How Architecture Makes Friends

Abstract

product of a dominant intellectual class. Since the 1980s, scholars from Science and Technology Studies have paved the way for myriad studies of the embodied practices that shape knowledge in laboratories, government offices and other institutional settings. Such internal critiques are motivated by the conviction that ideas and facts are not immaterial constructs but contingent things realized through the distributed agency of individuals, protocols and objects with conflicting interests. In architecture, this influence has helped to erode heroic myths cemented in midcentury accounts of modern architecture and delusions about architectural “autonomy.” It has also helped to reorient architectural discourse away from static buildings interpreted solely through design intention and public perception. Yet the most memorable studies about architectural knowledge have focused on the pedagogical settings of the studio and the seminar and on the agency of individuals such as Alvin Boyarsky or the duo of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Indulgent attention to the intra-disciplinary legacy of such figureheads reduces architecture to a medium for commentary on the social and diminishes its participatory role in the public realm. For Yaneva—perhaps architectural scholarship’s most prominent defender of Actor-Network Theory, a method adapted from her mentor Bruno Latour—the “crafting” of architectural ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 2021, VOL. 25, NO. 3, 394–398 history and architectural knowledge instead has stakes in a larger public discourse on the built environment. Whereas Yaneva’s earlier research isolated “design” as the site where architectural knowledge is shaped—as in The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture, her 2009 study of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)—Crafting History instead centers the “archive.” The material site is the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, which since its founding in 1979 has worked to reposition architecture as a public discourse. It was selected by Yaneva for its unique organizational mandate, which has evolved with the shifting currents of scholarship in the four decades of its existence, reflecting the succession of CCA Directors, including Kurt Forster, Nicholas Olsberg, Mirko Zardini, and, since 2020, Giovanna Borasi. With an increasingly interdisciplinary (political, technological, economic) understanding of the built environment, as suggested in a recent exhibition on the spatialization of emotional capitalism (Our Happy Life, 2019), the CCA uses its collections and exhibitions to deliberate architecture’s capacity to reorganize society. It extends these deliberations across a range of institutional programs: publications, online events, produced films, lectures, archives, research projects and visiting scholar programs. Despite its idiosyncratic character, the CCA should nevertheless be understood as a fairly conventional “institution” in the sense that it is both highly organized and wields significant leverage in the field. With its iconic holdings of celebrated architects’ work, it also functions as a fairly conventional “archive”—and is thus ripe for demystification. The book’s seven chapters are organized by a central question, notably whether collections operate as a precondition of architectural scholarship. The first two chapters are essentially historiographical, respectively highlighting how—especially in the aftermath of Derrida’s “archive fever”—the archive has become a central concern in the humanities broadly and architecture specifically. Yaneva’s theoretical framing of the archive eventually bridges to empirical concerns in museum studies about the relationship between (architectural) preservation and debates in (architectural) culture. The subsequent five chapters are fundamentally different in tone and method. Drawing from the anthropology of experts and the anthropology of knowledge, Yaneva rearticulates the institution as a set of concrete practices involving the “arranging” of and “care” for architectural objects (8). Here, the archive is not an intellectual conceit but a labor-intensive process that takes place far from public view: curating, cataloguing, circulating, preserving, etc. Yaneva’s work in this regard is unquestionably original. Few scholars have studied with such proximity the tacit, practical systems of “minor” actors in architectural institutions. The minutiae of archival labor become sites of controversy and altercation: the fragile corners of paper documents are fussed over; a bug that has hitchhiked its way from Mumbai in a crate creates a frenzy in the shipping room. In another compelling segment, Yaneva discusses the “stabilization” of objects (their elaborate conservation through quasi-medical procedures). In this network of actors she describes, organized as they are around unstable objects, Yaneva’s point is that there is no such thing as “an” archive, in the sense of a dusty room sealed off from the world to protect the things inside it, rather a constellated schema of activities with no particular inside/outside distinction that together debunk the notion that knowledge is a “thing.” Stylistically, Yaneva relies heavily on the “ethnographic sketch,” a tool for recording and presenting data that reflects the transitory states and spaces where archival practices unfold. With thoughtful and evocative prose meant to translate the “experience” of the institution, the author elicits the frictions between institutional protocols, material and digital artifacts, and the actual bodies of CCA employees. Narrative evidence is supplemented by twenty ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 395