The focus on the conversation format reflects the society’s intention to foster different means of exchanges and plurality of voices in architectural history and knowledge.
Part 1: Keynote presentation by Prof. Suzanne Ewing
‘Mind the gap(s)’
Voices of Experience intergenerational conversations (2016-24) and exhibitions (2019, 2025) reveal a wide scope of what is defined as architectural work, how it takes place and how this knowledge enters professional records and culture. Over 10 years these have been informed by feminist approaches to women as subjects, an understanding of architectural work that includes social and immaterial dimensions, and a need for methodological creativity in building knowledge. This collaborative activity adds ‘documentary heft’ to specific records of architects and architectural practice. Yet how does/can/should this accidental archivism truly shift, transform and re-set the foundations [sources, topics, practices] and trajectories of relevant architectural research and broader architectural culture?
Working in and through margins, gaps, erasures in architectural history and its historiography is familiar to those working from a feminist perspective, in queer studies, critical race theory, disability studies, infidel pedagogies, intersectional lenses: what is lost, disconnected, overlooked, unseen, erased, unheard, discarded, marginalized, buried, minor, unwritten. How might light be re-cast, unexpected findings exposed and original orientations mapped out? Working in and between fields, mediums and disciplines, and drawing together and co-constructing an ecology of sources, evidence and voices requires agility, dexterity and relational nuance. Margins can also become mainstream, creating their own gaps, edges, dominances and oversights.
This talk reflects on Voices of Experience work and ways of minding gaps, contextualized in the wave of international research projects, publications and practice-research collectives from the last decade or so that share these concerns.
Part 2: Conversation with guest respondents and the audience
Conversation here is explored as a method by which the themes and provocations raised in the keynote are open to questions and discussions, thus disclosing and producing architectural knowledge that is communal, social and cultural before it is individual. By shifting background to foregrounds, the conversation seeks to address the shift in architectural history when engaging with different publics, audiences, activities and industries, and to enable us to understand such cumulative intellectual enquiries in architecture.
Registration
£5 Students, £10 Members, £20 Non-members.
Location
The Alan Baxter Gallery, 70 Cowcross Street, London, EC1M 6EL.
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