Crafting History

What constitutes an archive in architecture? What forms does it take? What epistemology does it perform? What kind of craft is archiving? Crafting History provides answers and offers insights on the ontological granularity of the archive and its relationship with architecture as a complex enterprise that starts and ends much beyond the act of building or the life of a creator.

In this book we learn how objects are processed and catalogued, how a classification scheme is produced, how models and drawings are preserved, and how born-digital material battles time and technology obsolescence. We follow the work of conservators, librarians, cataloguers, digital archivists, museum technicians, curators, and architects, and we capture archiving in its mundane and practical course.

Based on ethnographic observation at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and interviews with a range of practitioners, including Álvaro Siza and Peter Eisenman, Albena Yaneva traces archiving through the daily work and care of all its participants, scrutinizing their variable ontology, scale, and politics. Yaneva addresses the strategies practicing architects employ to envisage an archive-based future and tells a story about how architectural collections are crafted so as to form the epistemological basis of architectural history.

Albena Yaneva is Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Manchester and Lise Meitner Visiting Chair at Lund. She is author of several books, including, most recently, Five Ways to Make Architecture Political.

Crafting History is a meticulous and captivating study that makes a substantial methodological contribution and will resonate with students and scholars of architectural history and theory, institutions, the anthropology of knowledge, museum studies and related fields. Few scholars have studied with such proximity the tacit, practical systems of "minor" actors in architectural institutions.

Overall, this is a rich and detailed study which is clearly of value to students of architecture, architectural history, anthropology and archival science. There is also something here for the museum scholar: the book points to the epistemic nature of collecting and, through its granular study of the processes that act upon and form these collections, reveals the interventions and mediations of individuals in the shaping of knowledge. For those working in and researching all types of collecting and memory institutions there is much here that can inform and provide new insights into how such work forms the basis of learning, scholarship and research.

It is a book you want to hold in your hands and keep in your collection after reading.

Mark Wigley, Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP:

This is a phenomenal book that can be very inspirational for scholars, young and old. Albena Yaneva offers an opportunity for scholars to see the space of the archive in a new way, and to think also in a radically new way. The archive is commonly thought as a repository of facts, of truths, of evidence meant to limit the imagination of the scholars and to keep them closer to the wisdom of the documents; the archive is imagined as a bunker, disconnected from the world, a space where we can witness the complete suspension of time. Yaneva's book undoes entirely this image of the archive and presents it as a space full of nonhumans, a space of contradictions, of confusions, of multiplicities and accelerations.

Jilly Traganou, Parsons School of Design, editor of Design and Political Dissent:

Yaneva has written an outstanding work that will be a key reference of future works on architectural archiving, as well as future ethnographies of archiving.

Hélène Frichot, University of Melbourne, Australia, author of Creative Ecologies:

Crafting History offers a much-needed analysis of what an archive does, and of what relations it is composed. Yaneva's writing is intelligent and accessible, introducing new methodologies for approaching the archive while telling compelling stories along the way.