The (Assumed) Possibilities of the Architectural Archive
M. Fernanda Barrera Rubio Hernández
Professor and Researcher at Library of the San Carlos Academy Archive, UNAM, Mexico.
“There is no political power without the control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation and the access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation.” Jacques Derrida
Collage made from the books shelved in the Library of the San Carlos Academy Archive by Natalia Rello, architecture student at UNAM.
Recently, the School of Architecture of Mexico’s National University has made an effort to identify and conserve the hundreds of linear metres of British, American and French publications that are shelved in San Carlos Academy library – books and magazines that, throughout the entire 19th century, worked as ‘operational manuals’ to build a ‘modern’ country.
It has been largely assumed that in this period, after Mexico’s independence from Spain, Mexican intellectuals turned exclusively to French knowledge – and, consequently, to its publications – in an effort to root the Mexican intelligence to other horizons, and that this tendency was reinforced in the late 19th century and first decades of the 20th century by the yearnings of the Mexican bourgeoisie and of its dictator, Porfirio Diaz, to Gallicise society, arts, architecture and so on.
Collage made from the books shelved in the Library of the San Carlos Academy Archive by Paula Trejo, architecture student at UNAM.
Recent work in the San Carlos Academy publications collections has revealed that it was not only French knowledge that had an impact on Mexican 19th-century architecture, but also British and American knowledge. This is verifiable not only through the numerous materials found in the archive, but also by the allusions and translated fragments of them published in 19th-century Mexican books and magazines. This is a topic to be explored not only within Mexican boundaries, but also in correlation with UK and US archives and its researchers.
From the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the image of America built – and reinforced – by Europe was of a savage and cannibal woman. What has changed since then? And how does this affect the architectural archive and, therefore, the profession?
What those nations with a long tradition of archives’ management lose sight of – and they are precisely the ones that have a colonising past – is that the countries subsumed in their empires were part of their material culture – like architecture – and therefore of its own archive records.
The prevalent concealment in the architectural archives in the “global south” is not only provoked by the people who manage them, but also by how all those institutions are given the opportunity to discuss their achievements, failures and challenges worldwide. How can the 19th-century History of Architecture and its archives be built on an equal footing?
America icon extracted from Recueil et Parallèle des Édifices de Tout Genre Anciens et Modernes: Remarquables, par leur Beauté, par leur Grandeur ou par leur Singularité et Dessinés sur une Même Echelle, Jean Louis Nicolas Durand. Library of the San Carlos Academy Archive.
Mexican icon extracted from A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, Banister Fletcher. Library of the San Carlos Academy Archive.
