Audience / Use

We are pleased to announce that Arch/tectures Arch/ves, an international symposium organised by the SAHGB in partnership with the AA Archives and RIBA Collections, has now been re-scheduled. It will take the form of a series of four virtual symposia, held between July and October, exploring the connections between architecture and archives. The relationship between the two provides a primary interface between architectural history and practice but has been little explored by either discipline. In the sessions we will ask who is represented (and who is not) in architectural archives, what the role of these repositories is for practice and pedagogy, who they serve, and what their future looks like in the age of BIM and Post-Occupancy Evaluation.

Session 1, 17^th July: Concealment/Representation

Session 2: 14^th Aug: Practice/Pedagogy

Session 3: 18th Sept: Audience/Use

Session 4: 23^rd Oct: Plenary

In the third of these themed sessions we will draw on the expertise of those in architectural practice, curating, archiving and academia to explore the relevance of archives to users beyond the traditional figure of the researcher. We will consider how approaches to acquisitions, cataloguing, access and interpretation can help or hinder archives’ ability to serve these audiences’ needs. Acknowledging the financial pressures many architectural archives face, we will interrogate the ways in which institutions and agents endeavour to balance long-term economic sustainability with their responsibilities to existing audiences.

Finally, we will cast our sights to the future to consider what role innovation can play in a sector concerned – in part – with preserving the past.

Programme

14:00 Welcome and Introductory Remarks

India Whiteley (RIBA)

14:10 Collecting Robin Hood Gardens for the V&A: Good or Brutal Move?

Neil Bingham

14:30 Drawing Matter: Archiving a Collection/Collecting an Archive

Matt Page (Drawing Matter)

14:50 Archives and Platforms: A Sustainable Economy of Information

Provides Ng (Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London)

15:10 Discussion/Break

15:30 The HEIR Project: Old Views for Those Creating the Modern World

Dr Janice Kinory (Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford) and Francesca Issatt (Department of History of Art, University of Oxford)

15:50 An Introduction to the SAHGB Oral History Project

Geraint Franklin (Historic England)

16:10 Situational Perhapsing: (Re)Constructing the RIBA’s 1958 Oxford Conference on Architectural Education

Ray Verrall (Newcastle University)

16:30 Architecture of the Archive: Rethinking Archival Spaces

Peter Lester (University of Leicester)

16:50 Visualizing History: Mobilizing the Archive

Karen Lewis (Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University) and Francesca Torello (School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University)

17:10 Discussion

17:45 Close

For further details please visit https://www.sahgb.org.uk/whatson/symposium1-n6sf9

Image Credit: Image courtesy of RIBA Collections, Proposals for the RIBA collections at the V&A, Wright & Wright / Peter Alan Hull