 Hello everybody, everybody here and everybody there. Thank you for joining us on this very sunny day in a basement. Welcome to the book launch of writing Architectural History Evidence and Narrative in the 21st century with the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and Matthew Jones. My name is Lucia Alice. I am an associate professor at Columbia and the director of the Beall Center. For the study of American architecture here at Columbia. Today we meet on a campus on an island that lies within the ancestral homelands of the Lenny Lenape people. Until about 1650 the Lenny Lenape managed the forests, marshes, animals, winds, floods and paths of this island by stopping in as they navigated what is now called the Hudson River. Seasonally staying in small encampments, growing food, perhaps also harvesting crops, hunting and fishing, some animal species while conserving others, periodically setting fires to control growth and generally maintaining a resource ecology that stretched all along the Atlantic coast from what is now Western Connecticut to Delaware including most of New Jersey and Southern New York. By the end of the 17th century the Lenny Lenape had largely been driven out of their homelands. In the century since their communities have been decimated, their humanity denied and their descendants dispersed. The European settler state that was responsible for this erasure and diaspora relied overwhelmingly on the institutionalization of land and Columbia University, a land-based institution is a legacy of this urge to settle and appropriate. One of the ways that architecture continues to be implicated in this history of displacement is through narratives. For example, the narrative that the total transformation of this island into an parcelated marvel of concrete and steel was an act of collective architectural genius unconnected to this continuous indigenous struggles. And yet new narratives are being told and written by indigenous scholars and activists who remind us that land is not an object to be parcelated but a relationship. They tell us, for example, that much of the construction labor for the building of the World Trade Center in the 1970s, as well as a lot of the new financial towers in Jersey City shown here in the 2000s was supplied by Mohawk steel workers who have rightly derived great pride from this contribution. In order to perform this labor, they were not only traveled weekly, usually by nightly bus on Sundays from their homes on the Askenaswe reservation, crossing the border between the United States and Canada. So not only did they do this, but they also use this occasion to refuse at every passage to declare themselves citizens either of Canada or the United States, provoking a weekly confrontation with border bureaucrats in order to insist on the integrity of their governance and sovereignty. So the participation of Iroquois steel workers in this most American of architectural myths should not be separated from their more quiet quotidian struggle to activate and articulate their rights as members of reserve nations. So new narratives need to be written and the narrative I've just recounted was written not by an architectural historian but by our colleague in the anthropology department, Audra Simpson, a very beautiful book influential called Mohawk Interrupted, and I encourage you to read it. And this is the border crossing that these steel workers performed. New narratives need to be written and that's good news because we are writers in this room. We're here to celebrate this book, Writing Architectural History, and I'm very impressed that Michael Gollick said it's a remarkable editorial achievement if only he knew. It's a book edited by three persons, but it's also a project that was brought through the Aggregate Architectural Collaborative, so there's a number of roving people in this room and probably on the screen who took part. My job is just to introduce everybody and thank you for joining us. I also wanna thank the team at the Buell for helping this happen, and G-SAP IT. And I don't wanna take too much of your time, but I just wanna maybe set the mood by saying one thing which is that writing is back. Writing in architecture is back. There's a growing number of venues where we're being asked to write with online and in print. Stories, reviews, critiques, discourse, debates, petitions, there's a lot of writing going on. There's growing demand too in architectural schools. Historian theory people are increasingly being asked to, if maybe their students can write about their studio projects, can we teach them to do that? For the past 20 years, there was a kind of turn towards the exhibition or the research book, and today architects and scholars are increasingly being asked simply to write. So this is great. At the same time with increasing demand comes increasing pressures and renewed dangers. I'll cite just one, which is probably in all of your inboxes. There's an email from an architectural press, this is gonna be anonymous, which is promoting very heavily a book, a nice book, written about one architect in the form of a monograph by one artist, which says it's a great book. This is a quote from a newspaper journalist. It is not like any other book on architecture I have read, and that's a really good thing. A very good thing. So there's a challenge there, and one way to think about this book, it's not exactly, it's not the only way to think about it, and I'm sure the conversation will get much more technical and disciplinary, but one way to think about it is that this book takes up that challenge. So we write, how do we do that, and how should historians brace themselves for the fact that what they do is right. So what I'll do is I'll just introduce the three editors who are here, then they will, I've asked them to each make a little statement, and then I will introduce Matthew Jones. He will speak, give a response, and then in a debate-like fashion, we will all sit and discuss. Shannon Mattern, who was supposed to join us as well. Her semester has taken a turn for the more busy, and she has had to bow out, but don't worry, we have promised her that she will have to be part of our programming in the fall. So I'll start with Danny. Danny Abramson is a professor of history, of architectural history. Is that your title? Professor of architectural history and director of architectural studies at Boston University. His most recent book is Obsolescence and Architectural History. He, his current work relates to the architecture of American government centers, citizenship, the state, and capitalism since 1900. Small book. Zainab Chalek Alexander is an architectural historian who teaches at Columbia's Department of Art History. She's the author of Kenecetic Knowing, that's a 2017 book. She's an editor of Gray Room and the director of Columbia's Center for Comparative Media and her new book is on Imperial Data. And Michael Osman is a associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where he currently directs the MA and PhD programs in architectural history. He is the author of Modernism's Visible Hand and is working currently on the political economies of construction. So please, I let you three join me and please join me in welcoming them. Speak, you stand. We've prepared some three minutes of comments. Thank you for hosting us here. It's a wonderful pleasure to see all of you, old friends and colleagues. I thought I would just give a few words of introduction to the book and then hand it over to Zainab and then I think Zainab will hand it over to Danny. So I'm trying to really speak to the book's formulation as a project and I think that maybe most importantly is the way in which it, over the course of several years, I think from the 2015, when we began deliberating the project until just a few months ago when it came out, it went through many iterations and many formats. And so I wanted to speak to that a little bit and then and how that actually influences very much how we think of the project and its conceptualization. So actually the project began as two syllabi and we were workshopping syllabi, which is something that we do at aggregate, but not as much now as we may have done with in our kind of enthusiastic youth. The idea I think was about taking teaching seriously as a scholarly practice and especially teaching scholars to be scholars. And so the two syllabi, one was on evidence and one was on narrative. So it was a nice combination and actually one had been already tested and the other one hadn't yet been tested and in their joining, two of us, two of the three editors decided, okay, we should make an SAH session based on this problem of evidence and narrative. And in that session, it was conceptualized as really kind of a feedback. Do these two projects intersect in ways in architecture that we hadn't anticipated or that find new venues? And I think we collected some five papers or something like that and realized, yeah, we have a project. What was so exciting also is that the JSAH at the time was going to do a special issue on evidence. So they were collecting field notes from various scholars, including Mabel, Irene and Charles who wrote a field note on their edited volume on race and modern architecture at the same time that Danny and I wrote one on evidence and narrative. So that was an interesting experience also because this is moving from a format of then workshopping a syllabus, teaching a syllabus, an SAH session, feedback from the SAH session, submitting an essay to JSAH, getting feedback from Pat Morton and then realizing that the project, if we were gonna extend it, we'd need to extend it in many different ways, thinking about the interdisciplinarity of our field. And so we ran a workshop at BU and then another one at the Clark thinking. Also, in this case, I think, again, to the project's formulation is really about moving from institution to institution and seeing how the different institutions themselves impact the work and thinking and the kinds of feedback we were receiving. And then at that point, we had, I think, collected something like 23 authors or something like this, 24, maybe, or 25 even. And then some, of course, didn't submit. But we came close to not submitting ourselves in a bit. But I guess that story as a kind of preamble to the project is really just to say that what makes this a kind of aggregate project? And you can see that it's got the aggregate, the architectural collaborative, is that that process of moving from institution to institution or moving from format to format or moving from medium to medium, as it were, was a reflexive process. And it was a process that solicited feedback. And that when we conceptualized the book finally after having collected the essays, writing the introduction as you always do last, I would say, and this is really a sideway to Zainib's few minutes here, which is the project wasn't really about method. And that's something that Zainib's gonna talk about. It became, as Lucia said, about writing. And so with that, I'll just transfer it to her. Is not good? It's okay? Thank you so much. First of all, thank you, Lucia. Thank you, everyone at Beall. And thank you, my dear, dear fellow editors It's been a wonderful experience, especially during the pandemic. It was sessions of therapy more than anything else working with you. So as Michael said, this volume probably looks like it's a call for rethinking the question of method and architectural history. So I'd like to take a few minutes to elaborate on what that might mean. Historically speaking, remember, method is a word associated with the demarcation of the modern disciplines. At the turn of the 20th century, constellations of disciplines at Western research universities were rearranged according to something called method, as opposed to object. Both sociologists and architectural historians say might study the city, but they will do so using different methods, arranging particulars and generals in markedly different ways. Because we still inhabit that epistemic universe and epistemic universe in which method is the distinguishing mark of disciplinarity, any talk of method these days has the ring of a call to disciplinary orthodoxy. Even on occasions when a plurality of methods is allowed or even encouraged. And here I want you to think of the notorious methods course that lists feminists, Marxists, post-colonial perspectives in order one week after the other, but only after the foundational texts of the discipline have been studied. In fact, one could argue method implicitly assumes the necessity of a foundationalist epistemology and calls for methodological innovation for the sake of methodological innovation. So that's why I want to make sure we convey, as the editors, the message that while we're very much hoping that writing architectural history will be used pedagogically. In seminars that may still be called methods, it's pointedly not a demand for method. Or perhaps more precisely, it's not a demand for methodological discipline. We made an observation in the introduction that given its peculiar place within the university, architectural history demonstrates an ad hoc interdisciplinarity. To be clear, we're not complaining. It's this position we think that allows us to make the case in the book that our call is for thinking seriously about working philosophies rather than hard methods. What does this mean? Hopefully it doesn't mean dodging the question of disciplinarity, rather talking about working philosophies allows us to bypass the more abstract and arguably more idealist meanings of the term method. It allows us to elaborate on its more mundane meanings so that we can pay close attention to procedures, to protocols, and techniques that we use knowingly or unknowingly, that we invent or inherit from our discipline as we write architectural history. So this is genuinely a book about writing architectural history. Which is why we structure the introduction as a series of open questions. What counts as evidence for architectural history? What is an archive? What are the ethical implications of privileging one kind of evidence or one kind of archive over another? What if your archive is too large or too little, or as the case may be for some of our collaborators in the volume non-existent? What ideologies do narratives produce or counter narratives? How do you write a history with oral as opposed to written sources with myth and fiction as opposed to fact? Some of our questions in fact were even more mundane, more practical. What does it mean to start your text with a general statement as opposed to an anecdote? What do you put in the subject position of a sentence? What kind of work do your footnotes do, et cetera, et cetera? Any answer that we as editors may have provided to these questions in the introduction was by a stention. That is by pointing to the work of our collaborators and the rest of the volume. So in the time that we have left, Danny will say a few words precisely about that, the breadth of our collaborators approach. Thank you. It's a pleasure to follow Michael and Zane up and to be their partners. And thank you to Lucia for having us and to the Beale staff for hosting all of this. I'll continue with what Zane up said and talk a little bit about the breadth of practices, kind of the content of the book itself. In some ways, in terms of practices, there's much that continues architectural histories, conventional writing practices that were implemented if somewhat self critically, a section of pairings and comparisons, which is one of our practices, putting things in chronology, focusing on materials. But there were other practices as constituting this ad hoc interdisciplinarity, practices of reasoning and analysis that in the book by our collaborators are referenced and even actually borrowed by them to do architectural history. For example, composing works following that of literary analysis or of autobiography or of mathematical reasoning or cartography. And especially in a book that takes evidence as one of its themes, many of the contributors were operating out of the practices of legal reasoning and legal history. It follows then from this kind of ad hoc interdisciplinarity and breadth of practices that there would also be a breadth of evidence present in the book. Of course, there are buildings and drawings, photographs and maps, but there are also mathematical formulas and tables, data sets and dust, tree rings, and a lot of court records. The breadth also encompass the scale at which the evidence was presented. There are bricks and books. Of course, there are buildings, cities, regions and even the planetary, but even from the smallest scale of coins up until the scale of continents as well. The geographies then that our collaborators focused on also show to breath, from the very local to look at a particular site in Venice to the scale of the globe, from the South Atlantic to Pakistan, Caribbean to Kenya, Iraq, Kosovo and elsewhere. The chronology also is fairly broad it doesn't go back earlier than the medieval, but we were glad to have contributors talking on medieval and Renaissance architecture up to the very contemporary. Along with those breadth of scales, of practices, of chronologies and evidence, what also emerged with the breadth of different subject agents and agencies. Of course, again, there are architects and planners and historians, but there are also felons and forgers, revolutionaries and refugees, astronomer, anthropologists, and corporate bodies like courts and companies also figure as important agents in architectural history. So writing architectural history was and is, as Michael and Zaynab have explained, a collective exploration into the past, present, and future of architectural history writing. Of all its breaths, one of the most important, as Michael has explained, has been the formats in which architectural history writing can take place. Not just how it's been done, but how it might be done. Not just in scholarship, but as Michael said in teaching and not just by individuals, but in ever widening groups of people. And so in that spirit, we're very much looking forward to today's event or format, which is to us a natural and welcome continuation of the project as it has been conceived all along. An opportunity for exploration and conversation amongst those of you and us interested in writing architectural history. Thank you very much and look forward to the rest of the afternoon. Okay, so thank you, you three. And now I'm very pleased that Matthew Jones and Matt Jones, friend of aggregate, but also sort of eminence and incredibly broad, with an incredibly broad expertise who is joining us. So James, I mean James, Matthew Jones is the James R. Barker professor of contemporary civilization at Columbia University where he focuses on the history of science and technology in early modern Europe and on recent information technologies. His book from Chicago in 2016 was Reckoning with Matter, Calculating Machines, Innovation and Thinking from Pascal to Babbage, and he's working on a new book with Chris Wiggins called How Data Happened, and we can't wait for that to happen actually, so we can all read it. So please join me in welcoming Matt Jones. Okay, thank you for inviting me. And this is indeed the case, it was an extraordinary privilege to read the volume today. And so as I understand it, my job is to spend the next four hours summarizing all of the papers. So with a long prologue. No, but I won't do any of that at all. I just wanted to begin with, well, being a historian with an end note. And late in the book, in part of an extraordinary essay about refugee camps, there is this amazing note. And there's a lot of reasons to call attention to this, one that for all the luminous writing in this book, it remains anchored in powerful ways with scholarly practices that involve epistemological and other kinds of problems at the very moment that it challenges many of those. And so in this moment, footnote, or end note nine of Siddiqi's essay, she notes that the documents were profoundly ephemeral. They were printed on paper with an emulsion that could no longer hold ink, and she held each leaf directly up to a lamp to study embossed traces of the printed text. Due to the state of the documents, she notes I may be the last researcher to be able to make out the words on these pages. This is all the more poignant, given that the essay is so fundamentally concerned as are many of the essays, with the rarity of the evidence. And it's also primarily, it's extraordinary in its emphasis on the ephemerality, but also the everyday quality of the technique that she's reading, that belongs among a whole range of techniques. And above all, about the challenge that this evidence itself might dissipate, that it might never not be able to provide for the collectivity again. I'm gonna come back to this several times, but I was really struck by it. So what I'm gonna talk about, and I'm only gonna talk about for 10 minutes, I hope, if that, I'm gonna talk about five major things that I saw as I was reading this book, as an outsider. I'm gonna talk about fears, epistemic fears. I'm gonna talk about absences, productive ones. I'm gonna talk about rarefication, which I'll explain. I'm gonna talk probably most about technique, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about story. And I must say, because there are 20 essays plus an introduction, I cannot do justice. And to those authors who are in the room, if I should not mention your essay, it is no sense of a lack of admiration, it is a question of space. But fear, why fear? Well, essays, particularly on the first half of... Oh, I should take this off. Someone should have said something. Essays in the first half frequently refer to one of the sort of grand books in my field, Objectivity by Rainey Daston and Peter Gallison. And one of the most striking things that happens in Objectivity, which is a book that I adore to teach, because it is at once so generative and so problematic, they note on page 372 that all epistemology begins in fear. Now, most people who read the book, well, a lot of people, it's one of these classic books that's cited everywhere and rarely thought as carefully as this volume does. But I take this very seriously. And so I wanted to begin by thinking about the fears that animate this book. So as I was reading it as a very interested outsider, someone who occasionally reads architectural history, even more often is privileged to have graduate students in the history of architecture here at Columbia and from the New York area. I was curious about what the fears were, what was animating. And it took me in some sense until page 258 to realize one of the fears. And maybe I'm wrong about this. But on page 258, we, which is an extraordinary essay about habeas corpus, which I can't recommend enough to you. And is one of the essays that most clearly speaks to historians about architecture. The author, Lisa Albert-Thompson, notes that danger and fears about the priority of architectural drawings as the foundational technical practice around which. And once I realized this, I saw that everywhere resonating as a technical practice that grounds even if people resist. Now, a second fear is something that the kids might call FOMO, the fear of missing out. And I mean this in a serious way. Resonating through the volume is the fear that architectural historians might be missing out on alternative evidentiary practices. And again, this is, at the very end of the volume, Hyde notes this. That perhaps law offers evidentiary practices that we ought to think about adopting, not slavishly, not as master methods. But it's really, so I mean it seriously, a fear of missing out that other people might have something to offer. And then also resonating through the volume is a fear of prior narrative forms. And again, I realized in reading Eric's essay that monograph means something different to people in art history. But fear of both the monograph and of the social historical totalizing account. Fear of those narrative forms, fear of the kinds of things that Hayden White makes us to think. I see these as productive and powerful fears through them. Now along the way, I also noted a lot of things that were missing. And I was happy about it. That were productive, just as the fears were productive, there were two, there were productive absences. There was not a lot of things that I've often become accustomed to, particularly among humanists who style themselves in some sense physiologically oriented. You don't see in this volume a lot of different kind of what I will call facile moves. You don't see a facile materialism. You don't see a facile privileging of practice over the theoretical. There's a deep suspicion of theoretical. It's not laid out this way. It doesn't have the tone, which is so replete in a lot of our prose as humanists and makes us so irritating to others, so that we always already knew our own epistemic superiority and thus we are going to proceed in this way. There's likewise no facile recourse and boy was this a breath of fresh air to neoliberalism, right? The fear of social reductionism led to an almost not, that there was not an engagement between the market structures, the government structures of today that they saturate the essays, but not in such naive and idiotic terms. More deeply, there was a striking absence of the epistemological strongman that we like as humanists often to put. There was not that focus on constantly renouncing claims to objectivity rather than concrete investigation of claims of evident nakedness. So in the chapter on tabulation from Zenith, you see at once a deep profound suspicion that we have of the artificiality of data. And then a recognition that that story is important to tell but is a starting place, right? And it's a starting place that is essential for us both as scholars of these things, but was essential also to the people that were writing them. The most interesting practices are not those that are caught in naive claims of objectivity. People may voice those, but to spend all of our time investigating the voicing of claims of objectivity is often to miss the activity such as the activity that the volume engages in. Rarification. So this is a term that I take from, of all things, an obscure essay by a great French ancient historian who wrote this amazing piece called Foucault revolutionizes history. It's a little unclear whether it has anything to do with Foucault, but it's an amazing piece of prose. And rarefication, I take to be in two sense against forms of plenitude. One is a pushing against the plenitude of evidence, the plenitude of evidence that say a diplomatic historian believes that he or she is able to have in order to reconstruct results, the kind of thing that modern U.S. historians frequently think they have, and that it's clear that certain kinds of privileged architectural historians believe that they can have, either through certain kinds of drawing documentation or proper forms of context, whether they're economic, social, and cultural. The volume pushes against the possibility of that and the dangers of pushing on that. And then secondly, and rarefication meaning a blowing up, as it were, of the sense of the solidity of that evidence. Both to question those domains where evidence is produced regularly in archival forms and stored, and to recognize the necessity when approaching evidential bases, which are necessarily going to require modes of working for much greater forms of uncertainty. The second kind of rarefication, of course, is the breaking of the solidity of the self-evident. And that is what Vane claims that Foucault does brilliantly, that Foucault takes apart both things like ideology but also the solidity of apparent material practices. And I think that's one of the extraordinary moves that we see throughout here. We see it particularly in the opening essay on Haiti, but also the remarkable essays that I've already mentioned on the refugee camps and an extraordinary piece on dust, and so by Musaafir. We see the way in which this rarefication then comes to be narrativized, and I think this is a primary thing. So I'll come back to the literary forms of this, but one facet of the rarefication is, of course, a recognition of the limits of evidence and the need for non-certain forms of reasoning. And it leads, I think, in some sense, and I wonder how self-consciously this is, to many of the authors producing something that in some sense is almost like a detective story, taking on the epistemological thing. Now, Carl Ginsberg, the great historian now at UCLA, has told the history of this alternative mode of investigation with the knowledge of the particular. But I think that's very much at stake here. It's not accidental that that's a powerful literary mode that exposes both the search for evidence but also the probabilistic moves that are necessary if you are going to talk about anything that is rarefied at all. Now, yeah? Oh, I'm so sorry. Okay. Sorry, my Zoom friends. No, usually I wander around. It's to take an incredible self-discipline. So once I was giving a lecture and I was mic'd so I could walk around, and it's the first time ever they project the Twitter feed on the lecture. So in real times, like people trash-talking me. But there was speculation on exactly how many steps I had taken in the course of it. Okay, so I will attempt to be better mic'd. So, now, one thing that was striking, an absence that I'm not at all critical of, but in traditional narratives of the development of the history profession itself, there's a great historical and epistemological crisis that occurs in the 17th century. And the answer to that crisis is not a philosophical answer. It's not epistemological closure at all. But it rather stems from the hooking together of the whole range of the so-called auxiliary disciplines of history from numismatics to diplomatics and other sources. An entire set of practices which had been developed in extraordinary ways throughout the Renaissance and hooking those and connecting them into historical writing. That dangerous generative moment is often lost in the sort of Rankian narratives. And it's often lost in the kind of classic moves of someone like a white who think in largely an epistemological vein about history. Has history as something that is about what someone, I'll quote in a second, calls noble interpretation. So that leads me to think from the moves of the volume, which are about encouraging us to think about rarefication, to the roll throughout on what I'm going to call technique. And here I think is one of the sort of things that I think is so extraordinary through and through that runs from the chapters on law, the chapters on, in the middle of the volume, an extraordinary set of chapters on how to think about pairing as a technique in architectural history and not just taking the approach that it's sort of epistemologically so clearly wrong. So I'm going to pause it and I don't know if this is true that the fear, the anxiety about around that mastery of reading drawings is interestingly channeled here not into the abandonment of technique but to an explosion of potential techniques that might be valuable. Techniques all understood to be probabilistic, uncertain, but nonetheless somewhat useful. Michel Dessertot in a part of an essay that's really widely read called the Writing of History in a section that is very rarely read said something really extraordinary. Now he was reacting in a very strange essay in that he's excited by Foucault and he's also excited by the first glimmers of Cleometrics and the Cleometrics that is the counting of signatures it's a project that it collapses, it's awful, it's not about it or told to historians when they go to bed so they don't be, they're not bad sorts of people and digital humanities has done, tried to get over this heritage. But Dessertot puts the use of computers in this incredibly interesting framework. Now he is writing primarily about the French university but I think it's an extraordinarily useful, he writes, insofar as the university is foreign to practice and technicalities of the university, everything that places history and rapport with techniques is classified as an auxiliary science. Now as I said, there's a long narrative that connects auxiliary sciences with the possibility of doing history in the 17th and 18th century. Formerly he continues, this meant epigraphy, paparology, paleography, diplomatics, today musicology, folklorism, computer science. History would only begin with the noble speech of interpretation. It would finally be an art of discourse erasing all traces of labour. I think if you've read the volume you know why I'm quoting this because at every level the concerns of this are everywhere. The volume is fundamentally concerned with questions of noble interpretation but is constantly tacking back to those forms of technique or auxiliary sciences as Dessertot says, that ought to be looking at. So the volume very much is much more interested in evidential practices rather than bluster about representation. It's much more interested in what one comment one of the authors refers to as a kind of sensuous thinking than a epistemological strawman and this is deeply connected to that push against the facile critique I mentioned before. That facile critique is not wrong, people making ridiculous claims about objectivity and representational knowledge. They are wrong but we know that. That story has been told but often that's a surface of a much more interesting practice and that's indeed what we see throughout the volume and we see it in two ways at least. One, we see the cataloging of quite remarkable sets of practices that you all as architectural historians and those of us who are mere historians ought to take a look at. That forms a proxies for kinds of knowledge that we might not otherwise be able to have. And thus we have extraordinary chapters on the utility of thinking about tree rings, the amazing chapter on carbonization, a reflective chapter that considers the sort of way that shapefiles will bring into view things you might not see, not as a scientific practice, but as a practice of engaging in technologies such that one visibility becomes possible. The chapter, the book very much ends with the utility of different approaches from legal precisely to bring in things into visibility. None of these is presented as a master method and indeed much of the richness of the volume comes from the fact that they are coupled with chapters that are making us think about the emergence of these evidentiary practices as probabilistic domains. Thus we see the Constitution in a non-reductionist way of these kinds of technologies. And I think the four chapters on pairing bring this out really beautifully. Zeynep's chapter which I've already mentioned on tabulation again. These are all profoundly, well for lack of a better word, might call iffy representational practices, but they're powerful. They're not the royal road to truth, but there is no royal road to truth. They're just denouncing representational models and we move on from there, then we're going to get somewhere both in the historical development, in understanding historical development of different evidential practices and in assembling evidential practices that may enable us to overcome the fears and without falling into those things that are absent. And I'll say this is broadly true, I think of a lot of the most remarkable work that's happening in the history of the sciences and more broadly. In the volume you can see the connection between as it were the climate realism that is now saturating many of the humanities and that has pushed back against the two simple, but you also see this in sort of remarkable work that's been done on cartography where scholars have noted the extent to which the very critical, the battery of critical techniques that humanists claim to be their own are central indeed to the transformation of the discipline itself in recent years that we are all acting as if people were still writing the awful things that were writing in 1949 and in fact that's not the case in cartography and it's also not the case in the self-reflexive quality of climate science. Okay, I'm talking way too long and I promise that I will cease to do so very quickly if this works. Hello. There, it only had one word on it. Story. Okay, now this, I feel like I'm going to fall into almost a subcritical domain but it is striking things about this volume is that it is everywhere anxious about narrative and it's replete with it and I love that about it. It's incredibly writerly throughout and it's writerly in different genres. Writerly in the genres that guide you carefully through the historiography and make you see in a luminous way previous answers that were that built upon disciplinary configurations and there's others that are far less academic and traditionally academic in form and it strikes me as a great strength. So they're anxious about narrative and replete with narratives but they're also and this I think is unusual it is a profoundly memorable set of essays. It is filled. It begins the first two essays are profoundly anxious about the anecdote. So as historians we teach our students to begin the weird anecdote that then motivates an inquiry that you alone are going to solve and there's good reasons for that, right? There's a good reason for that specificity. The volume begins with asking us to think differently about that and yet throughout whether it's in this unbelievable moment of the ephemeral facts thing, the these extraordinary essay on dust and silt as well as a whole series of architectural formations which I think are disciplinary central to you to thinking about dendrochronology and other kinds of things. So I guess that gets me back to the Certeau I quoted because there we have noble interpretation and it's cast against technique but what I was so struck and that's what I wanted to hear the panel discuss is the extent to which that is a self-conscious part of the labor and work we want to do that noble interpretation far from being something that we ought to analyze exclusively on a theoretical and a theoretical register which much of the postmodernist critiques of history have long done and we know that but the extent to how we think about practice and technique and narrativization and the diversity and I mean this in a very concrete way and I was so happy that the editors talked about this is that this was produced in a pedagogical context and I would love to know because this is a volume I'm currently involved in editing something with 19 papers and it's a mess and none of the papers talk to one another and as coherent as this is without being over determined I think is an extraordinary achievement but it's not an achievement purely in the realm of theoretical expression but it is a realm in sensuous practice and I think that's where I would sort of like to end by inviting a discussion that is very forthright about that so I want to thank all of the authors Michael Zinnop and David for putting this together which must have been extraordinary work and Jordan for making this possible so thank you very much thank you very much that was incredible and thankfully I'm not the one to respond to it but these people are so maybe is it okay if I sort of open the stage for you I could imagine that Danny would want to respond to the questions about writerliness and Michael about the herding together of cats and Zinnop but you know that's just my guess so maybe I leave you to have a kind of discussion and then I have some questions in my pocket and I'm sure people have them too and by the way authors are sort of strewn throughout and some also on Zoom Matt thank you okay Matt thank you very much that was really incredibly generous and perceptive response and I wish we'd had you write the introduction to the book and repeating what you said at the end just what you wanted to have us address so that I can kind of think more deeply about that and we can because I do want to try to answer that question but I think I didn't catch all of it yeah so I it's really in some sense a banal question we rarely enough do that is what in fact in practice do we do to encourage as a collective and then individual authors to confect things that engage in all of these registers and yet communicate as powerful like really concretely how do we think about doing this with graduate students but as well as sort of college and how did you do it and both in a sort of deeply practical way but also how is it that you retain that mix of as a work very theoretical high-handedness with incredible legibility I'll try to say something about the practice of it I think the first part relates to what Michael was saying about it being an aggregate project which is kind of the repetition getting together in different formats letting people do the work that they were going to be doing on their own anyway but trying to encourage them to think about the questions we were asking so by repeatedly getting together and talking I think that we hopefully set up a situation in which we trusted each other we trusted them and they trusted us and just a lot of nagging I think and asking people to keep on considering the questions of evidence and narrative and so that when we edited the pieces we left alone things that we were in expert in which was kind of the content of what they were doing but just kept on pushing them to try to address it and then when we wrote the introduction that too was done basically as a group among all 23 of us everyone who could participate and I think again that helped people to see when they were reviewing their essays to do so and then we paired people up to do that and so it just it was a lot of work but it was joyful work because we were all in it together so I don't know if that's what you're getting at but it just was a lot of different stages and I think as Zaynab said the three of us really enjoyed and wanted to keep working together too so it was never a labor to do that and we hope among the other contributors too so that's the practical part it just was putting in the time but also just letting people do what they were going to do anyway and recognizing that and not trying to force people to do more than they could could you say I mean one of the characteristic facets of the volume is I would say generic innovation with unrelenting and I'm sort of and how I mean how did you the right people how did you how did you encourage that generic exploration without it exploding into you know pure you know older style like 90s styles you know self-flagellation about the inadequacy of all knowledge or something closer like this whatever work shopping thing able to take and I'm sure the audience I was going to answer that by the way it was a sounded like a much better book when you I was going to answer your question in a way that I think maybe Danny was hinting at but I want to kind of the language we make distinctions between teaching and research every time I think we put our materials together for review or whatever we think of teaching as some kind of sort of like more close to service and maybe research more like about ourselves and I think that what I realized from your comments actually is that that kind of firewall or false dichotomy between those two acts which we are constantly distinguishing them in a weird way the editorial process itself moves back and forth from a kind of research practice to a teaching practice and in a certain way it makes them indistinguishable and I think the editors are learning from the research what the what the edited volume is about and the researchers are learning what so there's this reciprocity that I think feels like teaching I should say because it's not like one directional it's bi-directional teaching so that workshop which we constantly use that word that's that feeling that's that sensuous thing that I think you're pointing to so yeah I don't know if that's an explanation as much as it's kind of like maybe like a language game that we've been playing that denies us access to that practice I think that sounds like from the experience of a contributor that sounds right there's a hand periodically in your inbox like massaging things like flashback I was going to maybe rephrase I think your answer is exactly right that there's a sense that architectural history has the capacity to structure itself nevertheless there's a choice and I think this is part of your question about the coherence there's a choice about how to do that and I think that the book is a horizontal coherence across fields that are not speaking to each other sorry research that is not speaking to each other and that's different than a choice let's say to have a vertical integration or something like that where all topics people are experts in the same field or they're trying to get at the same literature or the same aspect of the bibliography etc can you maybe talk about that like how that's different making a horizontal volume is very different than making a volume that's vertical of which there are also some great ones so this is an answer to Zainab's point about those great volumes edited volumes coming out in architecture object or subject or area or something like that so this is different than that any to use a sports metaphor I think we were looking for the best athletes in the draft that is we I think what attracted us was essays that were really as a contributor I'm offended by that you shouldn't be I'm just joking I think we've felt to repeat what Zainab says that architectural history is in a really great place especially here I think at Columbia and I can say that because I don't have any institutional affiliation that there's an extraordinary group of people who have been trained here and as well as elsewhere and so that when we received proposals for contributions or were looking for contributions we weren't looking for that kind of vertical integration I think we were looking for people who were doing what we thought was complicated work with a certain degree of self-reflexivity and we were hopeful that we could get those contributors to think harder about issues of evidence and narrative and so it ended up being very dispersed and difficult then to kind of group together in the table of contents because it didn't have that vertical integration but that was the wager we took at the beginning was that we were looking for things that were dispersed and that from the experience of governing by design the first aggregate book it maybe didn't have the opportunity to pull things together quite as much we learned from that experience to try even harder this time to integrate the things together to leave that dispersal in place of that horizontality but then as Mathew is talking about we tried to put in more time trying to thread things together I just also the pedagogical realized that I only make editions of volumes that are geared towards a particular pedagogical audience for M.Arts to master of architecture students who were in studio settings under a certain kind of pressure not to be engaged with this theory because it wasn't an attempt to engage them and this actually is very much a methods I mean I've been teaching the Pro Seminar in my department this is whether they like it or not no no this is not the quibble but I think that we we're like more like the Oakland A's than the Yankees just to use you should know there's this movie based on a book by Michael Lewis called Money Ball and it's less so like the I think the discipline as it were of architectural history is less a kind of you know Bernie Williams like they're not like the I think we are a more horizontal field that way like and I'll quote from your comments somewhat useful I think that I think that there's a sense maybe it's also the youth of the field like general youth is that the sense that the anxiety of influence is maybe less but then new anxieties emerge and they're all somewhat useful you know you were right about the anxiety all the anxieties you had were your diagnostic is 100% you could make bets on this and get rich I think that the one of reading technical drawings the question of reading the drawing as evidence I don't think anyone would have put their finger on that voluntarily but you have read it I think correctly can I ask a sort of question that goes to that and it's a question kind of for both because the when the objectivity book has traveled from architecture I mean this is one of the influences in this book and one of the ways in which it is manifested in the introduction is that you've written about the importance of historical epistemology as a model and it strikes me that that's slightly different in a field like the history of science where epistemology, the production knowledge is also the practice scientists presumably know that they're producing knowledge as opposed to architects they actually know that they're also producing knowledge but fundamentally the architect the imagination is one that produces and then the historian produces knowledge and so historical epistemology actually has a slightly different valence in architectural history aside from the pedagogical goal of this book this is about writing architectural history so did you your question for you coming from the seat I'm not the real, I'm not making a reality gesture I'm waving, I'm not saying the real thing did you feel that difference and then to the editors what do we make of that I think I was not concerned or I was not surprised to see that the idea that what would count as architectural history was plural I sort of took the centrality of certain technical modes of interpretation that that like it didn't seem to me that the volume betrayed the worry about the plurality of the things that one might consider an architecture though I was often intrigued in narrative terms at the moment in which all of your authors stopped and said why this architecture so in the essay on habeas corpus is really, no no there's an excite and I could have marked every one of them and I'm like here's the moment and I could imagine an editorial voice being like you have to say this but I also like the tension associated with why it was that we were talking I mean I just the habeas essay is just sitting here with me because it's also one in which the importance of architectural history to other domains of history is very clear we didn't talk about this I was going to ask you that it's some but I'll get back to that in a second the that yes there was always a moment in the reintroduction of why this was valid as a space of as architecture as to the question of knowledge versus the constant so the history of science is had in the midst of a 30 year a 30 year process of self hate that knowledge is it something and there's a massive disciplinary divide with the history of technology and that is so extreme that I once brought up Kant in front of historians of technology and they would like live it that I should have done this because I violated everything so but more seriously that there's been such a concentration on practice because science for so long was misapprehended that we now actually are having to work really hard to think about that differently and so objectivity is controversial it's much more widely said and positively cited outside of my field and and it solves in the way that it works to both do something that is historical epistemology which goes back for this project of being really contingent about the nature of truth and falsity and then connects that to questions of the embodiment of the knower rather than social history is a controversial and powerful set of moves that both brings knowledge back and circumvents social history by virtue of the constitution of the virtues of people I think it's extraordinary it's undetermined I love teaching it because I love teaching books that are incredibly bold and problem and and so just to come to your question I was I guess heartened everywhere to see at once critical self reflection that was constituent constructed and so many essays that were about that process and so yeah so your course yours right I will remember all these essays for approximately like for like 27 hours but then that will stick with me yeah so there you see both of those really powerful and I think that's one of the powerful moves but perhaps it's because my domain is always to think about the knowledge that it struck me as less foreign than it might other of your readers Zainab please do this Zainab if you don't do this the people on Zoom think you are in mine your question just one comment that we got from Pat Morton if you remember was is this a call for a new empiricism remember and I think we took that really seriously as a kind of reminder like we've been here before maybe and so not moving away from the empirical but understanding how it's somewhat useful getting out of the noble narrative I think and then that we I think this is again to the and Mark thing and I think I'm you know Lucia and I still teach in architecture schools but there is something about though the sort of labor a professional labor and this was written into the introduction somewhat that the professional labor of the architect and Zainab said this in her in the design techniques book 2 which is there's something about that process which has of performing an act like an ideological act which somehow in performing it you're actually becoming a part of the apparatus so like I don't remember if the quote is from like all to Sarah Pascal what was it that one okay no but what I'm saying is that there's something about habituation right habituate and the practices of say and this is to your question of drawing which in a certain way become the sort of empirical register for some other thought practice right so like and that back and forth the presumption of design or whatever as like this long history of being able to make your ideas into things I think that's there's something disciplinary about that you know and I don't know so I I'm trying to answer your question by saying like I think that we're dealing with knowledge practices as practices as empirical and we have habituated that as a discipline okay I have a counterfactual it's coming from zoom Philip Denny is asking a question about biography it's to the left of the projector so Philip Denny is asking about the role of biography the putting biography on the table and he mentions that the text the book I was so I mentioned two books earlier one was Mohawk the Intruptus by Intrupted by Audra Simpson and then just now the book that is being promoted heavily which is a very nice book by Justin Biel is called San Futures I think and it's about Minoru Yamazaki it's a biography of Minoru Yamazaki of course Justin Biel is not a historian in the traditional sense he's an artist he does now a PhD but nevertheless it is a biography and there's and so the question is with a notable exception of this book which I would actually argue is not really in the same sort of bookshelf let's say biography on biographies seems to occupy only a marginal position in the recent writing of architectural history why is that and this is counter to your understanding that there's a fundamental understanding everywhere that architecture is a knowledge producing practice I think most people who are reading the Minoru Yamazaki however much self-conscious Justin Biel actually puts into the book basically see it as the biography of an architect written by a sympathetic person who is also a creative human being so not knowledge production but rather object production and indeed actually biography I mean Islal's text is a kind of biography Islal is the author of the Dustin Silt essay so why do you think that is is that or is that coming back why has biography I suppose one of the questions is where's biography in this book maybe why is biography not something that we teach in architecture school the composition that's why okay biography is a ridiculous proposition we have an answer I think that's true the other essay that I'd point to that thinks about biography as Meredith Tenhor's who's sitting right here and the fabrication of biography you know what I'd say too is that I believe that biography is kind of re-entered through the backdoor through the oral history term which is not about the biography of the architect but about the life story of an inter-user so it also comes back to and these were things that Michael and Zaynep and I talked about in the introduction which is that desire for some kind of coherent subject whether it's the monograph of a building which is a kind of biography or of the person and you know you have to be you have to think critically about what sort of narrative desire you are seeking by wanting to have a coherent subject whether it's biographical or monographic I have another answer for Philip it's not only that the biography the biography feels absent maybe on first blush but also that I think another point Danny you made a really nice point in the introduction where the biography of the protagonist of the narrative often reflects back on the seeming coherence of the autobiography of the writer the historian and I think that also these actually is really good at breaking that coherence of yourself of your story or Zable's protagonist as well so I was just thinking about the fact that those might be answers to Philip too which is that maybe the sense of the complimentary reinforcement of subjective coherence and maybe that's an anxiety that he's got that we're now talking about Philip that we're like the therapists for no I mean here's how you might deal with that Philip okay so that's the other answer the answer is that it's not absent at all it's it has taken it has been split off into several it's been activated differently by different people when Meredith at the end of when we find the Friesson of finding out what really happens at the end of your essay that's one use of biography which is very different than the way that Jol motivates it in the way that Justin Biel does it so one more question coming from the zoom sphere which is about style and I think this might be we have maybe 10 more minutes before people sort of annoyed and want to go and so maybe if you have a question or two I can take that but first style what is the role of style and because you know Hayden White came up and you didn't bring him up but what is the role of style in our and not I'm assuming this person is not asking about architectural style but writerly style and especially when one writes about yeah we're just going through style, biography object so writerly style because we don't only write for our advisors but and our students but also for other people Danny I write for the people in this room to be understood by them I think we each have our own styles and those have to come naturally I don't know what you know we read the people whom we like we think hard about that I think everyone contributed to the essay was to the book was actually developing their own style of writing I really appreciate what Matt said about the interest in practice and technique and craft I think was important to us too so I don't have anything more I mean it's just for someone like myself who's not trained as an architect but has an undergraduate degree in writing that's the kind of the making that I'm closest to but other people have different backgrounds I didn't notice one thing I was going to say the same thing I had to write with Forrest I got to write with Forrest who has a completely different voice and it came out completely differently in addition to the methodological problem of how to convey scientific knowledge and its history he's a great historian of science he came up with all the best terms of phrases so there was something the style is co-authored you heard it here first and also on behalf of the collaborators I should say that there's not as much agreement among these three as they are apparently displaying right now and also that there is the receiving feedback was one also of having your style pushed and pulled so Reinhold has a question first of all congratulations to all who opened it in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes so has there been a crime that question actually that Matt mentioned because it did come up for me in opening the book like evidence of what what has happened here maybe there's a why I was trying to reconfigure the anticipating some of the essays you know the themes in a way that you know present and synthesize that evidence in the form of the answer to the question what has happened there is one essay uh Igens in which there's a criminal or but what I think it turns out somebody stole something from the archive or something right which is to say what do you mean historically historically historically you know something some crime has been committed against the the sort of structures of knowledge that are worth reproducing or building but evidence you know in the sense that something has happened historically in the world like out there in a way that then can be empirically or otherwise tabulated and app-narrated so first of all I'm going to say thank you that's a very you know amazing nugget you know to mull over my answer I'm going to thank the editors I don't know if I should keep it can you hear me yeah okay first of all you're being very humble I think all of you what was encouraged was precisely the kind of quote that you pointed out to Anu Sadikis right the vulnerability right in the researchers vulnerability giving them the space to be vulnerable that the evidence they're looking at might not amount to something and to sort of contemplate what happens if this evidence disappears right the narrative will fall apart how what rests on precisely this thing being sort of holding together you know precariously as it is that for me was the crime was that we have already only held up as evidence which is solid and it's stable and can be peer reviewed and all that right so what in the past right so what about histories in which the evidence is multiple iterations of a story right or letters which are disappeared and only one person can look at it right so can those be histories right it's I don't know if it's I don't know if it's I don't know if it's crime I don't know if it's crime but it would be a story for which testimony would be hard to you know assemble right the test for which the testimonies have disappeared or are disappearing so how to tell that story right I'm right I don't know if I understood your question or if this is an answer but to me the crime is the loss of grand narratives in architectural history I like stories I think they're memorable in terms of teaching but I think more important politically they're important because as artificial and authoritarian as a grand narrative might be I think they're also inspirational for change going forward and I certainly understand and respect people in architectural history who don't want to compose a grand moralizing narrative but I think something's lost when we don't at least understand those forms of narrativity so I guess I'd say for myself and I don't know if Michael and Zaynab share my sentiments about it that's the crime or the loss or the absence that impelled me to want to work with Michael and Zaynab and all the collaborators on thinking about different forms of narrative it's a haunt it's not a crime it's a ghost it's not a crime it's a crime it's almost contra Danny no matter how hard you try the crime you can't like proof of a crime as it were doesn't make it go away like justice or something I mean I can actually Timothy is not here I think Timothy would have a different answer we had contact with a legal let's say ratas and the fact that we're meant to think that evidence means that there is a crime etc and we can take that apart maybe not to put words in his mouth so we have time for maybe one more question or comment or if the authors if any of the authors many of whom are here wanted to respond to something that Matt said now is your moment he's on stage any more comments or questions Yvonne Nicole I was going to say that on the question of Sherlock Holmes so he also there's a section he says you cannot theorize without sufficient data and then draws a material parallel saying you need sufficient play to make bricks so my question here is like how do we know I guess is there a way to discriminate from having sufficient data to create these theoretical observations versus not having enough and trying to mask that insufficiency as enough this is good question how do you know when you in fact Matt alluded to it in reading the text that there are some archives are too wide some are too small but you were describing a kind of diversity but how are there techniques are there ways that we know when you have enough to make something or not quite or too much and leap of faith I'm going to say you were earlier articulating a concern of being seen as empirically so as if there's it's an easy dichotomy between that is the accumulation of fact and then theorizing and to be when Carlo Ginsburg talks about Sherlock Holmes it's in the context of connoisseurship which is the constitution of a self that embodies kinds of techniques whether it's a Pascalian habitus or Borgias habitus which is stolen from that but there's a sense that there's that middle term of technical virtue in a kind of way that is in between the accumulation of fact and interpretation the danger is assuming that it's totally probitive and one of the things I really liked in your volume is that you both enact that as historians but you're also often telling stories where there's contesting evidentiary practices whether it's the valuation of buildings this really beautiful moment in Eric Carver's where there's two really different views of IQ one of which it lines with older narratives in architectural history and the other which doesn't so I think that the answer is not are we empiricist or not it's what kind of post empiricism are we interested in instantiating and recognizing that there's not going to be a nice cover narrative closure is not coming through a philosophy of the history of architecture in any sort of way closure is going to come through attempts to it's not going to be closure but there's going to be a lot of attempts to practice that are according with kinds of part-time that actually map those conflicts as part of their source I think that's what I find bracing one of the things I find bracing so mapping conflict rather than finding the crime that sounds like a great place and I really want to thank first of all you guys for pushing through with the book thank you for making us do it and thank you Matt for your response and thank you to all for coming and to all in Zoom and for the doctoral students who are registered for the next event you can stay here to participate in it at three and everybody else you can stay in Linger thank you so much