Yale Architecture Forum
Albena Yaneva
The Craft of Architectural Archiving
What constitutes an archive in architecture? What epistemology does it perform? What kind of craft is archiving and how does it relate to design? Addressing these questions, the lecture offers insights to the ontological granularity of architectural archiving based on ethnographic observation of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal and interviews with a range of practitioners around the world.
Drawing on an Actor-Network-Theory approach, I follow archiving in its mundane, down-to-earth and practical course. I sketch and analyse specific scenes from the daily work of archivists and conservators in architecture such as performing a treatment in the conservation lab and processing an archive. Every move of archiving is captured in its situated context of practice and connected to a specific archival way of knowing, documentary techniques, instruments, and experimental tactics. Unravelling the epistemic dimensions of archiving allows us to question some well-established myths of creativity and authorship in architecture. From the incidental accounts of archives as sources, I shift the attention to archives as practice, from collections as sites of enduring historical evidence to collections as sites of epistemological reshuffle.
Bio:
Albena Yaneva is an architectural theorist whose research crosses the boundaries of science studies, cognitive anthropology, architectural theory, and political philosophy. She is Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Manchester, UK and the author of seven monographs: The Making of a Building (2009), Made by the OMA: An Ethnography of Design (2009), Mapping Controversies in Architecture (2012), Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (2017), Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy (2020), Latour for Architects (2022), Architecture After Covid (2023). She also co-authored The New Architecture of Science: Learning from Graphene (2020) with the Nobel Laureate in Physics Sir Kostya S. Novoselov.
Yaneva has held the prestigious Lise Meitner Visiting Chair in Architecture at the University of Lund, Sweden as well as Visiting Professorships at Princeton School of Architecture, Parsons, New School and Politecnico di Turino. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at GSAPP, Columbia University. Yaneva has delivered more than 180 invited lectures at prestigious universities. 48 of these were keynote addresses at major conferences.
Yaneva holds a DEA from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and a PhD from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris where she worked alongside Bruno Latour. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Thai, Polish, Turkish and Japanese. She is the recipient of the RIBA President’s award for outstanding university-based research.