Chairs and Contact Details:
Vanessa Grossman, University of Pennsylvania - Stuart Weitzman School of Design
Daria Ricchi, Oxford Brookes University, NYU London
Nora Wendl, University of New Mexico
Love Lives and “Historical Drag”: Performance Art as Embodied Architectural History
Yangfan Zhang, KU Leuven
Food, Home, and Diaspora: Herstories of Shanghai’s Workers’ New Village in Zhang Yiwei’s. Fiction (1990s-2000s)
Shellie Smith, The University of Newcastle
Storytelling as Historiography: Oral Knowledge Transfer and Indigenous Standpoints in Place Based Histories
Curt Gambetta, Dartmouth College
In the Presence of Others: Notes on Collaborative Architectural History
Elisa Dainese, Georgia Institute of Technology
Reflections on Narrating the Arctic
Spyros Papapetros, Princeton University
I and “Eye” in Anthony Vidler’s incomplete Autobiography
First-person narration in architectural history offers an intimate mode of engagement that bridges past and present, foregrounding personal insights, emotions, and reflections often absent from third-person accounts. By grounding historical analysis in lived experience, this approach humanizes architectural history and challenges its reliance on detached abstraction. Yet the use of the first person also raises critical questions about subjectivity, bias, and the risk of eclipsing broader historical frameworks. This roundtable invites reflection on the role of first-person narration in architectural historiography, with particular attention to feminist and queer perspectives that foreground emotion, identity, and positionality—distinguishing the conventional academic “I” from a more explicitly subjective and embodied voice.
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 adopted third-person narration to present evidence as neutral and systematic, distancing the authorial voice and reinforcing 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 shaped by racial biases, produced histories that excluded marginalized voices. As historical fiction gained popularity, the first-person voice remained closely associated with fictionalization. In the twentieth century, thinkers such as Paul Ricœur underscored the importance of preserving a clear distinction between verifiable history and imaginative fiction. Early twentieth-century avant-garde movements began to blur the boundaries between artistic expression and historical narration, further unsettling established notions of historical objectivity. The concept of the “death of the author” continued this destabilization by challenging assumptions of objective truth in writing, including historical texts. In 1987, Pierre Nora published Ego-histoire, marking the first explicit use of the first-person pronoun by a historian to reflect on personal subjectivity in historical writing. That same decade also witnessed the emergence of Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistories, demonstrating 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 by introducing concepts like “situated knowledge” and embodied experience. These ideas emphasize the partial and positional nature of all knowledge, challenging traditional narratives that have historically excluded personal identity and emotion. This perspective has informed approaches where autobiography and architectural history intersect, as seen in works exploring 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 also 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 demonstrate how personal narration in architectural discourse can offer fresh insights, showing how feminist and subjective perspectives illuminate broader, more complex narratives of space and urban development.
This roundtable invites contributions spanning diverse historical periods and geographies, examining how first-person narration—foregrounded through feminist, intersectional, and queer frameworks—can connect individual experience with collective memory in architectural history. We welcome papers that engage with the emotional, political, and methodological dimensions 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
Ania Molenda, Nieuwe Instituut
Unfolding the Archive: New Dimensions of Access to Born-digital Architecture Collections
Anna-Maria Meister, KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, saai Archive, Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence (Max Planck Institute)
The Intelligence of Loss in the Archive
Ana Miljacki, MIT
On Historical Archives and “Synthetic Memories”
Lucas de Mello Reitz, IAB- Brazil’s Institute of Architects
Queering the architectural archive: AI-assisted data collecting, hybrid prototyping, and web scraping lost traces in architectural history
Joshua Silver, KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, saai Archive
Architectural Warez: Another Archive of Digitalized Architectural Production is Here
The archive is undergoing a profound transformation. Once conceived as static repositories for historians, archives have expanded into dynamic, digital platforms attempting to democratize the 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. This transmedia approach allows researchers to move fluidly between different modes of knowledge—from AI-powered pattern recognition to embodied understanding through virtual site visits—creating richer, more nuanced interpretations of architectural history.
However, historical knowledge in the AI era is increasingly shaped by a set of tensions particularly visible in the architectural archive. On one axis lies the pull between datafication and resistance: while machine-readable descriptions promise expanded access, they simultaneously provoke counter-archives and practices that insist on opacity, informality, or partial visibility. On a second axis lies the tension between augmentation and forgetting: while XR offers immersive, affective modes of engaging the past, it also foregrounds the fragility and potential "drift" of born-digital materials as constitutive conditions of knowledge rather than mere technical failures.
This roundtable invites scholars to interrogate the "Transmedia Architecture Archive" as a field of negotiation where historical meaning emerges through shifting relations between simulation and erasure, institutional stewardship, and precarious forms of memory work. We will explore how moving from metadata-based systems to AI-driven epistemologies introduces intimacy and urgency, while navigating the pressures of digital persistence and loss.
Guiding Questions
What does the advent of AI entail for architectural historiography, and how does it reshape the agency of individuals and institutions in historical interpretation amidst the tension of datafication?
What tools and methodologies can breathe life into static collections, transforming them into participatory spaces that balance the desire for cataloguing with the creative potential of archival "drift"?
How can XR technologies (AR/VR) foster emotional connections to historical spaces, and how do we address the "confusing" or fragile nature of these simulations when representing systematically excluded histories?
How can we ensure AI and XR don't reinforce Western-centric power structures? Special attention will be paid to data sovereignty, indigenous knowledge, and the right to resist total digital legibility in contested historical contexts.
By addressing these issues, the roundtable aims to push the boundaries of architectural historiography. We seek to understand how transmedia archives redefine the roles of historians, architects, and the public, inviting both speculative and grounded contributions that examine the future of architectural knowledge at the intersection of traditional scholarship and emerging, often volatile, technologies.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Karen Burns, University of Melbourne
Lori Brown, Syracuse University
Sonja Hnilica, Technische Universitat Dresden
Collective Action of Feminist Architects in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s
Bettina Nagler, University of Kassel
What Remains of FOPA? The Fragile Nature of Feminist Organising in Architecture
Isabelle Doucet, University of Sheffield
The Architecture of Refuge: Housing, Supporting and empowering women
Helena Mattson, KTH School of Architecture
’It’s About Our lives’: A Manifesto by Women Building Forum
Chiara Ingrosso with Antonia Marano, University of Campania
The feminist architecture of Italian Collectives (1978-1999)
María Novas-Ferradás, ETH, with Lidewij Tummers, Tussen Ruimte; Setarah Noorani, Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands
Feminist Protesting? On Women’s Grassroots Organisations in Dutch Architecture
Lillian Chee with Dorothy Tang, Chaewon Ahn, Rachel Fong and Pari Sen Biswas, National University Singapore
A Coalition of Women, Wives and Mothers: Alternative Feminisms
Justine Clark, Parlour NGO, Australia
Agents & allies, opportunism and trust: the fast and slow of action on equity
Bart Decross, University of Antwerp
Archiving the Gap: The oral history of ‘Vrouwen en wonen’
Alex Brown, Monash University, Australia
’The Work Is Mysterious and Important’: Teaching, Doing and Revisiting Architectural Histories with Collectives
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.
Chairs:
Léa-Catherine Szacka, EAHN Vice-President, University of Manchester
Fatma Tanış, EAHN Communications Lead, TU Delft
Roundtable organized by the EAHN executive committee (participation by invitation).
