Join us on the afternoon of Sunday, May 29th for a virtual book club event at which we will discuss author Albena Yaneva’s most recent publication: Crafting Histories: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy. Albena’s book is available in various formats. Click here to use the discount code on the flyer for an additional 30% off your purchase: CSFF2020
Albena Yaneva is Professor of Architectural Theory and director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG) at the Manchester Urban Institute. She has been Visiting Professor at Princeton School of Architecture (2013), Parsons, New School (2015) and Politecnico di Turino (2018). She held the prestigious Lise Meitner Visiting Chair in Architecture at the University of Lund, Sweden (2017-2019). Her research is intrinsically transdisciplinary and crosses the boundaries of science studies, cognitive anthropology, architectural theory and political philosophy. She is the author of several books: The Making of a Building (Peter Lang 2009), Made by the OMA: An Ethnography of Design (010 Publishers 2009), Mapping Controversies in Architecture (Routledge 2012), Five Ways to Make Architecture Political. An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (Bloomsbury 2017), Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy (Cornell University Press 2020), The New Architecture of Science: Learning from Graphene (World Scientific Publishing 2020), co-authored with Nobel Laureate in Physics Sir Kostya S. Novoselov, Latour for Architects (Routledge 2022) and Architecture After Covid (Bloomsbury 2023). Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Thai, Polish, Turkish and Japanese. Yaneva is the recipient of the RIBA President’s award for outstanding university-based research.
About Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy:
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.
Please contact programming@nycarchivists.org with any questions or for more information.
