Members of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative are chairing two sessions related to Aggregate projects at the Society of Architectural Historians 2015 conference in Chicago: "Resource Architectures" (chaired by Jonathan Massey and Meredith TenHoor) and "Architectural Histories of Data" (chaired by Lucia Allais and Zeynep Celik Alexander).

Full session descriptions are below, and we encourage submissions and questions before June 6.

Architectural Histories of Data

In the so-called digital age, “data” is repeatedly presented as the primary unit of knowledge. Yet we know almost nothing of this epistemic unit’s history. How did we come to imagine data as untethered, immaterial bits of information? Historians of the early modern period have written compelling histories of the modern “fact” by exposing its unexpected ties to preternatural monsters and double-entry bookkeeping. What would equivalent histories of data look like? Architectural historians may be particularly well positioned to excavate histories of data since space is a central paradox in our understanding of this unit: while data needs to be infinitely addressable, we assume that it does not occupy an address in space. The sixteenth-century scholar who decided to record his bibliographies not in bound volumes but on slips of paper so as to be able to rearrange them understood this as well as the contemporary data analyst. Over against the assumption that data is dematerialized information flowing in an imaginary frictionless space, then, this session proposes that data has always had architecture. We invite papers that explore the material infrastructures that gather, store, index, aggregate, and dissimulate data: from cabinets that file paperwork to buildings that house bureaucracies and from graphs and tables that make data visible to data centers and satellites in orbit that push it out of sight. How can these spatial and material histories start sketching an historical ontology of data? What concepts, artifacts, techniques, and institutions have been playing roles in these histories? And, finally, how might historical accounts of data challenge the technological master-narratives on which histories of architectural modernity have been based?

Session chairs: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, University of Toronto,[email protected] and Lucia Allais, Princeton University,[email protected]

Resource Architectures

The extraction, distribution, and consumption of resources has often been subject to architectural design. Examples familiar from the Western modernist canon include Sant’Elia’s power plants and Le Corbusier’s radiant farm, but there are many lesser-known infrastructures worth probing, include granaries, markets, pipelines, canals, distribution warehouses, and data centers. In all these cases, the creation of buildings and systems to manage resources such as water, energy, and food has been part of architecture’s domain.

Recent scholarship has considered such sites from a variety of angles, examining their politics; the roles architects have played in the collectivization or privatization and monetization of resources; the differences between architectures’ representations of ideal resource use and the material constraints of such systems; questions of scale; and the ways in which such work transforms understandings of architects’ professional qualifications. To foster comparative discussion and clarification of the stakes and methodologies of this work, we invite papers about the relationships among resources, infrastructures, and architecture in any period and location.

We are particularly interested in papers that reflect on the methodological implications of writing about resource infrastructures in architectural history. What approaches, tools, and texts from other disciplines can help architectural history reckon with resource infrastructures? Conversely, what distinctive interpretive opportunities do our methods afford?

Session chairs: Meredith TenHoor, Pratt Institute [email protected]  and Jonathan Massey, Syracuse University [email protected]

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