IN-PERSON: Learning. Life. Work

Abstract

Looking at the application of cross-cultural inquiry approaches, architectural scholars seldom have addressed lexicon-based methods framing the possibilities and limits to identify unheard agencies and unlock the writing of alternative historiographies. This paper occupies this niche looking at the intertwining of lexicon-methodology, posing a series of questions about the applicability of a method based on lexicon in a discipline as architecture that is materially/pragmatically oriented. How is it possible to assess massive corpora of written information in architectural history privileging the assessment of the overview rather than the obsession of the details with the scope to grasp and unravel easily who and what has been neglected by current dominant historiographies? How the deployment of big data approaches for the study of architecture and architectural history can be problematized (i.e.premises, promises, pitfalls)? How digital technologies that rely on the architectural lexicon could support alternative historiographies, unveiling previously unheard agencies so far marginalized by class, labour, gender, race,…? This paper answers these questions reflecting on what the translation of written sources and evidence into electronic data entails for architectural studies, especially when the focus on the lexicon is built at a pedagogical undergraduate level. Case study is a research-based theory class (DIS Copenhagen) whose prompt is to investigate the Danish architectural production under the Cold War implementing a specific inquiry method learned from other fields: the Distant Reading (Moretti, 2005; 2013). What seems a task of Sisyphean proportion turns out as an engaging inquiry into the learning and unlearning of architectural historiographies.