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architecture <> record

A symposium organized by Ph.D Architecture students at The University of Michigan.

Taubman College of Architecture and Planning (Ann Arbor, MI)
March 20, 2026

This symposium and forthcoming e-Flux editorial project are invitations to explore how architecture claims, assembles, and curates evidence. We recognize architecture’s complicity, as well as the possibilities that emerge when architecture’s disciplinary logics are used to deconstruct or build new agencies within or beyond the state’s data repositories. Where archives are often imaged as finished, bounded, and custodial; records in our framing are active, provisional sites through which worlds and identities are formed and re-inscribed; encompassing for example, inscriptions on monuments, as well as the moments during which these sites are challenged. Both architecture and records are changing rapidly, exacerbated by the scale of data landscapes, the classification and de-classification of archives, rapid political shifts, and academia’s precarity.

Thinking through architecture and records is not new. For centuries, architects and architectural theorists have drawn on and interpreted interdisciplinary thinking towards the record and the state, from Vitruvius to Mabel O. Wilson. Disciplinary boundaries continue to expand, including more-than-building, epistemes from the global majority, and technologies that model the future through records. In light of these continued disciplinary and political fluctuations, we ask, how are researchers reconfiguring both architecture and record? Are our relationships to the state also changing? 

Architecture, following Samia Henni, encompasses “built, destroyed, lived, and natural environments.” The built environment itself operates as an epistemological construct, organizing how knowledge is produced, stored, circulated, and silenced, much like records do. Infrastructures such as roads, cables, and buildings, often co-produced with states, materialize this order—directing flows, arranging and rearranging, and drawing boundaries. These systems also contain potential to unsettle. Architecture is a site of contestation through which conflict and erasure are inscribed, becoming a repository of violence, toxicity, and memory.

Records refer to data, historical accounts, codes, drawings, algorithmic deployments, and other practices of storing information that are not only preserved but also activated, reified, and designed by bureaucrats, information scientists, and other agents to classify, police and shape particular realities. What emerges when architects form, spatialize, interpret, or deconstruct records? What are the conditions of possibility when spatial thinking is used to dismantle the record’s language, representations, categorizations, and evidentiary claims? How can architects and architecture produce counter-archives? Departing from Ariella Azoulay, we ask, which potential histories emerge when we use architecture to interrogate the record, to unlearn imperial conditions, and to “re-open the possibility of shared worlds that imperialism destroyed?”

Organizers: Sarah K. Cheema, Hilary Huckins-Weidner, Dana Salama
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Kuukuwa Manful 

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