes against the dictum of the personal (male) estate, this text argues that it is by utilising the powers of metadata that one can create, write and shape other, more inclusive archival structures for alternative architecture histories. On the one hand, there is the possibility of naming the authors of the objects (plans, photos, etc.), on the other hand, the architects or the office, in order to present an alternative narrative than that of the individual genius figure. Since, if not recorded consistently in the metadata, especially supporting actors (some with, as it turns out, a starring role) start disappearing from historical narratives—or never make it into them in the first place.

In a feminist tradition of building upon existing structures our work in the saai wants to investigate steps that can be taken not to undo the archive entirely, but to intentionally annotate it with more diverse voices. Rather than simply switching the collecting strategy from one figure to a substitute, we want to test out Donna Haraway's argument for diversification and differentiation building on the existing structures in *Cyborg Manifesto*.<fnref n="1" /> And yet, the question of how one can write other histories from a German (formerly male-run) archive within a Technical University by subversively and productively working from within the logics of the archive is not a trivial pursuit. How is one to mobilise archival activism in the intricate and paralysing bureaucracies of public institutions?

Following Achile Mbembe, one might have to concede that archives are always ‘fundamentally a matter of discrimination and selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents, and the refusal of that same status to others’.<fnref n="2" /> And it is the space in archives and institutions that is contested territory – literally so when archivists negotiate how to select (supposedly) worthy material. Much has been written recently on the question of permanence in relation to history, and the discriminatory nature of historiography as favourable to those with the privilege to build, maintain, or monumentalise.<fnref n="3" /> This goes

for peoples as it does for individuals, and it solidifies in the archive. The giving space to others—here exemplified on paper by literally giving the space to Eiermann over Hilgers—is both the task and the challenge of architectural archives built over centuries, dominated by canonising Western value regimes.

If one considers the necessary restructuring of architectural knowledge—and, therefore, a different way to write and preserve and construct its histories—one must question seemingly stable categories which have been stalwarts. If an estate of an architecture office (already the first two assumptions: the estate and the office) is offered to an archive such as the saai, it is presented as a project list, rolls and rolls of plans, architectural models and several folders with correspondence. Then the spatial negotiation begins: what can be taken on, what needs to be left out. One can imagine that objects such as textile knits or fragile craftwork have long been not categorised as things worthy of archival treatment. And yet, recent histories have shown how essential precisely the histories of seemingly marginal and non-architectural making and creating are for a more diverse and deeper understanding of architecture and its histories—and, not least, its protagonists.<fnref n="4" /> Boxes of unidentifiable, unsorted postcards or Xerox copies are still prone to being discarded to make space in the archive for ‘proper’ architectural archives like models, plans, or sketchbooks—even though they might entail different methods and modes of thinking about and creating architecture. When architecture historian S.E. Eisterer writes about Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s time as architect in the resistance against the Nazi regime, for example, she unravels the history of a series of small knitted slippers (crafted in prison) alongside conventional archival methods; and yet most archives would still dismiss non-architectural objects from a list handed over by the donors or their heirs.<fnref n="5" /> When architecture historian Min Kyung Lee writes about Korean wigs in a shop in the United States, what she really constructs is the architectural space of a migrant community. When objects found in the Mediterranean are treated like archival objects at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, the logic of what must be preserved shifts; and when Arjit Sen writes about a street in Chicago, he writes about a group of space makers that were not trained and never afforded the space or means to erect monuments or collect files.<fnref n="6" />

<footnote n="1">1 Donna Jeanne Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" in *Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature* (London: Routledge, 1991).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Achile Mbembe, "The Power of the Archive and its Limits" in *Refiguring the Archive*, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, (Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 2002), 20, originally published by Kluwer Academic Publisher in 2002.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 See among others Cathrine Bublatzky and Fiona Siegenthaler, (Un)Sighted Archives of Migration: Spaces of Encounter and Resistance, 2023); On Alinari: Archive in Transition (Milan: a+mbookstore, 2021); Francis X. Blouin, *Archives, Documentation and the Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar*,</footnote>

<footnote>(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Gracen Brilmyer, "Archival Assemblages: Applying Disability Studies' Political/Relational Model to Archival Description," *Archival Science* 18, No. 2 (June 2018): 95–118; Ann Laura Stoler, *Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination* (Durham: Duke UP, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Alla Vronskaya, "The Work of Perchanush Msryan-Oksuzyan-Women Building Socialism: Female Architects of the Socialist World," August 5, 2022, https://womenbuildingsocialism.org/the-work-of-perchanush-msryan-oksuzyan/; Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," *Feminist Studies* 14, No. 3 (1988); Tarez Samra Graban, "From Location(s) to Locatability: Mapping Feminist Recovery and Archival Activity through Metadata," *College English* 76, No. 2 (2013): 171–93.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 S. E. Eisterer, "Spatial Practices of Dissidence: Identity, Fragmentary Archives, and the Austrian Resistance in Exile, 1938–1945," *Aggregate* 10 (2022), https://doi.org/10.53965/DCMI2133.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Min Kyung Lee presented her work in progress in a seminar lecture on May 4, 2023 at KIT and Kassel University. For the latter example, see Arjit Sen, "Viewpoint: Spatial Ethnography of Devon Avenue, Chicago" in *Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum*, Volume 28, Number 2, Fall 2021, 3–24; Massimo Ricciardo, Costanza Caraffa, and Almut Goldhahn, eds., *Encounters in an archive: objects of migration* (Foligno, Firenze: Viaindustriae publishing Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut, 2023).</footnote>
But what about the space that needs to be preserved for knowledge yet to
come, for documents destroyed, for figures that never held a place in the
index? Can one think of a redistribution of space not just for past figures that
may slowly reclaim their place, but for a future archive configured of different
kinds of knowledge altogether? After all, one might wonder who is the one
holding the blue pen deciding who 'wants' to be named in the archive and who
does not – and whether that pen should finally be passed on to write other
entries and different histories. Just as we must strive toward the diversification
of themes, materials, people and narratives documented in the archive, we
propose to diversify the logics of the archive itself. If archives should contain
not one but several layered histories held in one estate, and if they should
allow the uncovering of buried figures and stories, then the metadata can no
longer come from just one source, be it the donor or the archivist. Accordingly,
the pen should not only be passed on to another person, but the writing
of metadata should become a collective practice, the procedures of which
need to be transparent and accessible. How such an ambition can take
form in the archival processing is one of the tasks archives (and archivists)
must ask of future database developers, AI processes and, not least, of
themselves. Indeed, what may really need to change is not just the metadata
logged to the objects, but the striving for permanence (even if for a more
inclusive one) – instead opening up new avenues of fragile constructions
of shifting knowledges.

<figure><img src="image_63.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_64.png" /><figcaption>Architect Barbie on a visit to the Az W Cold Storage, nodes of knowledge Still from the video installation: *Hot Questions—Cold Storage*, The Permanent Exhibition at the Architekturzentrum Wien, 2022.</figcaption></figure>

Monika Platzer and Iris Ranzinger (Architekturzentrum Wien)

# ‘Az W Collection Online Meets the Encyclopaedia of Architects’:
## Our Kickoff Project to Something Larger

Like many of the European architecture museums, the Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W) is nationally oriented in terms of its collection activity. The guiding question in the work of the Az W–‘What can architecture do?’–is also the underlying question of the new permanent exhibition *Hot Questions*. *Cold Storage*, which we broadened by asking ‘What can collections accomplish?’. Our collection policy and curatorial approach focus not on style or mastership, but on the social dimension of architecture; that is to say, on the answers architecture is able to give to questions concerning society, culture, and the planet.

### RE-ASSEMBLING HISTORIES AND COLLECTIONS

As head of collections and curator together with the team we constantly shift between the following work environments: acquisitions, research and exhibitions. This multi-perspective approach shapes our way of thinking about the discipline, narratives and the collection. One of our main concerns is to open up the collection from a present-day standpoint. In this context, it is important to be aware of the ongoing criticism within the humanities to interpret the past through the lens of the present. *Präsentismus or Presentism* is made responsible for the declining interest in topics prior to the 20th century resulting in a limited view of history.<fnref n="1" />

Yet, we also recognise the benefits between the dynamic encounter of the present and the past and understand collections as materialised histories that play an important role as a civic resource in an increasingly politically charged environment. We do not see ourselves as neutral observers, quite the contrary, we want to bring socio-political standpoints to the discussion with our audiences. For us, the collection serves as a set of distribution nodes so to speak, from which we depart to question the past, present, and future. Against this background, the name of our permanent exhibition *Hot Questions*. *Cold Storage*<fnref n="2" /> was born. Seven Hot Questions were formulated

<footnote n="1">1. Lynn Hunt, *Against Presentism*, May 1, 2002; (https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism) James H. Sweet, *Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present*. Aug 17, 2022 (https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/september-2022/is-history-history-identity-politics-and-teleologies-of-the-present)</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Angelika Fitz, Monika Platzer, *Architekturzentrum Wien, ed. Hot Questions Cold Storage*. *Architecture from Austria. The Permanent Exhibition at the Az W* (Zürich: Park Books, 2023).</footnote>
to serve as a discourse generator for many wide-ranging inquiries into the
collection and breathe life into our depots, the so-called Cold Storage.<fnref n="3" />

Exhibitions are instruments of power and provide an important contribution to the global spread of architectural ideas and images. In general, permanent exhibitions are exclusively fed from the collection which have their limits, since collections are always fragmentary with gaps and inconsistencies. At the same time, they help to construct a master narrative, which solidifies into the canon. We wanted to challenge our collection from today's perspective in order to trace transnational as well as overlooked facets, and we wanted to brush the familiar against the grain. Our strategy was to move away from the classical object presentation and to leave 'he trodden path of chronology. Instead of a linear narrative, our storytelling shifts back and forth in time and shows the intertwining of architecture with social and political concepts. Whenever we needed to strengthen an argument, materials from other collections were added.

For instance, in our section 'Who shapes the City?' – where we talk about the dependencies of migration, politics and the growth of the city – we included a project by Otto Wagner and identify the interrelation between Wagner's work and his close political affinity with the antisemitism of the Christian Social Party. The emancipation of the Jews in Austria in the late 19th century raised hostile sentiments among contemporaries. Wagner increasingly invoked negative antisemitic stereotypes in his diaries, which were directly related to his dissatisfaction with market mechanisms which influenced the sale or construction of his buildings.

## BECOMING FEMALE AND RE-FRAMING THE CANON

To date there is still a strong imbalance in terms of gender diversity in our holdings. From about 100 archives only three of them are archives from women. This lead us back to one of the Hot Questions raised in our permanent exhibition 'Who is involved?' which we followed up with a quote 'Why have there been no great women architects?' which paraphrases the title of Linda Nochlin's 1971 essay *Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists*? In her text Nochlin explores the structural – as opposed to the individual – discrimination in the Western art system, an analysis which can be carried over to architecture. In this section of the exhibition, we assess the four educational institutions in Vienna, which reveals the systemic disadvantages women architects faced thus exposing the discrimination that has had a lasting effect when, for example, it comes to appoint a new full professor.<fnref n="4" /> It was not until 1996 when Nasrine Seraji was named as the first female full professor at Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts (1996–2001).

It's by now evidently clear that women architects have been written out of history in the absence of adequate sources about their work. Not only did structural inequalities minimise their professional opportunities, but a professional practice prevailed in which only those women received recognition whose architectural oeuvres were equal in size to those of their male colleagues. In light of the general social inequalities women faced, and the tendency of women architects to relocate across national borders due to educational and professional opportunities, we must develop new approaches to collecting artefacts and information about their work. For instance, what happened to the more than 200 women enrolled in Austrian educational institutions before 1938? In order to make these women architects visible we lauchend a research project in 2021, in cooperation with the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Center, entitled 'Female Pioneers of Architecture in Vienna'. The results will be incorporated into our project 'Az W Collection online meets the Encyclopaedia of Architects' and will subsequently lead to an expansion of the canon.

## THE CULTURAL POLITICAL BACKDROP

Like most cultural institutions, we operate within the scientific policies of our countries and Europe. Since 2001, Austria has been actively promoting the digitisation of its cultural heritage in order to make it available via the European platform Europeana.<fnref n="5" /> As a museum which is not operated by the state or city but by a private association, the Az W has had only limited access to fundings. This is also one of the reasons why the Az W still does not have an online collection database and why the digitisation of our holdings is mainly done on demand for specific research, publication or exhibitions projects.

Fortunately, as a new development, through the EU call 'Cultural Heritage Digital', the Az W is now receiving funds for digitisation for the first time. Within this funding context, open access is mandatory. We therefore aim to move beyond a general digitisation project of collection objects, which usually means creating a virtual representation of physical objects. With the project 'Az W Collection online meets the Encyclopaedia of Architects' we are developing an open online repository which merges and links other knowledge productions, which we have accumulated over the years through research, exhibitions or any other kind of scientific output.

### 'ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF ARCHITECTS'

The 'Encyclopaedia of Architects' is already available online via our website (http://www.architektenlexikon.at) and has become with more than 1.000 entries indispensable for architectural research on Austrian architects and their achievements. The database provides information on architects,

<footnote n="3">3 Who shapes the city? Who gets involved? How is architecture produced? Who provides for us? How can we survive? Who are we? How do we want to live?</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 The K. k. Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School Vienna) was the first school in Austria where women were allowed to enroll 1873 in architecture. At the Technische Hochschule [Technical College] in Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts on Vienna it took till 1919 and 1920/21 till women were accepted.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 https://www.europeana.eu/de.</footnote>
master builders, urban planners and theorists whose work shaped the appearance of Vienna from 1770 until the post-war years. The entries include biographical key data, listing of works, bibliographical references as well as detailed descriptions of architects curriculum vitae and analyses of built work, including separate glossaries on architectural-aesthetic, architectural-theoretical, architectural-historical, urban planning, and style-critical building characteristics, plus the exact bibliographical source reference for the referred buildings.

For years we have been asking ourselves how can we merge, enrich, disseminate the knowledge of this stand-alone biographical database with our other holdings. Especially many inquiries for images of the works mentioned in the entries have reached us over the years. By linking the 'Encyclopaedia of Architects' to approximately 19,500 photographs by Friedrich Achleitner, Margherita Spiluttini and Karin Mack, with structured metadata retrieved from various holdings and knowledge sources on approximately 12,000 buildings, we are now able to meet the requests of our users. By creating this corpus through the new funds for digitisation we are now laying the foundation for our online collection database.

## FOUNDATIONAL ARCHIVE DESCRIPTIONS

From our rich photographic holdings, we identified the just mentioned three archives that we hold in our collection at Az W: Friedrich Achleitner Archive, Karin Mack Photo Archive, Margherita Spiluttini Photo Archive. To pair the well-known Achleitner Archive, with two female Archives was intentional. In combination with Achleitner's documentary collection and the compositional photographic approach of Spiluttini and Mack, the digital synopsis of our online collection database enables a pluralistic view of the diverse lives of the buildings in the course of time.

In the 1960s Friedrich Achleitner (1930–2019) began his systematic survey of Austria's architectural heritage. His five-volume work 'Austrian Architecture in the 20th Century' still determines our knowledge and understanding of Austrian architecture today. The Achleitner Archive contains 78,000 visual sources, which are now to be indexed and made available online.

In the initial phase as a chronicler of Austrian building culture, Achleitner was accompanied by his first wife, the photographer Karin Mack (1940–), whose architectural photographic legacy of around 1,000 pictures is part of the Az W collection. In this context, the question of the role of women in cultural and architectural practice arises, because in contrast to the architect profession, the profession of photographer enabled women to gain a certain visibility as early as the interwar period.

Comparable to Friedrich Achleitner, Margherita Spiluttini (1947–2023) shapes our visual perception of Austrian architecture. With over 4,000 documented buildings, the Margherita Spiluttini Photo Archive is one of the

most important photographic collections on architecture worldwide. The focus of our project is her series *Wien Plan* a collection of 3,000 images that focus on historical buildings and looks at the transformation and ageing processes of key buildings.

At the same time, we want to break the classic master narrative in which the buildings are almost exclusively identified as the sole products of a single author. The person-centred dictionary is opened up through cross-references to other holdings and reveals other actors and contexts that played a role in the creation of architecture.

## ADD-ONS

Over the years, the Az W collection has been constantly consulted. Exhibitions, research projects, publications, events initiated by us or others – have become testimonials for the interactions with the collection. What they all have in common was the production of knowledge, but unfortunately often in the form of standalone database solutions that subsequently degenerate into data graveyards. These large repositories of unused data are no longer compatible with today's FAIR data goals (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) for sustainable data storage.

The work on the permanent exhibition *Hot Questions: Cold Storage* provided the kick-off for the consolidation and harmonisation of existing individual databases into our online collection database. Since the founding of the Az W in 1993, a large number of individual repositories of data have accumulated alongside a classic inventory collection database management. Efforts to put an umbrella over the various databases have failed for a long time – the heterogeneity of the data and the question how to deal with the materials that are not physically in our collection were unresolved problems.

As practitioners in a museum, mediation determines our research and work practice, which increasingly we see as a strength. Our methodological approach is situationally adaptive just like our pragmatic and content-related decisions are connected with each other. This is similar to our approach in 'Hot Questions. Cold Storage': we ask questions or are asked questions, selectively go into depth or look at our holdings from several perspectives and link different actors and disciplines.

The same method is now applied in our new database. In addition to standardised *inventories of* single documents or architect's *catalogues raisonnés*, we will now open up to findings from our users, to *external holdings* and research materials which have been accumulated through our work. This collected data which previously remained unused as tacit knowledge, are now made accessible. In addition, they not only contribute to the contextualisation of our holdings, but at the same time facilitate internal work processes and remain usable for the future. This leads us to another important function of the new collection database as an indispensable
resource for administrative collection management purposes such as loans, condition reports, exhibitions, and publications.

## HOT VIEWS: FROM THE DIGITAL COPY TO DIGITALITY

As a last consideration, in addition to providing multi-perspective background information and links with other data pools, it is adamant to develop adequate, new forms of visualisation for these materials. An online collection database that is a mere accumulation of objects records is no longer up to date. In addition to pop-ups, overlays and parallel narrative threads, it is the forms of presentation that interactively enable the organisation of knowledge according to various criteria of order and similarity – place, time, authorship, categorisation and networks between those. And in the end, the simple means of zoom in–zoom out in the digital display enable a form of scalability for collection visualisation: overall view ('distant viewing') and detailed view ('close viewing') are further opposing perspectives on knowledge. The theme of scalability fits perfectly with the ways in which the built environment is represented and, in an abstract sense, with our research ideas and contextual investigations.

<figure><img src="image_65.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_66.png" /></figure>

Illustration from the title page of The Analysis of Beauty, commons.wikimedia.org

Dana Arnold (Manchester School of Architecture)

# Cherchez la Femme: Finding the Feminised Line

I have written and thought a lot about how we can interrogate the archives of architecture to allow us to bring other voices and actors to the fore, and the ways in which this reframing of the archive reconfigures the discipline. My focus here is on eighteenth-century architectural prints and drawings and how rethinking them makes them speak to current concerns about finding female voices and actors in the past. In this way, prints and drawings become an archive in their own right, which is freed from masculinist categorisation and taxonomies based on chronology and a focus on the male-author genius that continue to dominate western historical thinking.

The graphic line which, whether in a print or a drawing, is a form of writing that prompts a critical awareness of the various visual, technical, and semiotic modes of description.<fnref n="1" /> And the field of relations both historical and actual in which the graphic line operates is in constant flux. We can, then, see how the line changes its identity over time and consequently has fluid potential, capacities, and indeed uses within its sphere of cultural production at any given moment. A different conceptualisation of the line can disrupt canonical historical narratives and perceived archival truths. If we attribute the line with agency it can work to challenge the gender assumptions embedded in normative, linear, verbal histories and their concomitant archival practices. I begin by thinking about the connection between the eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth and Gilles Deleuze – unlikely bedfellows but (and please forgive me) the line draws them together.

In his popularist treatise *The Analysis of Beauty* (1753) Hogarth outlines his theories of visual beauty and grace in which he feminises the line and identifies the waving line as the 'line of beauty' and the serpentine line as the 'line of grace'.<fnref n="2" /> This feminised line has agency as it has the ability to lead the eye in a 'wanton kind of chase'.<fnref n="3" /> My query here is how this agency, when combined with the mnemonic and descriptive qualities of the line identified by Hogarth, could challenge the archival practices that promote the hegemony of the sole author/genius (male) architect.<fnref n="4" /> Hogarth's idea of the motion of the chase makes me think about Gilles Deleuze and the way in which he privileges the geographies of movement over history.

<footnote n="1">1 I discuss the resonance between visual and verbal descriptions of architecture in my recent book Dana Arnold, *Architecture and Ekphrasis: Space, time and the embodied description of the past* (Manchester: MUP, 2020)</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Hogarth, *The Analysis of Beauty* (London: Printed by John Reeves for the Author, 1753), Xchapter VII, 'Of Lines', 38.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Ibid., Chapter V, 'Of Intricacy', 25.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Ibid., Chapter VII, 'Of Lines', 37; William Hogarth, *The Analysis of Beauty: With the Rejected Passages from the Manuscript Drafts and Autobiographical Notes* ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 206 and 231.</footnote>
But first of all, I want to untie the line. Deleuze and Guattari speak of the concept of the rhizome that enables new connections to be made. Here the rhizome, as a root or fungus is used to explain research methods that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in the presentation and analysis of the archive. This approach stands in opposition to an arborescent (hierarchic, tree-like) approach that favours dualist categories and binary oppositions. To quote Deleuze and Guattari from their *a Thousand Plateaus*:

> Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialised, organised, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialisation down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another.<fnref n="5" />

The line of flight, like the line, has no beginning or end, but always a middle. And it is in this middle or 'in between' that everything takes place.<fnref n="6" /> If we think about the Deleuzian notion that it is not what the line is but what it can do or be, then a line can be a mark, a trace, a contour or an outline, which is both seen and unseen.<fnref n="7" /> In this way a line can form visible and invisible pathways and these fluid processes work to locate memory and recollection, and ultimately time through their shifting, crossing, and repeating. For Deleuze, the line both frees us from linear histories whilst operating as a process of historicisation. As we have seen, the line forms the basis of textual and visual histories. Here, I use it to retrace the feminised and female in drawing to present a provocation as to how we can rethink the archive.

There is a further connection here between Hogarth and Deleuze. For Hogarth the waving line is the 'line of beauty' and the serpentine line is the 'line of grace'.<fnref n="8" /> Their varied form means they contribute most to producing beauty. The serpentine line 'gives play to the imagination, and delights the eye.' In addition, Hogarth admires 'the effects of quantity' as a source of beauty. Here we reach the sublime as an aesthetic category of expression and pleasure: 'vastness', 'horror', 'awe', 'immense', 'colossal', 'grandeur'. '[I]t is quantity which adds greatness to grace'.<fnref n="9" /> Deleuze's 'line of flight' produces a transport or lift which can be interpreted as a kind of sublime. Indeed, Deleuze describes this as 'a sort of delirium'.... There is something demoniacal or demonic in a line of flight. [...] What demons do is jump across intervals, and from one interval to another.'<fnref n="10" />

Where, then, is the demon in Hogarth's theory if his line allows us to jump across established textual (linguistically masculine) narratives and their

archival predicates? *The Analysis* begins with a quotation from John Milton's *Paradise Lost* (1667):

> So vary'd he, and of his tortuous train
> Curled many a wanton wreath, in sight of Eve,
> To lure her eye.

But the complete verse reads:

> With tract oblique
> At first, as one who sought access, but feared
> To interrupt, sidelong he works his way.
> As when a ship by skilful steersman wrought
> Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the wind
> Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail;
> So vary'd he, and of his tortuous train
> Curled many a wanton wreath, in sight of Eve,
> To lure her eye.
> *Paradise Lost* (9. 510–18)

'He' is Satan and he is at once feminised through the allusion to the ship and its movement as well as masculinised by the allusion to the 'skilful steersman'. I am drawn here to the use of the word 'wanton'.<fnref n="11" /> Hogarth makes a further reference to Milton's Eve in his discussion of hair (see also above). 'The poet knows it, as well as the painter, and has described the wanton ringlets waving in the wind'.<fnref n="12" /> Here Hogarth alludes to 'her unadorned golden tresses wore / Dishevell'd, but in wanton ringlets'. *Paradise Lost* (4.305–6).

Eve's hair attracts Satan but more importantly the waviness of her ringlets is echoed in Satan's serpentine movements as he approaches her. Indeed, Ronald Paulson has remarked 'Milton could reasonably be interpreted as implying that Satan's wiles are derived from the female line'.<fnref n="13" /> But as W. J. T. Mitchell notes, Hogarth never mentions this in the text itself, despite numerous references to serpents and the promotion of a serpentine line as the epitome of visual allure.<fnref n="14" /> However, there is a strong visual clue in the image of the line of beauty that appears on the title page of *The Analysis*. The serpentine line that floats in a pyramid atop a plinth entitled 'Variety' is in the form of a serpent, with a serpent's head and a pointed tail. It is also vertical, so its shape forms the letter S. Satan is, then, present in the feminised, demoniacal serpentine line. Is this then a way to disrupt masculinist (verbal) histories or descriptions through Deleuze's lines of flight?

<footnote n="5">5 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, *A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*, trans. B. Massumi (London: Althone Press, 1988), 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Ibid., 6–15.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, *On the Line*, trans. J. Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 19 esp.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Hogarth, op.cit., chapter VII, Of Lines, 38.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Ibid., chapter VI, Of Quantity, 30.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, *Dialogues* (Paris: Flammarion, 1977) and trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1987), 40.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 For a fuller discussion of this see Abigail Zitin, 'Wantonness: Milton, Hogarth, and *The Analysis of Beauty*, *Differences*, 27:1 (2016), 25–47.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Hogarth, op. cit., chapter V, 'Of Intricacy', 28.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Ronald Paulson, *Hogarth's Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England* (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 194.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 W. J. T. Mitchell, 'Metamorphoses of the Vortex: Hogarth, Turner and Blake', in Richard Wendorf (ed.), *Articulate Images: Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 125–68 and132 esp.</footnote>
In this way we can begin to unpick the linear and chronological viewpoints that are a hallmark of western historical thinking. As a consequence, it is possible to see how graphic representations of the architecture of the past can be independent of the preoccupations with progressive chronologies, authorship and style that dominate textual histories and their concomitant archival practices. The eye engages with history in a different way when looking at it rather than reading it—it is not a sequential left to right movement, instead it is a more random ‘wanton kind of chase’ of history as we follow the line. And this line is feminine.

The practice of printmaking reinforces the agency and feminisation of the line. Although not normally, formally apprenticed women, usually working in the family home, played an active role in the production of prints.<fnref n="15" /> Throughout the eighteenth century, engravings were the most common kind of prints produced using the *intaglio* method.<fnref n="16" /> Here the image is cut into the surface of a metal plate. When the plate is inked, the ink is pushed into the incised lines. The plate is then passed through a press with a sheet of dampened paper which pulls the ink out of the lines and transfers them to the paper producing a reversed image of that incised on the plate.<fnref n="17" /> The force of pressure applied by the press, which was powered by the exertion of the printmaker, results in an outline of the metal plate itself being impressed into the paper. This is known as the plate-mark. Prints in the age before machine-powered presses were, then, produced by the efforts of the body, which could be male or female.<fnref n="18" /> The (female) printmaker is then embodied in the line of her engraving. Moreover, the combination of production processes from original drawing, to the transfer for engraving, and the act of printing show us that prints and drawings are an archive produced through collective endeavour. And this archive can narrate histories other than that of the sole male author genius.

The relationship between the burin (a small, V-shaped chisel used to cut the lines into the plate), the plate itself, and the movement of the engraver complicates the relationship between print and printmaker. The process of engraving is fundamentally that of two linear movements, one straight and the other circular. The engraver produces straight lines by moving the burin diagonally across the plate, usually from right to left placing the plate in front of him or herself.<fnref n="19" /> In this way, the movement of the engraver is embodied in the creation of the line. By contrast, curved lines are more complex requiring the combined movement of the burin and the plate. The latter is placed on a cushion filled with sand and rotated against the burin. Instead of the

draftsman's hand moving across the surface, here the surface moves across the draftsman's hand so reversing the relationship between draftsman and surface we have just seen in the creation of straight lines.<fnref n="20" /> In this way, the production of the serpentine, feminised line disembodies the efforts of the engraver and gives agency to the line itself. Prints and drawings become an archive in their own right, which is freed from masculinist categorisation and taxonomies.

<footnote n="15">15 Lia Markey, 'The Female Printmaker and the Culture of the Reproductive Print Workshop' in Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini (eds), *Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800* (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2005).</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Antony Griffiths, *The Print before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550-1820* (London: The British Museum Press, 2016), 21, and Tim Clayton, *The English Print 1688-1802* (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997).</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Engravers could use a mirror to transfer the image to the plate. On this point see Griffiths, loc.cit.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 The physical processes of printing are described in detail in Carl Goldstein, *Print Culture in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse and the purposes of print* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 22 esp.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Markey, loc. cit.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Griffiths, loc.cit. See also William M. Ivins, Jr., *Prints and Visual Communication* (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT, 1969).</footnote>
Decolonising
<figure><img src="image_67.png" /></figure>

Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library by Joar Nango and collaborators at the Nordic Countries Pavilion (18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia). Photo: Laurian Ghinitoiu (2023). CC BY-SA 4.0.

Carlos Mínguez Carrasco and Frida Rosenberg (ArkDes)

# Indigenising the Archive:
Girjegumpi – The Sámi
Architecture Library

## GIRJEGUMPI

In May 2023, *Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library* opened at the Nordic Countries pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. *Girjegumpi* is a spatialisation of conversations and research initiated by Joar Nango. Over the past two decades this project has expanded with site-specific adaptations while travelling to different locations in Sápmi and the broader Nordic region.<fnref n="1" /> At each new site, the library has evolved together with multiple collaborations, including artists and craftspeople such as Katarina Spik Skum, Anders Sunna, Ken Are Bongo, and Anders Rimpi, among many others.

The word *Girjegumpi* is derived from two Northern Sámi words: ‘Girji’, meaning book, and ‘Gumpi’ – a small mobile reindeer herder cabin on sledges, often pulled by a snowmobile. This wordplay refers to a collection of books that are transported and displayed everywhere it goes. Originally it was an informal, personal collection of books that served as a place to gather around, including magazines, pamphlets, and hard-to-find fanzines. Since its origin it has transformed for every new occasion, in collaboration with friends, into a nomadic library.<fnref n="2" /> It has become a critical project, that builds spaces for Indigenous imagination.

Central to *Girjegumpi* is an archive of more than 500 titles that embrace topics such as Sámi architecture and design, traditional and ancestral building knowledge, activism and decoloniality. This archive also comprises artworks, materials, design details, and found objects.

## ACTIVIST, COLLABORATIVE, AND NOMADIC

Nango's original impetus of compiling literature around Sámi architecture is a response to the lack of references and publications on the topic during his years at the school of architecture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. To start collecting books around Sámi and other indigenous cultures was a form of resistance to the disregard to

<footnote n="1">1. The first expression and iteration of *Girjegumpi* took place at the culture festival Festspillene i Nord-Norge, The Arctic Arts Festival in 2018.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. "Hanging out in *Girjegumpi*," a conversation between Joar Nango and Mathias Danbolt in *Huksendáidda arkitektuvra Sámis = arkitektur i Sápmi = architecture in Sápmi*, ed. Bente Aass, Solbakken (Stamsund: Orkana, 2022), 170.</footnote>
the topic shown by the curriculum at the school, but also more broadly by the field of architecture. The intention was not only to gather printed references, but to find a 'place' and people to discuss them. Nango, in a conversation with art historian Mathias Danbolt says: 'When I was studying architecture in Tråante (Trondheim), there was nowhere to have these kinds of conversations. It was one thing that Sámi architecture was just barely covered in the course, but I also didn't have any other Sámi architects with whom I could establish a dialogue'.<fnref n="3" /> The gathering of books became in time a way of building a network with other architects with similar interests, but also to initiate collaborations with artists, designers, and craftspeople from Sapmi.

Girjegumpi is a collaborative effort. The works that encompass Girjegumpi range in scale from small works produced by duojárs, for example the delicate reindeer skin pieces by Katarina Spik Skum used in the corners of some pieces of glass in the pavilion, to a full six-by-six-by-six wooden tent structure made of trees cut for this purpose and assembled by hand in situ by Tobias Aputsiaq Prytz, Joar Nango and Arne-Terje Sæther. Other works that can be found are a film collaboration between Ken Are Bongo with Joar Nango for a series of six episodes titled 'Post-Capitalist Architecture', the 'Mapping of Sámi Architecture', a research collaboration between Astrid Fadnes, Jenni Hakovirta, and Katrine Rugeldal, or the artworks of Anders Sunna. Even though the names of the authors can be listed, the in-situ process, and the true, often messy, creative, collaborative nature of all these works make the traditional, Western art and architecture credit system associated with artworks and design obsolete.

Nomadic by design, Girjegumpi is a living project addressing the relevance of Indigenous culture in architectural discourse and construction today, such as the importance of collaborative work; the use of resources in rapidly changing climate conditions; how to use local materials and embracing sensitive approaches to landscapes and nature. Beyond these global challenges, Girjegumpi highlights the architect's position towards a more polyphonic understanding of the world.<fnref n="4" />

## POLITICAL, UNTRANSLATABLE, AND ALIVE

Girjegumpi, wherever it travels, it opens spaces for political resistance and self-determination for the Sámi people. The archive creates a form of empowerment for a historically marginalised and excluded community. With Girjegumpi, Nango and collaborators build a space where the

conversation about what is Sámi architecture is entangled with questions around sovereignty, land exploitation, decolonialisation, and the overall support for the development of Sámi cultural and artistic practices. This makes the archive become alive and destabilises the whole conception of what we might think the archive entails.

However, the unfolding of a project like Girjegumpi in a context like La Biennale di Venezia – a global event organised under pavilions labeled and supported by nation-states – presents many challenges. The space for political resistance needs to inevitably negotiate pressures of opening it up to an international audience, as well as vindicating a space of exception vis a vis a pavilion supported by Sweden, Norway, and Finland, which have a legacy of colonisation across Sápmi.

Girjegumpi is an indigenous archive that is untranslatable to Western archiving and categorisation protocols. When Joar is asked about the role of duodji as a form of architectural form, he responds: 'I like the way the concept of duodji insist on being untranslatable. Since the question of what Sámi architecture is, remains so unanswered, it's been natural for me to take my starting point in the status of duodji as an autonomous and uniquely Sámi concept when I'm searching for new, Sámi forms of architectural expression'.<fnref n="5" /> This aspect of the untranslatability of certain concepts in Sápmi to other languages exemplifies the difficulty of translating indigenous forms of archiving and producing to traditional institutional codes.

How to define the multiple roles objects and relationships play in Sámi culture? The holistic way of doing and knowing in Sámi culture needs to negotiate forms of categorisation that tend to segment disciplines and professional fields. The untranslatability of the archive and the holistic epistemology of Sámi culture is a form of resistance to its categorisation. The sole separation between art and architecture biennials in Venice is therefore a hard separation that is impossible to delineate in a project like Girjegumpi and the roster of participants associated with it.<fnref n="6" />

Thus, Girjegumpi is a catalyser for community-building: the activation of the archive is paramount! It is primordial for Nango that Girjegumpi is 'used', the library 'visited', it otherwise has the propensity to become objectified. We think this might be a central question for the definition of a critical archive, or an archive that tries to resist definitions. Yes, it is a collection of books, but it is also a gathering of people around Girjegumpi that makes it alive,

<footnote n="3">3 "Hanging out in Girjegumpi", a conversation between Joar Nango and Mathias Danbolt in *Huksendáidda arkitektuvra Sámis* = arkitektur i Sápmi = architecture in Sápmi, ed. Bente Aass, Solbakken (Stamsund: Orkana, 2022), 170.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 The first four paragraphs have in some version been published in the curatorial statement of Girjegumpi: *The Sámi Architecture Library*, by Joar Nango and collaborators, presented at the Nordic Countries Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia, at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, which take place between 20 May and 26 November 2023. The project is commissioned by ArkDes, (Stockholm, Sweden), Nasjonalmuseum (Oslo, Norway) and Arkkitehtuurimuseo (Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, Finland). The project was curated by Carlos Mínguez Carrasco and James Taylor-Foster.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 "Hanging out in Girjegumpi," a conversation between Joar Nango and Mathias Danbolt. Ibid., 171.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 The list of collaborators of Girjegumpi is long but important to mention is: Håvard Arnhoff, Ken Are Bongo, Petter Bratland, Stefano Crosera + Margherita Pasqualato (Cantiere Daniele Manin), Mathias Danbolt, Ole-Henrik Einejord, Astrid Fadnes, Jenni Hakovirta. Eirin Hammari, Elin Haugdal, Petri Henriksson, Tone Huse, Robert Julian Hvistendahl, Iver Jåks + Jon Ole Andersen, Anne Kare Kemi, Annik Kristiansen Hagen, maka design, Grete Johanna Minde, Karen Inger Anne Nango, Nils John Nango, Anne Henriette Nilut, Ole Thomas Nilut, Raisa Porsanger, Tobias Aputsiaq Prytz, Anders Rimpi, Katrine Rugeldal, Wimme Saari, Sámi Architecture Dictionary Group, Arne-Terje Sæther, Katarina Spik Skum, Mary Ailonieida Sombán Mari, Četil Somby, Anders Sunna, Anna-Stina Svakko, Eystein Talleraas, Petter Tjikkom, Magnus Antaris Tuolja. The Collaborating institutions are: Ájtte, Arctic Arts Festival - Festspillene i Nord-Norge, Sámi Dáiddaguovddáš (SDG), RDM - Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway.</footnote>
so the books and the topics addressed in the archive can be continuously discussed and reinvented.

Girjegumpi, in this sense is an archive made of itinerant reanimations, if we follow art historian Hal Foster's dialectics, which he presents in his essay 'Archives of Modern Art'.<fnref n="7" /> For the archive to become alive, it needs to become a library, a place, a gathering structure, a discussion device, a tool for redefinition that cannot be unmanned, that needs the bodies and minds thinking and building discourse around it. It is not a place where things are kept in its original context, or 'left to die', quite the opposite. It needs of its reanimation to perform. This is the argument that Hal Foster presents as the dialectic of reification and reanimation in the art museum and in the art history during the late Nineteenth Century and the Twentieth Century. Foster argues through comparing examples of authors that defend the idea of a museum that is the mausoleum for the work of art, a place for the work which is 'left to die', versus a view of the museum as a place where the artwork has an afterlife, a space 'for the fantastic reanimation, indeed of spiritual idealisation'.<fnref n="8" />

An interesting effort to imagine new forms of maintaining the project alive is the digital version of *Girjegumpi* created in 2019 by Joar Nango in collaboration with ArkDes. ‘The Virtual Library of Sámi Architecture’<fnref n="9" /> is a digital project that transfers some parts of the archive to a digital platform. The project serves as an open archive for anyone interested in questions related to Sámi culture, and it foresees the possibilities of how an indigenous archiving can become interactive and collaborative in the digital sphere.

The idea of itinerant reanimations is productive in order to put in perspective how *Girjegumpi* redefines the role of the institutional frameworks that it negotiates with, in order to build new forms of hospitality where the visitor becomes an active member, and where the custody of the archive becomes a shared responsibility with the visitor, with mutual stewardship.<fnref n="10" />

## CONCLUSION

*Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library* confronts museums and cultural institutions with political and cultural activism that destabilises forms of curatorial, archival and conservation practices. The project opens spaces for Indigenous self-determination, it defies notions of categorisation and authorship. The work ArkDes has done in support, care, and facilitation of the

unfolding of *Girjegumpi* at the Nordic Countries pavilion for the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale has helped us who work at the museum to relearn our practices. Our mindsets needed to rethink the ways in which the works from Sámi architects as well as the works in the collections who have been built in Sápmi can be studied, presented, and shared with audiences.

*Girjegumpi* demands a transformation of the traditional hospitality, hosting, and the animation of works performed in the museum. The nomadic nature of the project empowers its position in the negotiations with the political and institutional frameworks it temporarily inhabits. Finally, and perhaps most importantly the expanding nature of *Girjegumpi* builds alliances with other Indigenous cultures and aligns efforts with a broader movement towards Indigenous self-determination.

<footnote n="7">7 Hal Foster, "Archives of Modern Art," *October* 99, (Winter 2002): 81–95.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Foster, "Archives of Modern Art," 85.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 The Virtual Library of Sámi Architecture can be visited here: https://gumpi.space/en. Accessed 2023-09-05.
*Kiruna Forever* was an exhibition at ArkDes around the relocation of the city of Kiruna in the Arctic in Sweden, and where Joar Nango participated as part of a series of perspectives from Sámi artists and architects responding to the transformations in the region. The exhibition was curated by Carlos Mínguez Carrasco and was open from April 24 2020 until February 7 2021.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 See Bastian, J.A. "Mine, yours, ours: archival custody from transaction to narrative." *Arch Sci* 21, (March 2021): 25–42.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_68.png" /><figcaption>Memory Map of a Chinese corner shop and home in Lady Selborne before forced removals and demolitions. Drawn collectively by author and researcher, Meghan Ho-Tong, and former resident and witness, Sonia Ho-Tong.</figcaption></figure>

# Reading Sino-African Archives: Expanding Histories of the South

## INTRODUCTION

Archives are affective places, evolving from a reciprocal relationship between a user and the 'archival habitat'.<fnref n="1" /> As psycho-geographical environments, they link diverse chronologies in different ways. Constituted from artefacts of the past that exist in the present, precisely requiring presence, archives are invented whenever we have a question we need to answer. They are not static repositories, nor are they neutral. Thinking with Achille Mbembe, archives are fundamentally a process of selection and discrimination, resulting in the granting of a privileged status to certain artefacts, certain histories, and refusal of the same acknowledgement to others judged 'unarchivable'.<fnref n="2" />

As politically and economically negotiated forms of cultural production, buildings and settlements also carry archival traces of social, political, economic and ecological histories relevant in the present. Their entanglement with a specific place sediments them as productive epistemological entry points, beyond conventional discussion of style or aesthetic, contributing to the construction of transregional social and cultural histories which address, amongst many other things, labour, geopolitics, race, gender, economic systems, and technologies.<fnref n="3" /> As architects and as researchers, we are implicated in the construction of archives and must ask ourselves – who gets to write archives, how have they been written and what stories get to be told?

Aware of these politics, I believe it's necessary to investigate our approach to the gaps, absences and erasures created by colonialism, apartheid, racism, and other practices of archival decision-making that determine what should and should not be preserved or remembered. These erasures are not simply countermeasures to the production of history, but rather, they are history. In *Archive Wars*, historian Rosie Bsheer explores how the production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artefacts that are witness to them. From obscuring documents to the physical demolition of buildings, destruction is a requisite for the making of History and of the state.<fnref n="4" /> Where the crafting of a History relies on manufacturing of territories of emptiness which are then available to be

<footnote n="1">1 Rachel Lee, "Engaging the Archival Habitat: Architectural Knowledge and Otto Koenigsberger's Effects," *Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East* 40, No. 3 (December 2020): 526–540.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Achille Mbembe, "The Power of the Archive and its Limits," in *Refiguring the Archive*, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 19–27.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Lee, "Engaging the Archival Habitat," 526–540.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Rosie Bsheer, *Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).</footnote>
occupied. While Bsheer was describing the Saudi state's bureaucratised efforts to construct a historical narrative through national archives and re-ordering of public space, the mechanism is common also to the broader project of coloniality, and has particular resonances with the construction and destruction of the postcolonial apartheid landscape of South Africa.

If we are to think from a southern perspective – operating under the radar, through the gaps and inside the shadows of Western polemics – what then is an architectural artefact in the context of the Global South? In the forthcoming book *Fugitive Archives*<fnref n="5" />, editors and research fellows underscore the importance of methods that emerge when privileging voices rooted in diverse knowledges and experiences of space. Understanding the need to move marginalised perspectives back to the centre, this means reorienting towards context, and grounding in specific modes of recording, communicating and learning. To create African architectural archives that are situated, new forms of evidence need to be created that disrupt western and colonial knowledge frameworks and expand existing architectural archives. To recentre Africa in histories of architecture, researchers have to develop new ways of seeing, listening, recording and learning, with the capacity to acknowledge alternate knowledges of space and place.

## ORIGINS OF THE ARCHIVE

Against this backdrop, my research explores histories of Sino-African migration and settlement in South Africa. It takes as starting point my family history, and in particular, a small booklet of stories passed down from generation to generation. The archive is held together by custodians along matriarchal lines – mother, aunt, daughter, niece – who conjured narratives and events real and mythologised by memory. These stories are often intertwined with physical territories of dominion and control. An incisive fragment into a larger history, the archive points to the broader complexities of a colonial and apartheid condition as it intersects with frameworks of mining labour and land extraction, racially segregated group areas and forced removals, migrant communities and constructions of home or spatial strategies of survival.

The artefact itself is simple, operating outside the boundaries of the traditional archival artefact. Inscribed on the last page of the copyshop-printed cartridge-paper booklet, folded and stapled down the middle, it reads, 'I hope this information is useful to you and you will have a better understanding of your roots.' It's not addressed to me, or anyone in particular, but to an ancestry displaced and rerooted.

The influx of Chinese into South Africa towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century can be understood as part of a broader

colonial project of extraction. The economic crisis following the Anglo-Boer War in 1902 produced a need for cheap labour on the gold mines. In parallel to the longer-term crafting, by colonial and apartheid states, of a native migrant workforce – dispossessed of land and in a suspended state of migrancy due to land policies like the Natives Land Act – an active recruitment campaign was also established to supplement the mines with Chinese and Indian labour. While the majority of the 63 695 indentured Chinese labourers dispatched to South Africa between 1904 and 1907 were eventually repatriated, some settled in South Africa, and many South African-born Chinese are descendants of independent migrants who arrived from 1870's onwards<fnref n="6" /> in search of Gold Mountain.<fnref n="7" />

As a mixed-race Chinese South African born from these histories, and from a generation that lived the transition from apartheid to independence, I am interested in the cultural artefacts of marginalised, minoritarian peoples working either in the peripheries or invisibly at the centre. The use of concepts such as hybridity or cultural difference become important in dismantling the reductionism of binary systems.<fnref n="8" />

Too small in numbers to constitute a separate group area, occupying a kind of statistical anomaly, and falling within the ambiguous gradient of a racialised 'other' during apartheid, the Chinese operated on the margins and in peripheries. Their in-betweenness produced a system of strategies for the navigation of territories of control and subjugation, and provides distinct and complex views into significant histories of postcolonial South Africa. The research project asks how an archive of migration, that is fragmentary and multilocational, might have the potential to destabilise presumptions of fixity, offering sites of resistance to oversimplified histories of settlement, and allowing the inclusion of marginalised voices.

## EXPERIMENTS IN CREATIVE MAPPING

Experiments in drawing out the archive have been based in photography and creative map-making. The photographic project places archival imagery in dialogue with a survey of the land as it is now. Reading simultaneously across chronologies draws connections between built manifestations of the Afrikaner state, in monuments, buildings, and the city of Pretoria itself, and the haunting absence of Lady Selborne, a multiracial settlement that became the largest dispossession and forced removal project in Pretoria, and where many Chinese historically lived together with Black, Coloured and Indian communities.

Creative mappings have attempted to spatialise alternate, frequently overlooked and embodied knowledges around place-making, settlement

<footnote n="5">5 Claire Lubell and Rafico Ruiz, eds. *Fugitive Archives: a Sourcebook for Centring Africa in Histories of Architecture* (Montreal: CCA/Jap Sam Books, 2023).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Melanie Yap and Dianne Leong Man, Colour, *Confusion and Concessions: The History of the Chinese in South Africa*, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996), 112.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Darryl Accone, *All Under Heaven* (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2004).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Felipe Hernandez, *Bhabha for Architects*, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2010).</footnote>
and architecture in the context of physical and epistemological erasures. A memory map of 120 La Fleur Street documents a former Chinese corner trading store and home in Lady Selborne. This live-work typology was typical of Chinese migrants, who worked extensive hours to make a living, and positioned their stores, and so their homes, in multiracial settlements by designation of their race and proximity to low-income communities that their stores served. In Lady Selborne specifically, the proliferation of Chinese corner stores emerged out of the overlaps of property law and racial geopolitics – where the Chinese were not allowed to own land, but were favourably granted trading licences by the state, and so corner trading spaces were often rented from African owners by the Chinese. These Chinese corner shops, apart from their commercial and economic value, also functioned as an extension of the wider communities' homes<fnref n="9" />. Offering their refrigerators to those houses without electricity, and serving as pantries for residents who didn't have space to store all their foodstuffs, the shops became significant socio-cultural spaces within the urban fabric.

The method of drawing the memory map is significant, an artefact co-produced through situated testimony of a witness to the space simultaneously recorded by the researcher through the architectural plan. In describing the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Eyal Weizman recalls that he ‘did not make films about politics, but made films politically’; asking what social relations go into the production of evidence?<fnref n="10" />. Working against the epistemological wrecking-ball of colonialism, that destroys not only lifeworlds but also documentations of the fact of its destruction, truth practices such as working together on the social production of facts cultivates a solidarity and resistance that contributes to the commons and recognises diverse experiences of space.

A second mapping draws out a network of multiracial enclaves within the segregated apartheid landscape as a shifting archipelago through which it was possible for liminal identities to drift. It uses Filip De Boek and Sammy Baloji's framing of the 'hole' and 'mountain' in postcolonial African cities to generate an epistemology of the city through topography.<fnref n="11" /> On the one side the man-made mines of Johannesburg, the Gold capital, and across the plateau the Magaliesberg Mountains of Pretoria, the state capital, form two figures of mountains, embodying historical layers both colonial and apartheid, that have contributed to the formation of a physical and mental landscape entangled with power. Between these mountains, there existed a series of interconnected 'holes', gaps between separate group areas, where diverse races, and specifically Chinese, lived together – Sophiatown, Western Native Township, Commissioner Street, Marabastad and Lady Selborne. The fact of their racial integration was the reason for their

condemnation by the state as ‘black spots’, or slums, near white centres, which led to forced removal and demolition. When one township was marked for erasure, Chinese communities drifted and reformed in another. The wave of Chinese traders and Reef Chinese in Lady Selborne resulted from the imminent threat of forced removals in Sophiatown<fnref n="12" />, a detail echoed in my family archives describing Lady Selborne as a place where ‘lots of Chinese decided to move’.<fnref n="13" />

Taken together, the mappings attempt to surface strategies of resistance and survival practised by migrant Chinese communities in South Africa. The findings, and their method of making, offer some resistance to dominant narratives that tend to dismiss the architectures created by common people in the act of survival. This includes appropriations of space they carry out in urban centres in order to live and work.

## THE DIGITAL TURN

Already a peripheral history, could the embodied, oral, printed, analogue-photographed, single-copy, mapped archive of Sino-African migration, inscribed largely in memory and place, be made more accessible through digital reconstruction?

In the axonometric reconstruction of a suburb in Johannesburg<fnref n="14" />, Sumayya Vally and Sarah De Villiers spatialise the imaginary and real-world registers of toxic mining landscapes through the story of supernatural communication networks as a by-product economy of the ground-radioactivity of a nearby impepho plantation. With audio, visual and written narratives embedded in the digital artefact, this kind of reconstruction provides a framework for complex histories contained in diverse archival traces. While acknowledging the limits of translating an affective archival habitat digitally, could the potentials of the digital repository form the grounds for greater access, particularly for narratives of the Global South.

And if we further question the digital forms a southern archive could or should take, the need for new ways of seeing may require a move away from high-resolutions, originals and perfection. Filmmaker Hito Steyerl makes a case *In Defence of the Poor Image*, acknowledging its capacity to transform quality into accessibility – ‘The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates’.<fnref n="15" /> It speaks to the original archival photographs in family albums, re-photographed with cell phone cameras and uploaded, downloaded, shared along grassroots distribution circuits. One might imagine another form of

<footnote n="9">9 John Seakalala Mojapelo, *The Corner People of Lady Selborne* (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2009), 133.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Eyal Weizman, "Atmospheric Violence," filmed September 2022 at Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Providence, video, 1:47:22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGcTXL0MTVY&ab_channel=WatsonInstituteforInternationalandPublicAffairs (accessed August 31, 2023).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Filip De Boek and Sammy Baloji, "Positing the Polis: Topography as a Way to De-centre Urban Thinking," *Urbanisation* 2, No. 2 (November 2017): 142–154.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Mojapelo, *Corner People*, 28.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Alice Ho Tong Poon, *Ho Tong Ancestry* (Pretoria: Self-Published), 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Sumayya Vally and Sarah de Villiers, "You Have a New Message: What of Johannesburg's Many Deaths – And What if These Could Speak?," *Ellipses Journal of Creative Research*, March 24, 2021, https://ellipses2022.webflow.io/article/you-have-a-new-message (Accessed August 31, 2023).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Hito Steyerl, "In Defence of the Poor Image," *e-flux Journal* 10, November, 2009, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (Accessed August 31, 2023).</footnote>
value defined by the velocity, intensity and spread of these images, where the poorer image is often all that remains as evidence of histories not recognised by formal archives.

Steyerl was specifically discussing the medium of cinema, arguing for a real and contemporary imperfect cinema, more ambivalent and affective, that strives to overcome the divisions of labour, race, class society<fnref n="16" /> and enables the participation of diverse perspectives. In my own filmic practice, I've investigated short films as atmospheric constructions of force and meaning that ask viewers to linger, in the hope that a more sensual knowledge of place might emerge. I am interested in pursuing future cinematic iterations of creative maps that tap into poor images as popular images — images that can be made and seen by many. Transforming film to clips. Using low-definition, fractured and flexible temporalities, and multilocational fragments. This speaks back to multiple registers of this Sino-African archive; in the YouTube-rip of *Kill or be Killed*, a popular 1960s kung-fu film set in South Africa starring my great uncle, otherwise lost to cassette, or the socio-cultural significance of the cinema space recounted in the anecdote, *'Although the Ho Tongs were poor, they were a happy family. There was no T.V. in those days, so they went to the bioscope "theatre" down the street'.*<fnref n="17" /> It's perhaps in the haze of the poor image that diverse realities come into focus, and it's possible to find expression for hybrid identities and the representation of marginalities.

<figure><img src="image_69.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="16">16 Julio García Espinosa, "For an Imperfect Cinema," trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut, No. 20 (1979): 24–26.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Poon, *Ho Tong Ancestry*, 5.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_70.png" /></figure>

Loly Sanabria and Barry Bergdoll at the archives of architect José Tomás Sanabria, Caracas, Venezuela, 2014. Courtesy of the author.

# Futurising Latin America:
With the Anxiety of Presentism,
We Enter the Archive

Today, the collapse of the future has given way to futurity. In this context, any architecture exhibition that turns to the archive of modern architecture posits a distinct historical time and mode of production that emerges in the context of modernism's temporal disintegration. Any return to the past has its pitfalls and its potential dangers. In an era of uncertainty, we are seduced by the historical document, by the magnetism of its patina of deep authenticity. Can we resist their allure? One can approach the archive with nostalgia for the slow time of architectural productions that seem to preserve the aura of the 'work of art' that, as Walter Benjamin noted, died with mechanical reproduction. However, this kind of management of the past is a grave error. The turn to the archive that marks contemporary curatorial practices in architecture must confront the loss of the aura. The display value of any work then must contend with this loss, in other words, with the secularisation of the work, from its coming of age, brought about by modernity.<fnref n="1" />

These ideas are a result of vigorous conversations with Argentinian architecture historian Jorge Francisco Liernur over several dinners, as we recently discussed the implications of the exhibition *Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980*, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2015. Along with architecture historians Barry Bergdoll, then MoMA's Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Brazilian Carlos Comas, Liernur and I were part of the curatorial team of the exhibition, along with a network of scholars and cultural agents in Latin America that made possible this endeavour. How to think about the future via Latin America—how to *futurise* Latin America—remained very much in my mind as I took the lessons of that particular MoMA exhibition into my research on the museum and my continued teaching of courses that focus on museums, architecture archives, and exhibitions.

A strong tradition remains to frame Latin America as the land of the future, as the land of ‘failed’ architectural and social experiments. Today, however, that Latin America is not the land of the future but rather of melancholy over a haunting macro-politics routinely presented in Europe and the United States. The modernist utopia, dependent on ‘the plan’ and top-down social

<footnote n="1">1 I'm drawing from several sources: Peter Osborne, *The Politics of Time. Modernity and the Avant Garde* (London; New York: Verso, 1995). Paolo Virno, *El recuerdo del presente. Ensayo sobre el tiempo histórico* (Buenos Aires; Barcelona; México: Paidós, 1999). For the notion of futurity in relation of race in the Western Hemisphere see, Juliet Hooker, *Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos* (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2017); for futurity in the context of Afrofuturism see, Tina Campt, *Listening to images* (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017); for futurity in architecture see, Ingrid Mayrhofer, *Architecture, Futurability and the Untimely: on the Unpredictability of the Past* (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022)</footnote>
engineering, crashed in the late 1960s, taking with it a future that cancelled
everyday experiences of modernity in favour of 'universal' conditions
imagined by the privileged few, architects amongst them. For all its good will
and optimism, this temporal modality of modernism's future remains caught
in the affirmation of a static horizon that is fastened to a space with no
time.<fnref n="2" /> So, if we are to jumpstart the future by reconceptualising it as futurity,
how do we do this? If we are to salvage the horizon of expectations still
present in the works of modernism, we must recover the lost futures buried
in the archive.

There's no denying that the work of the architecture historian has been
enriched by exhibitions that engage the archive, which today appears to be
a consolidated trend mobilised by the architect-curator as well. Curatorial
practices that engage the archive enable the translation and transposition
of architectural practices into museums and exhibition spaces. In these
sites, architecture becomes part of cultural work. This work has expanded
the narrative sites of architecture where values are being administered.<fnref n="3" />
Entering the cultural sphere and its diverse performative sites, architecture,
however, has generally been at a 'loss,' since it enters typically as
representation – principally via drawings, photos, and models – that solicit
their own material and historical approximation, distinct from the 'mandate'
of encountering the 'actual' work in the built environment. This 'loss' has also
opened new interpretations of architecture that both enrich and impoverish
the discipline by questioning the limits of its practice. The turn to the archive
then operates a dual 'loss' – of the actual object as built work and of the
aura of its representation. Architectural exhibitions are but the management
of these losses, of these voids present in any show. The turn to the archive
is thus underpinned not only by the cultural sites of the management
of the past and their politics of memory but also by the distinctiveness
of architecture's own archive – both concentrated and dispersed – embodied
in the work and in representations.

The multiplication of narrative sites of architecture culture comes with the
anxious presentism of our contemporary times and the uncertainty of which
values to defend. As a depository of the past, the archive has been a privileged
site of the writing of history. The critique of knowledge has exposed the
institutionalised powers and systems of control that underpin the management
and representation of the past. In all, the archive is far from neutral.<fnref n="4" /> Any
'opening' of the archive, along necessary critiques, must attend to the
singularity of the media and historical specificity of its production. In short, we
must attend to architecture—to its archival logic and to its cultural economy.

In the context of that vast and multifarious region routinely called Latin America, the critique of the institutional archive is conditioned, with respect to architecture, by its weakness and precarity. The recent 'exodus' of private archives – such as those of Brazilian architects Paulo Mendes da Rocha in 2020 followed by that of Lucio Costa's in 2021 (both donated to the Casa de Arquitectura in Portugal), and the Amancio Williams Archive from Buenos Aires, which sought refuge in 2020 at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal – revived concerns first voiced in 1995 with the acquisition of the Luis Barragán archive by Vitra in Switzerland. That same year, Harvard University's Frances Loeb Library Special Collections accessioned the archive of Argentine architect Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy. These acquisitions, however, are not commensurable. The acquisition of the entire works of Barragán was an outright commercial transaction of over $2-million U.S. dollars, according to the Mexican press, that laid claim to the buildings themselves as it sought to trademark and police all future photography of the built works. Two years after Francis Fukuyama had declared 'the end of history' in the late 20th Century, even the architecture archive seemed to be swept away by the angel of neoliberalism in the speculative bonanza of an emerging cultural market.<fnref n="5" /> Yet the flight of those archives of Mendes da Rocha, Costa, and Williams are framed not by the promised end of history but, rather, by the overarching structural precarity that, according to Italian Marxist theorist Franco Berardi, is the constituting condition of a time with no future.<fnref n="6" />

The question is one of cultural commodities and the uneven intellectual markets. Let me be clear, I'm not launching some kind of 'Latin Americanist' or nationalist lamentation against the exodus of archival materials and original works from the region. At Harvard, the Ferrari-Hardoy collection is not alone, and is in very good company, residing alongside the entire works of British architects Allison and Peter Smithson and Japanese architect Tange Kenzo – gifted to the Frances Loeb Library in 2003 and 2011, respectively.<fnref n="7" /> The exhibition *Latin America in Construction* served to increase MoMA's collection holdings, perpetuating uneven cultural playing fields. At the same time, the presence and preservation of these original materials that have left the region enable cultural operations that break the regional enclosure of this architecture. In other words, in a museum like MoMA these works may cease to be 'Latin American'. There are no easy answers. Willingly or not, the migration of archives and original works is a means of cultural and temporal silencing. The migration or re-location of any archival collections re-positions its meaning and brings with it serious challenges to underfunded scholars and cultural institutions for which these works become inaccessible. Archives are silent without their use, and who uses them – who has access to them – continues to be a pressing question.

<footnote n="2">2 'The utopic,' as Grosz argued, 'has no future.' Elizabeth Grosz, *Architecture from the Outside. Essays on Virtual and Real Space* (Cambridge, Mass.: London: MIT Press, 2002), 138.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 See, Giovanna Borasi, Albert Ferré, Francesco Garutti, Jayne Kelley, Mirko Zardini, Jonathan Hares, Noura Al-Sayeh, and Centre canadien d'architecture, *The Museum Is Not Enough*. No. 1-9 (Montréal, Québec: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Sternberg Press, 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 For a foundational approximation to the dialectics of history and memory see, Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," *Representations*, No. 26 (1989): 7-24. For a recent critique of the archive see, Ariella Azoulay, "Archive," *Political Concepts. A Critical Lexicon*, July 21, 2017. http://www.politicalconcepts.org/archive-ariella-azoulay/</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Francis Fukuyama, *The End of History and the Last Man* (New York: Avon Books, 1993)</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Franco Berardi, *Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation* (London: Brooklyn, N.Y.: Minor Compositions; Distributed by Autonomedia 2009), particularly see, Chapter 2. Also see, Lucas Van Milders, "Precarity/Coloniality," *Theory & Event* 24, No. 4 (2021): 1068–1089.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 The exodus of the Tange Kenzo archive caused great concern in Japan and spurred initiatives to prevent further flights. Conversation with architecture historian and theorist Seng Kuan, September 20, 2022.</footnote>
What is at stake is the production of knowledge. Who ultimately controls this production and who has the means of making architecture cultural work? The migration of archives thus strikes at the core of cultural or soft power but, more importantly, it strikes at futurity itself. As modernist futures are extracted from the region, they leave behind the built works as the detritus of yesterday's future.<fnref n="8" />

In 2015, our curatorial strategy with the MoMA exhibition was that of accumulation, the presentation of an overabundance of materials that aimed both to impress visitors with the quality and variety of architectural responses and to lure scholars to engage in further research. It acted as an implicit call for future hermeneutic actions on the project of *Desarrollismo* or Developmentalism, an overarching industrialising agenda embraced by governments across Latin America after the Second World War that produced the growth of an urban-middle class imagined as an agent of modernisation. The exhibition was staged as an archive of the period's architectural production organised in thematic clusters grounded by well-known canonical works. This framing presented the dialogics between canonical and lesser-known works but, more importantly, between history and memory, between monument and document, caught in a vortex of original materials. We mined archives from across the region—and beyond—to redress past presentations at MoMA. Since the 1943 exhibition *Brazil Builds*, MoMA had engaged the region's modern architecture in a ritual performance of the International Style, not absent of pan-Americanist politics. It had been 60 years since Henry-Russell Hitchcock's *Latin American Architecture since 1945*. In 2015, we engaged a specific institutional site and the long history of cultural relations between Latin America and the United States. The moment was one of great optimism echoed by the British magazine *The Economist*, which for its September 11, 2010, cover, bombastically declared the region 'Nobody's backyard' and illustrated the idea by appropriating Joaquín Torres-García's now-famous 1943 *América invertida* (Inverted America) with its 'south-up' gesture of epistemic emancipation.

For reviewers, the exhibition showed a period 'possessed by a bygone optimism'. In all, it recovered a time of dreamers when Latin America was 'the future,' *New York Times* critic Michael Kimmelman argued.<fnref n="9" /> *Latin America in Construction* returned visitors to a period of 'the abiding faith in public largess and its social agenda,' in which the processes of urbanisation were front-and-centre in the minds of many. Overall, it served as a wakeup call as we hurtled toward a future in which a third of the population will be living in slums, 'mostly in the so-called global south that includes Latin America. Once again, the region is the future,' as Kimmelman noted.<fnref n="10" /> As potent as such observations are, one must be vigilant of their focusing power. Latin America was not the refuge of a lost modernist arcadia, and any such perspective willfully hides the malevolent and destructive politics

of the period.<fnref n="11" /> For Kimmelman, the staging of the exhibition necessitated a political orientation. The exponential aggregation of materials that 'lumps some nations together and ignores others' made it next to impossible to discern historical details; the exhibition 'glides over politics'.<fnref n="12" />

If the exhibition was low in historical details, it was ripe with architectural facts. The Latin America defined by macro-politics—caught in the web of political conspiracies—tends to outshine the micro-politics of aesthetic productions.<fnref n="13" /> As Brazilian psychoanalyst Suley Rolnik argues, it is necessary to differentiate between two modes of politics present in artistic—and I will add *architectural*—practices: those of the 'macro-political nature [that] basically transmit ideological content, and this brings them closer to activism than to art. In contrast, in the second type of action the political constitutes an element that is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic to poetic investigation'. This 'macro-political tendency', Rolnik adds, has been the hegemonic interpretative tool when examining aesthetic practices in Latin America.<fnref n="14" /> Moreover, this approach to Latin America, as Ronilk argues, is concomitant with the archival turn—'mania', in her words—under globalisation.

The return to the past is a fundamental issue of our time. Without forgetting that the idea of a Latin America *in* construction presupposes the destruction of that which already existed in that place called Latin America, and taking Rolnik's suggestion of a micro-politics of exception, one can return to the modernist archive of a difficult political period to recover buried futures to have them insist on the present.

Looking back at our 2015 efforts, I would venture that the unrealised, yet latent, promise of the exhibition was how the micro-practices of architecture's past may contaminate our present. The turn to material culture—to the tradition of hand drawing in architecture, for example—continues to offer a critique of contemporary processes of image production and the dominance of a new kind of visuality preferred by the society of spectacle. This return to past modes of production can be a recovery of historical consciousness. In addition, the turn to the archive makes clear that the embodied memory of architectural subjects persists and presses on the present through recorded gestures and habits. These memories continue to seduce and haunt us. How we embrace or banish these phantoms is up to us.

<footnote n="8">8 See, Norma Evenson, "Brasilia: Yesterday's City of Tomorrow," in *World Capitals: Toward Guided Urbanization*, ed. H. Wentworth Eldredge (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1975), 470–506</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Michael Kimmelman, "Latin Visions, Fleeting Dreams," *The New York Times*, May 01, 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 We made politics in the exhibition explicit with a 30-meter wall that carried a chronology with social, political and economic events of the period.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Michael Kimmelman, "Latin Visions, Fleeting Dreams."</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 On the interpretation of Latin American conceptual art and the 'pensamiento del complot' or the mind of conspiracy see, Andrea Giunta, "Imaginarios de la desestabilización," in Rodrigo Alonso curator, *Sistemas, Acciones, y Processos. 1965-1975* (Buenos Aires: Proa, 2011), 49-58.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Suely Rolnik, *Archive Mania = Archivmanie* (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 7.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_71.png" /><figcaption>A local resident association's files from the 1980s kept in the kitchen of an otherwise closed-off community room, Brittgården, Tibro, Sweden. Photograph: Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, 2019.</figcaption></figure>

Heidi Svenningsen Kajita (University of Copenhagen)
and Jos Boys (Independent Scholar)

# Activating Social Housing Archives (Meeting Minutes)

**Location:** Room: Landscape, University of Copenhagen

**Date:** March 10th, 2023

**Time:** 11.30-17.00

**Attendees:** Hosts: Jos Boys, independent scholar, and Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, architectural researcher, University of Copenhagen. Participants: Rikke Lyngsø Christensen, architectural historian and research librarian at the Royal Danish Library; Gitte Juul, independent practicing architect; Kris Nilsson, practicing landscape architect; Marie Northroup, housing activist, anthropologist, Almen Arkiv; Armina Pilav, independent artist and researcher; Svava Riesto, architectural historian, University of Copenhagen; Meike Schalk, architectural researcher, KTH Royal Institue of Technology (Meike sent her apologies for not being able to attend); and David Roberts, architectural researcher, University College London.<fnref n="1" />

## AGENDA:

SOCIAL HOUSING, ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVES AND DESIGN ACTIVISM

This is an account based on seminar conversations between a group of cross-European researchers and practitioners sharing creative, ethnographic and historiographic methods for engaging with architectural archives in the contexts of social housing and design activism. The group convened to explore how archival documents, both existing and yet to be created, can be practical, critical and creative components in the constructive transformation of social housing and neighbourhoods.

We adapt and subvert the meeting minutes format to explore a different way of writing up such an event; 'keeping a record' that explicitly draws out some points and leaves out other points from participants, and valuing minutes as

<footnote n="1">1 In presenting order at the seminar, we heard from: David Roberts about *Mobilising Social Housing Archives in Regenerating East London*; Armina Pilav about archival practices in war/postwar cities; Gitte Juul about *Situated Planning in Taastrupgaard*; Heidi Svenningsen Kajita about *Impossible Instructions: Inscribing residents' voices in architectural paperwork*; Kris Nilsson about *Management and Care in Practice: the 'archivist' potential*. Case: fsb afd. Brønspark; Rikke Lyngsø Christensen about *Millech's Cabinet: Notes about the systematisation of the collection of architectural drawings at the Royal Danish Library*; Svava Riesto about *How Are Archival Artefacts Used in Contemporary Renewal Projects for Social Housing Neighbourhoods? Two examples and even more questions for expanding the archive and its future uses*; Jos Boys about *Questions on Archiving Matrix Feminist Design Cooperative*; and Marie Northroup/ Almen Arkiv about *Resisting Documents: Tenants produced documents as resistance tools*.</footnote>
themselves a social, performative genre and process, to be circulated and
lead on to continued work (action points).<fnref n="2" />

In a series of individual presentations (by attendees listed above) and joint
conversations, attendees shared insights into how archival documents
function in the transformation of post war and welfare-state social housing
over time as it is planned and designed, produced, lived in, altered,
contested and appreciated.<fnref n="3" /> In these entangled processes, architectural
and related information do not merely pertain to built objects, rather they
act among varied actors across disciplinary and professional boundaries,
inside and outside institutions; and between desk, archival and fieldwork. In
these processes there are many erasures – whether of marginalised voices,
memories, or modes of living – via the differential impacts of institutionalised
gatekeeping; or conventions about what constitutes an architectural archive;
or within a wider political impetus that increasingly frames social housing
through narratives of failure and social problems.

In what follows below, we list, describe and leap between the multiple
archival practices that were shared in the seminar. The listed items – that
run across points raised by individual participants – unfold the myriad ways
of attending to archival marginalisation processes, from analysis of the
mechanisms of the archive; to making visible loss of historical intentions
alongside loss of entire collections and using documents as a material
mediation of life; to housing activists’ creative use of document aesthetics
in their bureaucratic struggles (including making document genres, such
as drawing and lists of complaints, act in continuous, ongoing design
and maintenance processes.) We play with what constitutes proper and
‘improper’ evidence, with the intention of making records work for open and
diverse purposes, as counter-narratives and to capture methods that make
archives a potential tool of change – that is, as documents and processes
that can be activated towards more inclusive and just futures. This is
informed by diverse sources from the personal, through to practice-based
and theoretical engagements.

## ITEM ONE:
MECHANISMS OF THE ARCHIVE

One of the overarching seminar questions was how archival mechanisms act
to (re)produce norms – about what an architectural archive should contain,
about what documents and artefacts are of value, what stories need telling and
who has access – and how archives can be reimagined to support and amplify
marginalised voices and experiences in social housing histories and futures.

Seminar participants gave examples of how the systematisation of archives
effect which historical evidence we can access in the first place. We heard
of systematisation of institutional collections that define not only named
(often well-known) architects as a primary search category but can also
set a hierarchy of architects' relative 'importance' through the way furniture
is allocated for drawings storage. The architectural archive becomes
a repository of predominantly production and representational drawings
which, in turn, affect the conventions of histories developed by researchers.
Other kinds of materials, such as business files (often messy) may not be
deemed worthy of mention.

How might other kinds of sources offer wider (even speculative) connections
and insights, building for example on Ariella Aisha Azoulay's work on 'unlearning'
the archives of imperialism?<fnref n="4" /> The presence of marginalised communities'
voices in the archives – not usually represented in architectural history and
practice – challenge not only history writing and narratives, but also the
purpose of the architectural archive as only a record of built construction.
Again, examples beyond architecture and the built environment offer
potential directions.<fnref n="5" />

There is also a matter of who is given access to the archive. Counter narratives
require us to rethink not just what is collected and how it is catalogued
but also its locations and availability. Open Access platforms and site-based
archives (where material is produced and kept, looked after, and accessed in
neighbourhoods) are empowering and enable residents and other actors to
share stories, memories and personal accounts. But this also raises questions
of how such community-based or personally-held archives are looked after,
and how they can inform both architectural histories and current practices.
The fragility and precarity of non-institutionalised collections are often
apparent in their physical condition (for example, residents keeping materials
in damp attic spaces through decades, or residents' associations leaving
materials in plastic bags in kitchen cupboards). In addition, enthusiastic
individuals who collect, curate and act as custodians without resources may
struggle to keep up the work and enthusiasm over long periods of time. The
Matrix feminist architecture archive grew out of, and continues to survive in,
just such precarious conditions.<fnref n="6" />

## One Point One: Action Items

* Create architectural archives that challenge architect-as-star and scholar-centred frameworks. Diversify the use of, and access to, archives and architectural documents.

<footnote n="2">2 We are inspired by Cornelia Vismann's materialist approach to record keeping. She describes how minutes occupy a space between the oral and written: doubling as both record and act. Cornelia Vismann: *Files: Law and Media Technology*, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008): 54.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Despite significant differences in public, social and common housing organisation across European countries, we use the term *social housing* here for simplicity and in line with Housing Europe Observatory. See https://www.housingeurope.eu.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Ariella Aisha Azoulay, *Potential history: Unlearning Imperialism* (London: Verso, 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 See, for example, Kate Eichhorn, *The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order*. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013); and Ann Cvetkovich, *An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures* (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Matrix Open Feminist Architecture Archive (MOfaa) http://www.matrixfeministarchitecturearchive.co.uk/
See also Jos Boys and Julia Dwyer, “Revealing Work: Interrogating artefacts to (re)view histories of
feminist architectural practice,” *Architecture and Culture* 5(3) (2017): 487–504.</footnote>
* Explore open-ended archiving, that recognises that people who have different perspectives also have different practices. Make the archive useful to those that it does not include today.

* Establish continuity and long-term infrastructural support for social housing archives that exist outside of conventional institutional frameworks, for example, within housing associations themselves, or as community (web) platforms etc.

## ITEM TWO:
MAKING VISIBLE LOSS OF HISTORICAL INTENTIONS AND ENTIRE COLLECTIONS

During the course of the seminar it became evident that some documents or even entire collections dealing with social housing questions were simply not available. We heard of a London municipality who lost the entire collection of a housing estate while moving facilities; we learned that whilst documents used to communicate maintenance issues between maintenance staff, landscape architects and residents in a Housing Association in Copenhagen are highly valued in practice, these are unlikely to enter the association's own archive. We heard of how architectural practices own archives varied. Ralph Erskine's UK-based Byker site-office archive was kept in its entirety – boasting a unique variety of documents<fnref n="7" /> – whereas collections from their Swedish main office were more restricted. Low use-value and heritage value, storage space, money, practicalities, coincidence, lack of community influence and deliberate ignorance of certain material seem all to influence the disappearance of documentation.

What is lost in these processes? Post WW2 social housing neighbourhoods are often represented in mainstream media in simplistic and stigmatising terms say as 'failures', 'ghettos' or 'concrete jungles'. Meanwhile research and practice alike engaging in these social situations reveal multiple and complex narratives. Whether motivated by autobiographical, community-based story-telling and/or social justice agendas, social housing occupants often have positive contributions to offer about their lived experiences, as well as diverse practices for resisting resource injustices (poor maintenance, unsupported facilities and spaces, ghettoisation and gentrification) which challenge the marginalisation of their voices. What we lose are counter-narratives and a record of community and individual agency in housing struggles. What are the processes through which social housing groups can be enabled?<fnref n="8" />

In addition, what wider archival efforts are needed to make visible – and to act – on this loss? How do we today ensure documentation of what is

happening right now in the history of social housing? Housing activists, local communities, architectural practitioners, and community archives (such as the Bishopsgate Institute in London) were presented as possible drivers of alternate archival practices. And a wide variety of methods for both preventing loss and enabling alternative archives were discussed – from open access platforms and crowd sourced archives to performative methods, academic writing, teaching, site-based practice, co-production, as well as different forms of architectural practice.

## Two Point One: Action Items

* Local communities' representation in architectural archives is crucial to give a sense of how architectural communities contribute to define purpose, dignity and continuously changing modes and values of citizenship.

* We need to build on various techniques for site-based co-production of archival material already being explored – working in a locality; local communities co-producing collections; creating connections between several archives; using web-based, crowd sourced approaches; making interactive maps and augmented reality apps as a database sourcing images from the location where things happen.

## ITEM THREE:
USING ARCHIVES AND DOCUMENTS AS A MATERIAL MEDIATION OF LIFE

How do documents reveal 'life'? For archival researchers, documents can give access to certain feelings, such as the feeling of excitement that comes with opening a box of papers and thrusting yourself into someone else's life and work – described by an attendee. Social relationships might be imagined and/or understood through a scrap of paper; and the clues and loose connections suggested can stimulate imagined conversations that might have taken place around the documents. This, in turn, can lead to creative critical approaches to archival practices where the researcher feels challenged and moved to action.

In addition, rather than solitary research, being with others in an archive enables a common endeavour and the sharing of histories, a broadening of what might be considered an archive, not just a collection of documents but potentially a place and/or a practice. For example, sketches and maps produced on site with participants offer forms of recording with those who otherwise communicate via different languages, reflecting their different backgrounds. Comments from residents do not just need to be recorded through formal participatory sessions – an attendee noted that: 'people often don't necessarily show up to the workshops [...], they come out and then they ask what are you doing so in that sense I feel like the archive is a living

<footnote n="7">7. Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, "Urgent Minor Matters: Re-Activating Archival Documents for Social Housing Futures," *Architecture and Culture* 10:3 (2022), 483–51. DOI: 10.1080/20507828.2022.2093603.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8. Setareh Noorani, Katla Truijen, and Rene Boer, "Housing Futures: An experimental get-together for a rekindled housing movement," *Radical Housing Journal*, 4(2) (2022): 171–182.</footnote>
archive, because it's through the conversation that I get the knowledge from people who live there for 25 years or even longer'.<fnref n="9" />

### Three Point One: Action Items

* Value archive research beyond solitary scholarship.

* Create place-based architectural archives that engage with history in the making, including in contested situations.

## ITEM FOUR:

### ACTIVE USE OF DOCUMENTS IN BUREAUCRATIC STRUGGLES

What do local communities—from residents to facility managers to architects and local planners—find most useful about documents and artefacts in their actions for change? Mundane everyday documents, such as meeting minutes, official letters, and bills all hold information crucial for social housing campaigns. Whilst communities may be collecting materials to document their own story with or without institutional support, constructing a timeline of issued documents such as implementation of laws, various stages of urban plans, local hearings, etc., can double as entrance points for housing activists' actions. This suggests opportunities in making document genres, such as drawings and lists of complaints, act in both the recording of and intervention into ongoing design and maintenance processes.

Some attendees explored the materiality, function, and aesthetics of documents used in resistance practices. Documents, artefacts, and spaces all perform in relational processes between different actors. Simple techniques such as telephone conversations and walking around neighbourhoods play into how conventional documents are produced at the desk. In addition, by building new archives in the middle of social situations by means of crowd sourcing and co-production of collections, those who were former marginalised in documentation are made visible. Because architectural and planning documents are constructed in specific ways for production and bureaucratic purposes—which often run parallel to, rather than in direct dialogue and communication with, housing tenants and residents—we ask how more messy and relational place-based and community-based processes can make an impact? When should a housing activist's letter have an open feel or an authoritative aesthetic to perform in and thus inform the bureaucratic system, workflows and daily operations? By thinking about, and 'playing with' document genres, for example, complaints paperwork, it can be possible to turn what often acts as a 'blockage' into an unexpected potential mechanism for change. One seminar participant highlighted details from a document registering residents' complaints from 2017 to 2018. This noted, for instance, a resident's allergy to Birch trees—the

process mapped and shared all sorts of detailed and information about the residents' lived experiences and the actions taken, which had the potential to record complex, layered knowledge that could inform future design and maintenance processes.

### Four Point One: Action Items

* Diversify architectural document genres: attending to how systematisation mechanisms prioritise some material and marginalise other materials and genres. Consider documents that work both long-term and for immediate purposes, both for mainstream and marginalised purposes.

* Creative and critical practices can challenge who archival documents are useful to, say in performances, exhibition and visual techniques that draw in new audiences and users.

### MINUTES APPROVED

This article was shared with the seminar participants and approved by them, although in time honoured fashion (as overworked scholars, teachers and practitioners) many hardly had the time for thorough reading or reflection. As seminar hosts and minute keepers we have shared what we prioritised from the meeting—already to be understood as a historical and partial record, gathering fragments of very different archival practices and perspectives, and now ready for archival interpretation.

<footnote n="9">9 Comment by Kris Nilsson during the seminar.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_72.png" /></figure>

Aerial photograph of the JMM2 mountain depot, accidentally captured in 1973, two decades after its decommissioning as a gold depot, when documenting the construction of a nearby wastewater treatment plant. Retrieved from Bildarchiv, ETH Library. Swissair Photo AG, LBS_P1-733921, 24x24 cm, black and white, 06.04.1973.

Ludo Groen (ETH Zürich)

# In Search of Architecture in Non-Architectural Archives: Learning from the Archive of the Swiss National Bank

If you really want to hear where to find the Alpine vaults of Swiss banks, and what they look like, the first thing you should probably know is that the archives of almost all banks in Switzerland are not publicly accessible, and even when they are, the last thing you will find there are architectural drawings.<fnref n="1" /> Your best hope are illegible scribbles, in the margins, on the backs of papers, overlooked by archivists, because everything that does resemble a floor plan or section could compromise the security of still in-place infrastructures, and has therefore been excluded from the archives. After two years of combing through piles of correspondence, annual reports, and meeting minutes in the archive of the Swiss National Bank, one such document stood out. A yellowed bedraggled piece of paper of approximately 15 by 21 centimetres that, considering its serrated edge, must have been hastily ripped from a block note. On top of the thin blue-lined grid, there is a palimpsest of data, five consecutively applied layers, bleeding off every corner of the paper. In sharpened graphite grey pencil, the nine lines are ruler-straight, not veering to left or right, clearly from the hand of a precise, fastidious person. They make up a rectangular space, an underground cavern, the mountain side accentuated by a hatch, pierced by two access corridors. An assumption confirmed by the fat red pencil, handwritten, probably during a site visit, annotating the space's internal dimensions of 8.5 by 7 metres.<fnref n="2" />

Back at the office, the torn piece of paper was inserted into the typewriter of one of the bank's secretaries. The drawing was dated as October 13, 1939 (six weeks after the start of the Second World War), and clarified with a caption: 'the layout of the space available to us is approximately as follows'. The 'us' refers to the document's author, who signed his drawing with 'BI' in blue pencil in the right bottom, like an architect signing a drawing. The same 'BI' features on the banknotes that the National Bank issued the same years, and belongs to its Chief Treasurer Erich Blumer. On top of the memo there is a red-typed codename, JMM2, a presumed military abbreviation of 'Interlaken Munition Magazine 2'. The same moniker can be found on later correspondence in the archive: 'a gallery intended for

<footnote n="1">1 Sentence structure borrowed from opening line J.D. Salinger's *The Catcher in the Rye*: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is..." J.D. Salinger, *The Catcher in the Rye* (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 1979).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 The sources used for this paper are retrieved from the public Swiss National Bank archive, especially from dossiers relating to the evacuation of assets during the Second World War, unless mentioned differently.</footnote>
the storage of ammunition, the rear part of which was separated from the
front part by a brick wall and made available to the National Bank after the
beginning of the war in 1939. It is the westernmost of 6 ammunition sites
at the entrance to Interlaken'. Finally our suspicion is confirmed, the sketch
represents one of the highly secret Alpine bunkers where the National
Bank during the war stored its gold and other valuables. But the caption
also reveals a new piece of intel, an indication of its location near the town
Interlaken in the Bernese Alps.

This is where another archival research method can assist. There is a vast
amount of historical aerial photography digitised over the past decade,
sometimes even geo-tagged, floating around somewhere on the internet.
In Switzerland, a lot of these are shots by the military pilot and photographer
Walter Mittelholzer, who in 1934 founded Swissair Photo AG as a subsidiary
of the eponymous airline carrier. At that time, aerial photographs were
primarily sold to tourist offices and magazines, marketing the panoramic
and, until then, unknown angles of famed mountain ranges. Interlaken
was a tourist hotspot and therefore regularly portrayed from above
by Mittelholzer and his aviators. But focusing a camera from a moving
plane required an incredible dexterity, such a difficulty that cautious
photographers often included major parts of the background and cropped
the relevant details after.<fnref n="3" /> The by-catch of a bird's eye view of Interlaken-
West offers a glimpse of what looks like six concrete bunkers, extending
out of the rock with a canopy.<fnref n="4" /> The photographer must not have been
aware of its background presence as, since 1938, federal law prohibits the
documentation of military objects, via photographs and other techniques.
But once again, in the margins of archival documents, one can find proof
of their existence.

Moreover, an image recognition tool can help navigate this vast amount of
digitised archival photographs which is available online. While the depot in
Interlaken was used to safeguard gold during the Second World War, the
National Bank used another bunker in Amsteg, along the Gotthard Pass, for
the storage of banknotes.<fnref n="5" /> There is one particular archival photograph of
that place that widely circulates online, depicting the alleged entrance to the
bunker. By uploading that image to Yandex's reverse image search engine,
its algorithm retrieves a larger collection of identical photographs of the
same bunker, among which stands out an image of a storage room whose
characteristics match the other mountain depots used by the National Bank.<fnref n="6" />
The images originate from a military photo collection in the Federal Archives,
but are neither indexed nor sufficiently labelled, making them therefore
impossible to find with a conventional archival query. After the open-source
platform Wikimedia scraped them from the archive and posted them online,

not fenced off by an identification procedure as is the case with the Federal
Archives, the image showed up in the reverse image search. This is an
example of how the digitisation of archives and its subsequent algorithmic
analysis introduces new ways to access archival materials. Sources normally
obscured due to incorrect or insufficient labelling, suddenly become
retrievable through the power of image and text recognition tools.

These are just a few haphazard strategies to seek architectural evidence
in non-architectural archives. In order to contain the laborious and costly
practice of archiving, the bureaucratic mandate of archives, that defines
what to collect, is often tightly framed, whether it is limited to a field such
as architecture, an institution such as the National Bank, a territory such as
a municipality, region, or country, or to particular types of documents such
as meeting minutes, correspondence, and annual reports, or architectural
drawings and models. The current shifting gaze in architectural history,
away from single authorship towards more global, collective, and decolonial
practices underrepresented in the canons of the discipline, often requires
archival research to go beyond these instituted frames, as their scale
extends beyond regions, their expertise transcends disciplines. The
disciplinary disaggregation of the fields of architecture, landscape, and
urban design further complicates the archiving of large-scale infrastructures,
such as the ones of the Swiss gold storage in the Alps, that are the result
of complex political, military, technological, and design decisions.

The same can be said of one of the most designed landscapes in the
Netherlands: the polder, which documentation is not necessarily found in
the archive of architecture and urban planning, but more so in laws and
policies in the Dutch National Archive. In this context, it would be easy (and
perhaps not entirely fair) to question to what extent strictly geographically
or disciplinarily defined archives such as the one kept by the Nieuwe
Instituut, mandated to collect Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, are
still relevant repositories of source material for the production of knowledge
in the field of architecture and urban planning. The geographical adjective
of 'Dutch' refers to the domicile of authors, a distinction that with the
internationalisation of practice becomes increasingly arguable. Why is it
that the work of Dutch practitioners abroad is present, while the work of
foreign architects and urban planners in the Netherlands is not? Besides, the
disciplinary boundary of architecture and urban design seems increasingly
hard to defend, as their practice and theory increasingly blur with other fields.

The Nieuwe Instituut would be the first to acknowledge these shortcomings,
being an interdisciplinary institute itself since the merger of the national
institutes of architecture, design, fashion, and digital culture in 2013. The
recent acquisition of the archive of a landscape architect has demonstrated
this, setting a precedent for an entire field to be represented as well, which
would require a significant increase in financial and human resources. But
also, within the current collection, the disciplinary focus excludes various
types of documents. You might find countless revisions of the same drawing
signed by the architect, but hardly any drawings by the structural engineer. If

<footnote n="3">3 Michael Gasser and Nicole Graf, *Swissair Luftbilder / Swissair Aerial Photographs*. (Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2014), 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Bildarchiv, ETH Library. Swissair Photo AG, LBS_P1-733921, 24 x 24 cm, black and white, 06.04.1973.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 A letter dated March 6, 1951 discusses the technical requirements for the new K10 bunker, and refers to the exact dates that the bunker in Amsteg was previously used. SNB Archive, dossier K10, uncatalogued.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Swiss Federal Archives, E5792#1988/204#1302*, 1939-1945.</footnote>
these were to be saved from the trash bin as well, the archive would double its size. And even if we were to change this acquisition policy, archives are by nature inert, non-agile, and dependent on their donors, making the process of shifting the focus of a collection—for better or worse—a slow, patient process.

One of the ways the thresholds between these strictly disciplinary, or geographically bound archives can be lowered is the earlier mentioned digitisation and the sharing of its data and metadata with other archives through standardised protocols like Linked Open Data (LOD). In such a networked approach, each institution can maintain its own collection policy, but together these distinct puzzle pieces allow a broader, multi-vocal view. In the context of this particular research, one of the downsides of digitisation is that this not only allows the researcher to faster navigate large amounts of data (for example by searching for keywords in OCRed documents), but it also empowers its keeper to tighten access regimes. In the Swiss National Bank, the minutes of the weekly Governing Board meetings are all digitised and searchable from a local computer inside the bank. The researcher cannot bring this digital file home, only hit the print-button, and paradoxically, take its physical copy. To what extent this digitisation helped the bank to restrict access to sensitive dossiers is unclear. The dossier containing Treasurer Blumer's drawing was not yet scanned, otherwise a trained algorithm could have recognised and red-flagged terms such as *Grundriss* (floor plan). Or if the sketch was scribbled on the backside of Blumer's notes, it would likely not have been digitised at all, as the archive does not scan the backsides of papers. But once a file is digitised in (for instance) the Swiss Federal Archives or the Dutch National Archives, physical files can no longer be ordered to the reading room, further complicating finding sensitive materials in the margins of archives.<fnref n="7" />

Not only the content, but also the access to these archives is carefully regulated. The Swiss federal law on archiving stipulates that documents are sealed for thirty years after the closure of the file, or longer if they contain 'an overriding public or private interest worth protecting'.<fnref n="8" /> But this law does not extend to private archives, such as the ones held by commercial banks, which are only accessible to the bank's own employees. As a result, their histories are often written by in-house historians on the payroll of the bank.<fnref n="9" /> Besides producing a celebratory monograph, the companies consider maintaining these archives as unnecessary expenses, or even a threat to business secrecy.<fnref n="10" /> This reluctance of corporations to make their archives public, will become more relevant as well to the Nieuwe Instituut, as it

continues acquiring the work of offices produced during the 1990s, an era in which architectural and urban design practice rapidly professionalised and financialised. When acquiring the archives of OMA and MVRDV (respectively around 2004 and 2015), mainly materials older than 10 years were included. That was not only because of the interest of archivists in their earlier work, but also connected to non-disclosure-agreements and greater economic interests at stake in the more recent projects. During the latest exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut on the archive of MVRDV, access to the born-digital archive of their last twenty years was generously provided, but only from a workstation at the office and after the approval of the business and development department to make sure the files were not subject to legal restrictions.

Rather than revealing where and how the Swiss banks stored their gold in the Alps, this paper sought to reflect on consecutively researching the archives of MVRDV and the Swiss National Bank. Researchers seeking materials that prefer not to be found, encounter similar hurdles in both archives, in which the imminent digitisation brings forth both opportunities and challenges in terms of acquisition, access, and research methods. Paradoxically, drawings, one of the most confidential materials in the archive of the banks, are the most ubiquitous in architectural archives, while vice versa, spreadsheets, the documents that fill the majority of the racks in banks are almost entirely excluded from the archives of architects, similarly for reasons of confidentiality.<fnref n="11" /> This raises the question whether the keeping of exclusively disciplinary mandated archives is still relevant, or that what really matters is how connect all these distinct repositories of historical evidence to each other.

## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper builds upon the author's doctoral research at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich, supervised by Laurent Stalder and Milica Topalovic in the context of the SNSF-research project 'Switzerland: a Technological Pastoral'. It greatly benefited from conversations with supervisors, guest critics, as well as former colleagues at the Nieuwe Instituut including Marten Kuijpers, Suzanne Mulder, and Marina Otero Verzier. The author would like to especially thank Patrick Halbeisen for his careful guidance through the archive of the Swiss National Bank.

<footnote n="7">7 For a critical reflection on the process of digitisation in the Bern State Archives, see: Thibaud Giddey and Benjamin Ryser, "Die süsse Verlockung. Zugänge und Herausforderungen mit zeitgeschichtlichen Quellen im Staatsarchiv Bern," in *Traverse*, (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2023), 98–105.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Swiss Federal Law on Archiving of June 26, 1988.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 For example, in his capacity as chief historian at Credit Suisse until 2014, Joseph Jung published various monographs on Credit Suisse and its founder Alfred Escher. Given the restricted access to the private archives of Credit Suisse, his writings are the main reference for the company's history.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Alexandre Elsig, Thibaud Giddey, Malik Mazbouri, "Le goût amer de l'archive. Éditorial." in *Traverse*, (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2023), 12–13.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 In the archive of MVRDV, kept by the Nieuwe Instituut, there is only four small dossiers from the office's administration, one of them being a cashbook from one of the first years of its founding. When asked about this document, one of the founders, Nathalie de Vries, was worried about the sensitive content of the cashbook. Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, MVRDV / Archive, inventory number MVRVTP000.1.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_73.png" /><figcaption>3D Rendering of a spatial installation about storytelling through the three archives exhibited.</figcaption></figure>

# Museum-Archive in Polygyros, Chalkidiki, Greece: New Technologies, Exhibition Design and Archival Research

## STEPHANOS KOTSIANOS' VERNACULAR MANSION

Polygyros is a village in the foothills of Mt. Holomontas at an altitude of 560m., in the peninsula of Chalkidiki, one of the main tourist attractions of northern Greece. The first mention to Polygyros can be found in a document at the Iberian Monastery of Mt. Athos, which dates to 996 A.D. Polygyros became part of the new Greek State in 1912 and has been the capital of the Municipality of Chalkidiki ever since.

The vernacular mansion of Stephanos Kotsianos is located south of the main pedestrian way in the old settlement of Polygyros and was built in 1894 according to an inscription found in situ. It is a complex of particular interest that showcases the development of the Greek economy from rural to urban. Located in the historic centre of Polygyros, it consists of three floors, built out of stone, as well as several open spaces destined to serve the processing of wheat and grapes. The mansion has an irregularly shaped floorplan, adapting to the significant difference in height between the two sides of the plot. Consequently, the building has two floors in the façade facing the street, whereas on the opposite side, surrounded by a yard, there are three floors. In the open space around the building, a two-meters stone fence limits the view from the road and protects the facilities which were used to make wine, flour, and silk.

In the 1980s, half of the building was donated to the Municipality of Polygyros, which triggered the acquisition of the rest of the building by the Municipality. According to the study for the Renovation and Reuse of the building, carried out in 2015 by the Technical Service of the Municipality, the mansion and its surroundings are being restored to be reused as exhibition spaces. Following a series of discussions, inquiries and collaborative design meetings, the Municipality agreed to use the space as venue for three different archives that had been acquired, as well as to host educational and cultural programs and activities.

## Stephanos Kotsianos' Personal Archive

The first archive constitutes the personal collection of former Member of Parliament Athanasios Stephanos Kotsianos. Stephanos Kotsianos was
born in 1908 in Chalkidiki. He went on to study Law in Athens and later in Paris. Part of his archive documents the time he spent in Paris, relevant to his interests and pursuits as a lawyer as well as a politician. He got elected as Member of the Greek Parliament in 1951. His archive contains a big and versatile array of artefacts, which underline his multifaceted personality and interests. It comprises of 270 folders of newspaper articles on politics and scientific matters, 65 folders of personal documentation, correspondence and important documents, 10 volumes of his writings, 4 chests with legal documents and cases which he had handled as a lawyer, as well as 21 cardboard boxes of bookkeeping.

## The Archive of 'The voice of Chalkidiki' Newspaper

The second archive, *The voice of Chalkidiki*, dates back to April 20th, 1930. The founder of the newspaper was Nikolaos Christou Yerochristou, born in 1899 in Taxiarchis, Chalkidiki. He attended junior high school in Polygyros and went on to create his own business in 1930, initially a bookstore and a print shop, located in the historic settlement of Polygyros. The premises where the paper was being printed still exist in Polygyros. The newspaper *The voice of Chalkidiki* was published from 1930 up until 1961, when its founder died. Later, the publication of the paper continued through his heirs until 1977. After 1977, the paper ceased to exist but, thanks to the founder's son contribution, most of the newspaper's physical copies were retrieved. More than 1494 newspaper sheets are now part of the archive: 136 of them date from 1930 to 1936, 344 were printed between 1945-1959, 865 between 1960-1969, and lastly 149 date to the 1970s.

## Archive of Polygyros' Local Photographer Argiris Vogiatzis

Argiris Vogiatzis, born in 1907, was a self-taught photographer who kept the only photography shop in Polygyros from the 1920s until 1982. His visual documentation of the life and people of Polygyros became one of the only and most significant primary sources of information for historians. Vogiatzis archive was acquired by the Municipality of Polygyros in 1983, one year after Vogiatzi's death. The archive was at times stored in spaces with high humidity and inappropriate conditions, which consequently resulted in the ruin of part of the documents. In total, the material comprises 1500 photographs and 500 negative films. The physical photographs would have to be evaluated and restored by a certified professional to stabilise and ameliorate their physical condition. In addition, specific recommendations should be made to determine the ideal storage conditions, avoiding further damage.

## ARCHIVES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Archives first emerged in private collections dubbed *Cabinets de Curiosités*, *Wunderkammer* or *Cabinets des Merveilles*, which constitute the first

collections of the 16th century, containing a wide range of objects and souvenirs. These *curiosities* would be stored, preserved, exhibited, and reinterpreted by the viewers. In this sense, archives are interwoven with the past, but also play a critical role in shaping a place's future, because they contribute to explore answers, pursuits, and responsibilities towards future generations. In 'Archive Fever', Jacques Derrida deals with this dual existence of archives as a strong element of their power.<fnref n="1" /> Archives show the human need to safeguard written and other important materials, as well as the need to share them with others, a dualism that extends to the ways in which archivists and researchers use and interpret archives. For archivists, an archive constitutes a treasure that should be preserved and maintained, whereas for researchers it is a field for exploration and experimentation, through which new views of the past can emerge. An archive should be ultimately viewed as a composite amalgam of interpretations and approaches to the past, rather than a complete and infrangible continuum.

From the 2000s onwards, the digitisation of numerous archives in Greece has been an ambitious and demanding project, which continues to this day. The project 'Digital Convergence 2007-2013' has contributed to the digitisation of nearly four million pages of material from 1821 to 1923.<fnref n="2" /> The General State Archives of Greece has an expanding agenda of digitisation projects focused on the historic period spanning from the Greek Revolution to mid-20th century.<fnref n="3" />

Archival material is an integral part of human existence which, amidst rapid technological development, has been omitted from the vast repository of human activity and culture that is the Internet. Digitisation and the creation of digital, open access repositories have been a milestone in the democratisation of archival material, moving away from their initial conception as collections reserved for the initiated few. Digitisation is the first step towards free and unconditional access to a vast number of information, which has survived for several centuries.

Recently, a new stream of research has emerged through the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Deep learning algorithms have enabled the interpretation of visual and written archives under a new artificially augmented light.<fnref n="4" /> Pattern recognition is an essential function of Deep Neural Networks and can be used to address different types of archival research. From 2015 onwards, the world of artificial intelligence has been revolutionised by research carried out regarding deep neural networks.<fnref n="5" /> The focus of archivists' profession is destined to shift from

<footnote n="1">1. Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, "Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression", Diacritics 25, No. 2 (Summer 1995): 14</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. See more about the project: https://www.mfa.gr/en/diplomatic-and-historical-archives/the-archives-today/digitization-of-archival-material.html</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. See more about the agenda of General State Archives: http://www.gak.gr/index.php/en/menu-en/our-activities/projects-and-programmes</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. Stanislas Chaillou, Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice (Basel: Birkhauser Verlag, 2022): 95</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. Giovanni Colavizza et al. "Archives and AI: An Overview of Current Debates and Future Perspectives", Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 15, No. 1 (December 2021): 5</footnote>
a profound knowledge of an archive, towards narrative and critical interpretation of the material.<fnref n="6" /> a prerequisite for processing archives through deep learning algorithms is labelling. The labelling of the three discussed archives has been completed within the 'Digital Convergence 2007–2013' project and is freely accessible online.

## MUSEOLOGICAL APPROACH

The notion of archives as well as their actual physical aspect, have been a point of departure for artworks that approach the human need of creating, preserving, and passing along information. The main concept for the design of the museum was the creation of interactive and digitally enhanced spatial experiences that narrate stories on the material encountered in the archives. The aim was to explore the three archives on two distinct levels. Firstly, through deep learning algorithms, with which the archival material, be it photographs, newspapers or correspondence, was classified, clustered, and visually represented in a way that visitors and researchers alike could navigate. Big breakthroughs in visual pattern recognition include Yale's Pixplot project, a convolutional neural network, which clusters visual material based on patterns identified from the material it has been trained on.<fnref n="7" /> Secondly, through spatial installations that address highlights and selected narrative stories extracted from the archives' ensemble. These installations provide the visitor with a general as well as focused outlook of the material that is stored in the Museum.

The main entrance of the museum is located on the ground floor of the building, where Stephanos Kotsianos' personal archive is presented, showcasing stories from his childhood, studies in Paris and professional career. A deep learning application trained on Kotsianos' photos and voice recordings of his public speeches is exhibited as an introductory look into his personality and interests. Circular configurations are used throughout the exhibition spaces to conceptualise the concept of a continuum of information and research material, which bring the past and present together.

The entirety of *The Voice of Chalkidiki* newspaper is presented on the same floor, through digital screens where visitors can navigate through the sheets, labelled, and classified by year. At the same time, the physical artefacts are stored in Bruynzeel custom-made storage units that enable potential researchers to get a closer look at the material. In the same space, stories in the cover of the newspapers have been selected, describing local customs and celebrations. Through this analysis, the place's traditions are showcased in an implicit way that lets the manners, language, and mentality of the time shine through. The choice of subjects and events presented in the frontpages of the paper of the time are indicative of how.

In the circulation spaces of the building, light and print installations unify the different segments of the exhibition, setting the tone for the rest of the museum. The basement of the building, formerly reserved for the processing and storage of flour, wine and other products, has been used to present Argiris Vogiatzis' Photography Archive, as well as an interactive installation titled "The archive of the Future". For the photographic archive of Polygyros, Yale's Pixplot application has been employed to classify and cluster the retrieved and digitised images. In order to emulate the environment of the actual photography studio, mirrors have been used to create the illusion of an infinite space. For the "Archive of the Future" installation, which tries to interpret the archive as a continuum of streams of information, screenings of archival material move in different directions according to the density of visitors in the room, which is monitored through motion sensors.

On the 1st floor, the three archives are presented as a palimpsest of information through a maze-like circular layout that illustrates stories from all three archives, which have been pivotal for the history of Chalkidiki. This open space is reserved for a more immersive and focused narration that highlights events of the village's history. Some material artefacts are exhibited in eight modular displays which form a full circle when put together. These displays act as the central focus of the room. Around the displays, lightboxes are hung from the ceiling at different heights, depending on the different hosted events.

## CONCLUSION

Contemporary museological theory and practice has shifted museums' focus from object-centred to human-centric. This has affected the way collections and archives alike are treated, now approached as a vehicle for story-telling and research with intriguing and non-canonical foci. Thanks to new technologies, the breadth of archives of all sorts can be navigated in a more efficient, user-friendly manner, artificially augmented analyses which enable new conclusions and observations. The three archives are approached through abstract spatial installations, which look to emulate the ambiance of the material encountered throughout the archival research conducted in order to design the museum. More specifically, the material is deconstructed and resynthesised to offer focused, anecdotal stories, representing what the press and intellectuals were consumed with in different times from the 1930s to the 1970s. Moreover, many observations of anthropological, aesthetic, politic and ultimately historical nature can be drawn from the archive, which are used as a point of reference for creating spatial 'moments', centred around isolated or recurring events.

The archives are analysed in multiple scales. Deep learning applications are used to draw observations about the entirety of these three distinct archives and let researchers and visitors alike take a closer look in the material exhibited and stored in the vernacular mansion. In the emergent field of digital humanities, the use of artificial intelligence has proliferated

<footnote n="6">6 Kate Theimer, "It's the end of the archival profession as we know it and I feel fine", in *Archival Futures*, ed. Caroline Brown (London: Facet Publishing, 2018) 1–18</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 See more on: https://dhlab.yale.edu</footnote>