Engaging the Archival Habitat: Architectural Knowledge and Otto Koenigsberger's Effects

Architectures of the past, should they survive, are historical agents in the present. As politically and economically negotiated forms of cultural coproduction, they inform understandings of the past, as well as contemporary experiences of the constructed environment. Mostly immobile yet profoundly expressive, buildings—with their potential for extreme longevity—can evidence multiple, interwoven histories that transect a wide range of chronologies. Tethered to a specific place (or specific places), they can provide rich epistemological entry points that transcend the discussions of architectural styles and forms often associated with conventional architectural history and contribute to the construction of transregional social and cultural histories, which address, for example, labor, geopolitics, gender, economic systems, and technologies.

For something that is ubiquitous and formative, however, architecture is often difficult to read. If walls speak, they do so in hushed tones and complex codes that are interpreted by a professional elite of archaeologists, building conservators, and architectural historians, critics, and theorists, who often focus on the authored architectural object as the basis for historical investigations and the generation of knowledge. These experts typically build knowledge about architecture and its historical implications from a wide range of media beyond the material archive embodied by built artifacts—photographs and drawings, maps and models, correspondence and reports, sketches and renderings, video and audio recordings—all of which may be contained in formal national and international collections, institutional repositories, and private holdings. Of course, not all architectures were created equal, and the archival traces left by building projects vary tremendously, even those that came into being in contexts of extensive documentation. Among other factors, the (in)visibility of the architect, the (in)formality of the architectural object, and the architectural object's geographic and cultural location contribute to what is recorded, accumulated, and stored.

In this article, I focus on ways in which archives can manifest architectural knowledge. I do this not by analyzing archival documents themselves, but by looking beyond them at the wider archival environment pertaining to architectural production. I argue for a more expansive and inclusive understanding of what constitutes an archive, thereby designating the "archival habitat" as an affective place of cross-disciplinary engagement. The archival habitat is a place of psycho-geographical encounter that links diverse chronologies in different ways. In building this argument I draw substantially on experiences in and with the private and personal archives of figures in the professional field of architecture, particularly those who were displaced, exiled, or forced to migrate, radically resituating a form of practice that would conventionally be developed in one place. Architects' collections can form particularly productive sources of knowledge as they contain material specific to an individual's networks or the workings of a practice, which provide rich material evidence of larger historical forces. Often held by the individuals themselves or by family members, such holdings can be difficult to access or appraise, because as well as the fact that they are frequently not catalogued or indeed organized, working through them requires the presence and assistance of the owner. Sometimes they are not open to visitors at all. However, they also contain an unparalleled diversity and wealth of material. If they are eventually accessioned into more formal collections, which is an exception rather than the rule, they are parsed and sifted, disaggregated and encoded, before being made available to researchers. Sometimes the architect-originator of the archive imposes restrictions on what is to be made accessible. Specific items, such as models or personal correspondence, may be discarded due to an institution's spatial constraints or because they are deemed irrelevant by the archivist. The archival habitat is alternately diminished or augmented as multiple perspectives come into the organization of private and personal collections, which, when retained, are typically stringently curated by their creators. To some degree they mirror their maker's lives and practices. The materials they contain offer immediacy and proximity, a portal to architectural production processes that can provide a unique entry point into the generation of architectural knowledge. While such collections can support hagiographic and canonizing historiographical practices, they also have the potential to embrace...