Draft:Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative

Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative is a collective composed primarily of architectural historians, founded in 2006 by Daniel M. Abramson, Lucia Allais, Arindam Dutta, John Harwood, Timothy Hyde, Pamela Karimi, Jonathan Massey, M. Ijlal Muzaffar, Michael Osman, and Meredith TenHoor. It supports collaborative research, teaching, publishing, and public programmes in architectural history and theory. Its work has extended architectural history across questions of art and visuality, media and technology, political economy, infrastructure, environment, race, migration, colonialism, and development, while also examining the disciplinary practices through which architectural histories are produced.

History

Aggregate began in 2006 through workshops in which members circulated research in progress for collective discussion and editing. These meetings developed into Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2012. The book examined the built environment through relations among design, government, markets, institutions, and technical expertise, ranging across housing and real-estate finance, ergonomics, food distribution, cultural policy, refugee settlement, monuments, and engineering. Reviews by Claire Zimmerman in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and David Smiley in The Journal of Architecture situated the volume within contemporary debates about agency, power, and the material and institutional scope of architectural history.

The collective incorporated as a nonprofit organization in New York State in 2012. The same year, the Graham Foundation supported the development of an online workshop and publication platform, launched in 2013 following an Aggregate symposium at the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty of Architecture. Metropolis named Aggregate one of its "Game Changers" in 2015, describing its workshops and digital publishing as experiments with the conventions of academic authorship and scholarly exchange.

Collective work has remained central to its organization. Aggregate's projects have involved joint authorship, workshops, conferences, peer review, digital publication, and edited volumes, often developed across several of these forms. A 2023 seminar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture devoted to Aggregate's working methods situated these practices within broader questions about collective scholarship, higher education, and academic publishing.

Research and projects

Aggregate's projects have expanded the evidentiary and conceptual terrain of architectural history beyond buildings and their designers to include images, media, technologies, infrastructures, bureaucracies, financial systems, landscapes, resources, and environmental processes. Their subjects have ranged from the histories of racialization and cultural heritage to development, migration, toxicity, and architectural techniques. This breadth has brought architectural history into exchange with art history, visual and media studies, histories of science and technology, environmental history, planning, geography, and political economy.

Early projects extended questions raised by Governing by Design into the histories of resources and technical practice. Resource Histories, organized by Jonathan Massey and Meredith TenHoor, considered energy, capital, information, and expertise through their extraction, circulation, and spatial organization; the project included a 2014 symposium and a "Resource Architectures" session at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. The Instruments project, organized by Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May, approached architectural practice through techniques including rendering, modeling, scanning, specifying, and positioning. It resulted in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020.

Other projects have brought questions of architecture and space to contemporary political formations. The 2015 Black Lives Matter dossier, edited by Massey and TenHoor, assembled thirteen contributions on racialization, policing, housing, property, education, monuments, and urban space. The Society of Architectural Historians republished its introduction and presented the project to its membership. The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS, edited by Pamela Karimi and Nasser Rabbat, examined monuments, museums, archaeological sites, and cultural objects through histories of war, colonialism, nationalism, preservation, and cultural property.

A sustained programme on architecture and international development brought together Arindam Dutta, Ateya Khorakiwala, Ayala Levin, Fabiola López-Durán, and M. Ijlal Muzaffar. Their research followed the institutions and forms of expertise assembled around development during and after decolonization, including governments, universities, international agencies, engineering, agriculture, housing, land, and infrastructure. It resulted in Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South, published by Routledge in 2022. The Temple Hoyne Buell Center at Columbia University hosted a discussion of the volume in 2023 with editors Khorakiwala, Levin, and López-Durán and responses from Debashree Mukherjee and Paulo Tavares.

Questions of historiographical method have themselves generated collaborative projects. Evidence + Narrative in Architectural History, organized by Daniel M. Abramson, Zeynep Çelik Alexander, and Michael Osman, began with a session at the Society of Architectural Historians' 2017 conference in Glasgow and examined the selection of evidence, construction of narrative, and attribution of historical agency. A 2018 symposium at Boston University paired six presentations by architectural historians with respondents from other disciplines. The project became Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2021. Its essays address how developments in critical theory, histories of race and gender, environmental and global history, and digital methods have altered the evidence and institutional location of architectural history.

Recent projects have continued to work across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Toxics, organized by Meredith TenHoor and Jessica Varner, examines architecture and landscape through histories of hazardous materials, industrial production, regulation, exposure, and environmental harm. Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration, edited by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Rachel Lee, was published between 2019 and 2022 across ABE Journal, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Aggregate. The project used migration to develop feminist histories of constructed environments and spatial practices, with particular attention to race, caste, gender, displacement, and the methodological possibilities of collaboration.

Online publishing

Aggregate's online platform combines open-access publication with collaborative editing and peer review. Supported during its development by the Graham Foundation, it was conceived as an extension of the collective's workshop practices into digital publication. Research is organized under four editorial headings—Matter, Discipline, Plots, and Systems—and includes peer-reviewed articles alongside dossiers, project materials, criticism, and other forms of scholarly writing.

Curtis Roth reviewed We-Aggregate.org in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2018, considering its combination of scholarly community, journal, and discussion forum as part of changing forms of digital academic discourse. Its editorial procedures retain the collective's emphasis on workshopping: submissions may pass among several readers and editors, with peer review functioning as part of the development of the research rather than solely as an assessment of a completed manuscript.

Selected publications

• Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
• Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.
• Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South. Routledge, 2022.