M+M | Albena Yaneva: Crafting History
University of Manchester Albena Yaneva
February 16, 2021 · 5:00 pm · via Zoom
M+M Program in Media and Modernity
Interlocutor: Mark Wigley, Columbia University GSAPP, emeritus
During the 1990s a flurry of concurrent developments in the social sciences and the arts brought archives to the fore of scholarly limelight: the “archival fever” in the arts and philosophy (Derrida, 1996), the emergence of the trend of “archival ethnography” in anthropology (Sahlins, 1992) and the “empirical turn” in archival science (The American Archivist, 1996: 59/2). The radical change in architectural practice triggered by computerization also led to its own “archival turn,” prompting practitioners to reflect on the techniques of archivization, both traditional and novel. All these developments point toward the importance to study archives as practice, and prompt us to ask: What constitutes an archive in architecture today? What epistemology does it perform? What kind of craft is archiving and how does it relate to design?
