Situated Practices: Three Architectural Archives in the City of Buenos Aires

Abstract

As cultural active infrastructures in the production of disciplinary knowledge, this study examines the operational and epistemological transformations of three architectural archives in Buenos Aires: Historical Archive of the Central Society of Architects, Administration of Argentine Architecture and Design Archives and Centre of Latin American Architecture Documentation. Through a qualitative approach combining fieldwork, conversations with curators and a review of their collections, classification and conservation strategies as well as management methods of their documentary holdings are examined. The results reflect their capacity to generate interpretive networks, implementation of protocols adapted to material diversity, and institutional openness thanks to public and inter-institutional access policies. Thus, this text contributes to the disciplinary field by highlighting institutional experiences that, far from replicating hegemonic models, develop situated practices of documentary management articulating their conservation with historiographical research and curatorial activation. These experiences not only consolidate the architecture archive as a cultural infrastructure but also position it as an effective agent in the construction of architectural knowledge influencing disciplinary narratives and the production of knowledge from peripheral territories.