And Yet It Moves: Ethics, Power and Politics in the Stories of Collecting, Archiving and Displaying of Drawings and Models: a guest issue edited by Interim Director, Dr. Federica Goffi in the Architecture and Culture journal series
October 1, 2021
Architecture and Culture, the international journal of the Architectural Humanities Research Association, has published a special issue on the archiving of architecture media, guest-edited by Dr. Federica Goffi, Interim Director of the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism.
Volume 9, Issue 3 (2021) of the journal is titled, And Yet It Moves: Ethics, Power and Politics in the Stories of Collecting, Archiving and Displaying of Drawings and Models.
The collection of essays draws attention to curatorial responsibilities in finding the proper placement for architecture collections and how accessibility, reproducibility, and promotion impact the cultural, economic, and socio-political role of architecture media.
It questions the relevance of translations from place to place when mobile architecture media moves between offices, buildings, archives, exhibition spaces, and websites. It also asks: How does mobile media generate a dynamic trans-mediated construction and construing, finding renewed significance over time?
Read Goffi’s introduction here (open access):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20507828.2021.1938851
“Changes in archival locations have implications on our ability to access, analyze, and interpret such artifacts, directly impacting the ongoing rewriting of the histories and theories of architecture and their influence on broader cultural and political issues,” she writes.
“The urgency of the questions related to archival choices becomes apparent when considering that the age of digital production, overproduction, and reproduction is reconceiving not just architecture media but also the modes of archival access on a local and global scale.”
Published by Routledge, the issue is available in the Carleton Library, and you can read the table of contents here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfac20/9/3
A hard-copy version of the issue will be released in October 2021.
“I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the contributors for realizing an excellent series of articles,” says Dr. Goffi. “A special thank you goes to the Editor of Architecture and Culture, Prof. Suzanne Ewing from the University of Edinburgh, for her generous support and to Sarah Ablett, Production Team Leader with Routledge, for seeing the issue all the way into production.”
Dr. Suzanne Ewing writes: “This special issue brings to the fore the situated complexities of documents of architectural production, and their after-lives, when reassessing ‘the archive’ and archival practices is an expanding and increasingly urgent subject. It is a timely assemblage that continues to weave some of Architecture and Culture’s threads of concern: for disciplinary practices and their associated techniques, objects and politics; the hidden mechanisms in architecture and design; architecture and the spaces of information that are at stake in contemporary research and architectural work.
A parallel publication to the journal, The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models: From Translating to Archiving, Collecting and Displaying, authored by Goffi, is forthcoming in May 2022.
