Archive Fevers

This chapter reviews several developments in the social sciences and the arts that date back to the 1990s and motivated this study of archives as practice. It refers to Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur as key protagonists that led to the rethinking of the role of archiving as a tool of memory. It also details the emergence of the trend of “archival ethnography,” which witnessed the advent of the archival turn in anthropology. The chapter elaborates how archival scholarship took an empirical turn in the mid-1990s, coinciding with the “archive fever” in the arts and the “archival turn” in anthropology that opened venues for investigating architectural archiving. It explores the realm of architectural practice wherein the computer radically changed working dynamics and led to the practice's own archival turn in the mid-1990s.