Roaming archives: The recontextualization of architecture and other myths

In 1984, the nascent International Confederation of Architecture Museums (ICAM) gathered in Amsterdam for its third international conference. While ICAM 3 was originally intended to discuss best practices and new techniques for managing architectural collections, its most critical debate concerned how ICAM institutions were to respect one another’s interests in their acquisition of architectural collections and archives. By 1989, the first ICAM Code of Ethics was formalized as a negotiated agreement that the integrity of architectural archives should be maintained as cohesive fonds and kept within the country where their titular architect had been based. There was, however, a crucial loophole in this voluntary agreement: it only pertained to the work of deceased architects. If architecture’s past was to be siloed within national borders, architecture’s present would be free to roam the world. And roam it did. This is precisely what happened in 2014, when Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza decided to divide his archive between the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) and the Portuguese Fundação de Serralves and Fundação Gulbenkian; and, then again in 2020, when Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha deposited his entire archive in Casa da Arquitectura, the Portuguese center for architecture. While reconsiderations or re-readings of Siza’s and Mendes da Rocha’s work resulting from this recontextualization have been marginal at best, the structures and collaborations fostered by the archives’ movement have quietly become the most lasting effect of their migration. An analysis of these two cases reveals how the institutional frameworks and hybrid instruments resulting from the migration of archives represent the most significant, yet overlooked, effect of the displacement of architectural heritage, ultimately shaping the way we understand architectural archives today.