Archival Absences: An Incomplete History of Architecture, or the Methodology of Historical Writing

You are cordially invited to attend the research seminar by Chin-Wei Chang:

Date: 6 Sept 2024

Time: 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

Venue: SDE3 Level 4 LT 425

Archival Absences: An Incomplete History of Architecture, or the Methodology of Historical Writing

Historical research usually—if not always—engages a vast array of materials. Historians working in this field grapple with all kinds of archival dossiers. In other words, archives as a medium are easily accessed by countless users for many purposes; from a scholarly point of view, they encompass a mass of researchable resources, a sheer abundance of personal collections and institutional holdings so vast it might even threaten to overwhelm the scholar.

Despite the massive accumulations of diverse material that potentially fall within the purview of histories of architecture, such histories can never be considered “completed.” Instead, as “1.4.1 The Question of Fragmented Archives” declared in my doctoral thesis at UCL (2023), they are always partial (shaped by researchers’ interests and questions, conscious and unconscious decisions they make and the materials they can access) and problematic (not unlike the production of historiography themselves, scholars’ work is framed by a set of choices akin to the crops and omissions that delineate the limits of archive’s purported offer of a window into the past. Paradoxically, the most comprehensive archival collections reveal not just the excellence of their holdings but also the lapses, gaps, exclusions, and oversights within those holdings. Our historical writing of photography replicates these relationships between what is present (visible/ available/ preserved, etc.) and absent (invisible/ inaccessible/ lost, etc.).

Over the past decades, the writing of architectural histories—especially from feminist and post-colonial perspectives—has offered substantial questions, arguments, and methods for identifying and confronting absences. This seminar attempts to trigger a double agency of questioning: what is missing from the archives on the one hand, and, on the other, what is missing in our critical discourses? Framed in both aspects, our seminar will present new scholarship and discuss questions related to materials and institutions, methods and research fields, canons and historiographies in the context of architectural history, theory, and criticism.

Trained as a professional architect and conferred an urban design master’s degree in Taiwan, Chin-Wei Chang’s master’s research addressed the social production of spatial forms within non-architect consequences, everyday landscapes, and their conflicts with modernity in the contemporary built environment. In pursuing a doctorate in Architectural and Urban History & Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, he focuses on the architectural profession and academy, particularly on the histories and dissemination of design education in China, Europe, and the USA.

In the College of Fashion and Textiles at Fu Jen Catholic University, Chang—upon his curatorship of “China Builders” at the Chinese Art Media Lab (CAMLab), Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University—is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of Museum Studies, who is also teaching at Xuexue International Cultural and Creative Enterprise Co., Ltd. in Taipei.