The Architectural Anarchive: Reimagining the Design Archive

Presented alongside our fall exhibition Open Access: Exploring 130 Years of American Design, this panel discussion draws inspiration from the elusive concept of “anarchitecture” — characterized variously by the cut and the collective, absence and activation, excess and erasure.

This panel will assess and reimagine the architectural “an-archive” as a site where knowledge workers, scholars, designers, planners, students, and community members converge.

How do (or could) archives condition what constitutes architecture, what’s worthy of collection and preservation, who counts among its stakeholders, what records or artifacts document its existence, and what alternative worlds might be conceivable?

Given the exhibition’s focus on “open and fair access,” we’ll consider what those concepts mean for an architectural archive in an age when extractive, surveillant technologies and authoritarian regimes have threatened knowledge infrastructures and public architectures.

Event Schedule

6 pm: Doors open6:30 pm: Conversation7:30 pm: Reception

About Shannon Mattern

Shannon Mattern is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Previously, she held full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and art history at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focus on media architectures, information infrastructures, and urban technologies. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media; and A City Is Not a Computer. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

Open Access is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation. Our work is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and by the Goldman Sachs Office of Corporate Engagement through a grant recommended by Goldman Sachs Community Development Grants Program.

​​​Notice of Access, Filming, and Photography

Van Alen is committed to ensuring that all of our events are inclusive and accessible for all participants. Van Alen Institute is on the ground floor and ADA-accessible. If you require accommodations or have any questions about access needs, please email [email protected] and we will do our best to support your participation.

When you attend this event, you enter an area where photography, audio, and video recording may occur. By entering the event premises, you consent to such recording media and its release, publication, exhibition, or reproduction.