Chairs and Contact Details:
Vanessa Grossman, University of Pennsylvania
Daria Ricchi, Oxford Brookes University
First-person narration in architectural history offers an intimate perspective that connects past and present, bringing personal insights, emotions, and reflections often missing from third-person accounts. This approach humanizes architectural history by grounding it in lived experience rather than abstract facts. However, it raises concerns about subjectivity, bias, and the potential to obscure broader historical contexts. This roundtable invites a reflection on the role of the first-person in architectural histories, particularly through feminist and queer lenses that highlight emotion, identity, and positionality, distinguishing the conventional academic “I” from a more subjective, embodied one.
First-person travelogues played a foundational role in the construction of European world histories, particularly during the colonization of the “New World.” Informed by colonial ideologies, these narratives engaged with natural landscapes and the built environment while drawing on Indigenous knowledge—perspectives that were often marginalized, distorted, or erased in the final texts. By the late eighteenth century, the rise of modern historiography marked a methodological shift, aligning historical writing with the empirical frameworks of the natural sciences. Historians increasingly employed third-person narration to present evidence as neutral and systematic, a move that distanced the authorial voice and reinforced the divide between memoir—rooted in subjective experience—and history—positioned as objective, analytical discourse.
In the nineteenth century, European historians of architectural styles, deeply influenced by racial biases, shaped architectural history in ways that excluded marginalized voices. While historical fiction grew popular, the first-person voice remained linked to fictionalization. In the twentieth century, thinkers like Paul Ricœur emphasized the importance of maintaining a clear distinction between verifiable history and imaginative fiction. The avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century began to blur the lines between artistic expression and historical narration, further destabilizing traditional views of historical objectivity. The concept of the “death of the author” further destabilized the notion of objective truth in writing, including historical texts. A pivotal shift occurred in 1987, when Pierre Nora published Ego-histoire, marking the first time a historian explicitly used the first-person pronoun to reflect on their own subjectivity in historical writing. That same decade also saw the emergence of Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistories, which revealed how individual, seemingly marginal narratives could illuminate broader historical truths—elevating the personal to History with a capital “H.”
Feminist scholars, such as Donna Haraway, have influenced contemporary architectural thought and historiography, introducing concepts like “situated knowledge” and embodied experience. These ideas underscore the partial and positional nature of all knowledge, challenging traditional narratives that have historically excluded personal identity and emotion. This shift has informed approaches where autobiography and architectural history intersect, as seen in works that explore modernism and women in architecture, such as Eva Hagberg’s When Eero Met His Match (2022). The growing prominence of first-person narratives in urban and architectural histories is further evident in works like Remaking Beijing (2005), Jane Rendell’s “The Siting of Writing and the Writing of Sites” (2017), and AbdouMaliq Simone’s Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South (2018). These examples highlight how personal narration in architectural discourse can offer fresh insights, revealing how feminist and personal perspectives shed light on the broader, more complex narratives of space and urban development.
This roundtable invites contributions from a variety of historical periods and geographies, exploring how first-person narration, emphasized by feminist, intersectional and queer frameworks, can bridge individual experience and collective memory in architectural history. We encourage papers that engage with the emotional, political, and methodological implications of this approach, while also addressing the tensions between subjectivity and historical representation in contemporary contexts.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Dirk van den Heuvel, TU Delft
Eytan Mann, TU Delft
The archive is undergoing a profound transformation. Once conceived as static repositories for historians to explore, archives have expanded into dynamic, digital platforms attempting to democratize narration of history. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Extended Reality (XR), the notion of the archive encounters ideas of collective, decentralized intelligence and multisensory engagement. The convergence of AI's analytical capabilities with XR's immersive technologies creates unprecedented opportunities for architectural research, enabling scholars to simultaneously analyze vast datasets while experiencing spatial configurations in virtual environments. This transmedia approach allows researchers to move fluidly between different modes of knowledge - from AI-powered pattern recognition across historical documents to embodied understanding through virtual site visits - creating richer, more nuanced and multivocal interpretations of architectural history. These technologies open new possibilities for studying architectural history, yet they also present ethical and critical challenges that demand reflection and debate.
This roundtable invites scholars to interrogate the "Transmedia Architecture Archive" as a space where storytelling and knowledge production span multiple media, blending traditional archival materials with computational and simulation tools. It focuses on the implications of moving from metadata-based systems to AI-driven epistemologies and how real-time simulation technologies introduce intimacy, empathy, and urgency to historical narratives.
The following questions will guide the discussion:
By addressing these pressing issues, the roundtable aims to push the boundaries of architectural historiography, proposing new ways to engage with the past while acknowledging the challenges of doing so in the AI age. The discussion will bring together voices from architectural history, critical theory, and archival practice, fostering dialogue between diverse scholars. By connecting historical expertise with technological innovation, we seek to understand how transmedia archives might redefine the roles of historians, architects, and the public in shaping historical narratives. The roundtable invites both speculative and grounded contributions, inviting participants to imagine and critically examine the future of architectural knowledge production at the intersection of traditional scholarship and emerging technologies.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Karen Burns, University of Melbourne
Lori Brown, Syracuse University
Over the last 190 years collective organising has been a strategic tool for marginalised and under-represented groups. The final decades of the long twentieth century, marked by ‘cleavages, conflicts and confrontations’, produced a dense cluster of social movements and distinctive forms of collective, activist organising. The global women’s movement was the largest of these social mobilisations.
This panel calls for papers that investigate how women organised collectively in architecture to enact demands for professional equity, new knowledge and social justice in the period 1960-2020. By focussing on campaigns, actions and networks, this panel aims to expand new areas for women’s history in architecture. It seeks to move beyond histories of individual figures and their buildings produced in the context of private firms or state bureaucracies. It aims to situate women in architecture as social actors in civil society in pursuit of emancipation and transformation.
Drawing attention to architecture’s activist past, we aim to situate women’s collective organising within a diverse set of geographies and histories. Early feminist or women’s collectives such as Matrix (London, 1980) and the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (US, 1974) are well established in the historical record, but other lesser-known examples include the First Women’s Collective (Iran, 1974) and Thyra (Copenhagen, 1979). How does the inclusion of overlooked collectives alter the received historiography of the influence, origins and growth of the intersecting women’s movement and architecture? What social and political forces and conditions specific to the profession and civil society have driven the rise of new collectives over the last decade, for example Counterspace, Johannesburg (founded 2015) and professional women’s organisations such as Women in Architecture and Design (founded Ahmedabad, 2016)?
Frequently shut out of the ‘great man, great monument’ model of mainstream architectural history, how does an examination of women’s collective organising raise the visibility of other kinds of architectural labour and innovation: such as collective activist pedagogy - ‘What’s ‘race doing in a nice field like the built environment?’, UCL, 2020 or ‘Contesting the Canon’ by the Feminist Art and Architecture Collective, founded US, 2018, or the mobilisation of research as an activist tool in older media forms such as Women in American Architecture (1977) and Making Space (1984) or in new digital platforms (Parlour, Australia, 2012 and FAME, London, 2018). How does this new work decentre the discipline’s objects of knowledge by centring experience, everyday lives and lived moments of sexism and racism?
Conferences and their ensuing publications have offered important temporary mobilisations of collective exchange, support, and new knowledge (for example Desiring Practices, London, 1993; Alterities, Paris, 1999; An Emancipated Place, Mumbai, 2000; Architecture and Feminisms, Stockholm, 2016). These published anthologies contain multiple voices and have proven to be a key format for women’s knowledge, but traditional print media has limited circulation and requires capital. How has digital media democratised the space of global collective information, such as that provided by una día / una arquitecta (Uruguay, Spain, Argentina, founded 2016) with its daily profile of woman architects and its formation of a counter-archive? In recognition of broader knowledge shifts, other platforms such as #WIKD (US, 2015) have co-located digital and physical spaces in events designed to expand the lists of women on Wikipedia.
Attention to women’s collective identity, protest and empowerment also invites us to ask how intersectionality and solidarity work. What kinds of labour and care are required to hold together campaigns and coalitions? What happens when they fall apart? Are these the unrecorded, difficult histories of women in architecture?
By using the temporal frame of the long twentieth century, we hope to establish persistent genealogies in women’s organising. We encourage a broad range of papers, from those that provide historically situated case studies to those that develop new methods for studying women’s collective action, agency and identity.
Chair: Léa-Catherine Szacka, EAHN Vice-President, University of Manchester.
Roundtable organized by the EAHN executive committee (participation by invitation).
