Documentary Architecture as Historical Method

Centre for Documentary Architecture, curated by Ines Weizman

This exhibition presents the archive of the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA), an interdisciplinary research collective made up of architectural historians, filmmakers, and digital technologists. It is part of ongoing research engaging with architecture’s modernisms and their history of migration and transfer, as well as their various afterlives and reinterpretations. In order to engage the multiple meanings and complex history of architecture’s modernisms and their history of migration and transfer, and to amalgamate a diffuse body of knowledge, the CDA has employed the methods of its namesake, “documentary architecture”, as historical method. This means combining material clues, soundscapes, and digital traces in examining a geography that cuts across scale – from the granularity of aggregate in concrete to sounds stored in matter to the geopolitical carving of entire regions – and across history – from the beginning of the Weimar era to the present day. The exhibition’s conceptual matrix is organised along two axes, matter and data, which link film documentation, archival studies, material analysis and digital building documentation in both tactile and media presentations. Architectural case studies – presented as “architectural biographies” – become key to understanding bureaucratic actions, abstract economic principles and political relations, while materials and sounds are explored on the spectrum of both microhistory and macro cartography.