The Architectural Anarchive: Reimagining the Design Archive

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

We’ll 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 open
6:30 pm: Conversation
7:30 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.