ARCH/TECTURES ARCH/VES: A Virtual Symposium
The Society’s events programme has gone virtual. Over the past three months our team of volunteers have been thinking how to move our flagship events online. Ewan Harrison (@EwanMHarrison), who also convenes the SAHGB LGBTQIA+ Network, reflects on planning the 2020 SAHGB Annual Symposium, a collaboration with the RIBA and the AA. Registration is now live.
Cataloguing the Colin St John Wilson collection at the RIBA Drawings and Archives Collection Piper Centre
In early 2019 I began work as a curator at the RIBA Collections on a project to catalogue the archive of Colin St John Wilson & Partners, perhaps best known for designing the British Library at St Pancras. This position, which involves cataloguing a highly varied architectural collection, led me to reflect on the position of the architectural archive in our discipline. Although architectural collections are often presented as neutral resources, to be mined for significance by the historian, architectural collections are of course constructed and shaped by multiple agencies. They can be carefully curated by architectural practices themselves before they ever reach public repositories: to tell certain stories, to conceal failures, to settle scores, to foreground successes. Then there’s the question of how and what institutions collect, how they in turn shape the stories that we as historians tell.
(c) RIBA Collections
While there has been a focus on technical challenges for archival practice, the epistemological and methodological questions that architectural archives and collections open up have not been widely explored in the UK discipline. What is the relationship between archives and collections and the self-fashioning of the architect? What role do archive collections play in architectural education and practice? Who is, and who is not, represented within archival collections and archiving practice? And, as a corollary, what new infrastructures of knowledge – in the age of BIM and Post Occupancy Evaluation – might need preserving in repositories? And there are practical issues to consider too: What new sorts of archival and collecting practices should we be encouraging? How can we enrich built environment archives? How can we have better funded, more inclusive institutions to diversify engagement?
An idea for a Symposium emerged after conversations with colleagues at the SAHGB (Neal Shasore), the RIBA (India Whiteley, Revealing the Collections Project Curator) and the AA (Ed Bottoms and Lexi Frost). We issued a call for participation but were hardly prepared for the flood of responses we received: ideas for papers, posters and presentations from across the globe and from across the disciplines of architectural history, architectural practice, archival practice and curating. We’d tapped into a much wider design to explore the role that archives and collections play at the interface between architectural history and architectural practice.
The symposium was planned for late May, to be held over two days at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square. Lockdown put paid to that, and as we regrouped we started to explore how a virtual symposium might work. Running a full two-day conference online seemed like an unnecessarily punitive exercise for all concerned – not least attendees – and so we’ve decided to convene four afternoon seminars over the summer and into autumn, allowing for plenty of time for discussion and reflection between sessions. Alongside our virtual meets will be provocation papers for circulation, articles and features on our website, and social media takeovers. We hope you’ll join us!
Registration is now live for the first three Zoom sessions - please sign up and share among friends, colleagues and students. We’re doing our best to keep our virtual programme free but if you’re in a position to do so please consider a small donation to support our wider educational mission. Further details – including the full programme and abstracts –are available on the registration pages:
Session 1: Concealment/Representation
Session 2: Practice/Pedagogy
Session 3: Audience/Use
A final summative session will take place on 23 October: this will feature the presentation of several papers that cut across several of symposium themes, culminating in an extensive plenary discussion. Details for this session will follow shortly.
We are incredibly excited to be going ahead with the symposium in this format. The convenors would like to extend their gratitude to all the speakers who have exhibited incredible patience in bearing with us as we planned, replanned, and then replanned again.
William Firebrace, AA Fifth Year, 1981–82: Press Archive, Fleet Street. AA Archives.
