Fragile Objects, Coded Knowledge by Anna-Maria Meister / TPOD, ACHT, THEMA, HITAM

Architectural archives are the site of an assortment of more or less stable objects, shielded from further decay, assembled for a belated historical gaze. They are also sites where narratives are constructed, to solidify as well as challenge canonical assumptions and disciplinary conventions. But exactly how stable, or rather, how fragile are these objects that program current historical knowledge? While it has become a widely acknowledged foundation of historical research to reflect on how archives are contested territorial negotiations, full of lacunae and desperately lacking, what happens to the stuff already within them? How do archival materials and processes (database entries, metadata categories, packaging, but also archivists, donors, and users) discriminate those who already made it into its (highly gate-kept) purview? After all, architecture archives are vast material depositories of boxes, folders, models, copies or photographs, of chairs and tables, screws and fabrics, most of which were never processed, catalogued, or even read. How is one to trace figures who already made it into the archival infrastructures, but got lost after their seeming inclusion? What about those who drop out of metadata or remain hidden in items considered “domestic” and “private,” fragile objects in need of decoding, which still often get discounted from a so-called “oeuvre”? This lecture will tell three stories of disappearances—of a collaborator, a daughter and wife, and an emigrée—tracing their path into the archive (and out of it) in an attempt to retrain the eye on the materiality that the archive presents. Refocusing on the matter of architectural histories might reveal how one can re-imagine the writing of others.

Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister is an architect and architectural theorist working at the intersection of histories of architecture and histories of knowledge with a focus on the design of processes and processes of design and their political, social, and aesthetic consequences. She is Professor of Theory of Architecture at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Co-Director of the saai Archive for Architecture and Engineering Structures, and Lise Meitner Group Leader for the project “Coded Objects” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence - Max Planck Institute.

Neighbours Lecture Series Vol. 3

13/3 - Pier Vittorio Aureli (EPFL). Architecture and Abstraction: Book Launch with Sarah Nichols, Christophe van Gerrewey, and Alfredo Thiermann
20/3 - Tatiana Efrussi (L’atelier des artistes en exil). Hannes Meyer’s Kinderheim Mümliswil: From Utopian 'Home' to National Memorial
27/3 - Sarah Gainsforth (Journalist). Challenging the New Housing Question
10/4 - Claire Zimmerman (University of Toronto). Industrial Architecture, Situated in the Twentieth Century
24/4 - Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). Against the Commons: Elements for a Radical Planning Theory
1/5 - Spyros Papapetros (Princeton University). Pre/Architecture
8/5 - Anna-Maria Meister (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz: Max Planck Institute, KIT and saai archive Karlsruhe). Fragile Objects, Coded Knowledge
15/5 - Platon Issaias (Architectural Association) & Ioanna Theocharopoulou (Columbia University). On the Polykatoikia and its Discontents