In this roundtable, organized together with Theodora Vardouli in the context of EAHN 2024 conference, we ask how does architectural history as a narrative- making and -understanding discipline contend with architectural data as an historical category, as an archival condition, and as a methodological challenge?
We invite historical scholarship on narratives that have endorsed, or emerged from, practices of defining, extracting, and using data in architecture’s long modernity. Within this larger inquiry, we also welcome works that focus on digital electronic computers as data- processing machines. The interest is less in historical computational methods in architecture and more in how communities of knowledge and practice made sense of data extraction and processing methods in specific settings. Examining these narratives can expose data’s complicity in perpetuating gender, racial, and class injustices. It can also prompt whose narratives have been foregrounded in histories of architectural data and whose have been left out. Together with critical historical accounts of architectural data narratives, we seek scholarship that tactically mobilizes data as a vehicle toward justice and reparation. As data activist scholarship and practice has recently highlighted, data, under different regimes of ownership and use, need not suppress, but can also activate voices of historically marginalized and oppressed communities. Inspired by such perspectives, the session also welcomes historical work that enacts or historicizes deployments of data toward emancipatory goals, to dismantle master-narratives about buildings, architectural spaces, and technologies.
Find the full call here: http://eahn2024.arch.ntua.gr/index.php/sessions-round-tables/#RT01
Eliza Pertigkiozoglou 