Writing as a Collective Practice

Associate professor and Buell Center director Lucia Allais opened last Friday’s launch of Writing Architectural History by declaring that “writing is BACK!” Following Allais’s introduction, editors Daniel Abramson, Zeynep Çelik Alexander , and Michael Osman described the origins of the project. Osman explained that it started as a workshop between writers and moved between mediums and formats. “It was never about method,” he noted. The book relies on a large breadth of historical evidence and tools, including mathematical formulas, data sets, court records, tree rings, as well as a range of chronologies, scales, subject agents and agencies.

Reflecting on the process of working on the book, Abramson observed that the distinction between researching and teaching as two separate practices is often blurred through the editing process; it creates a dialogue based on sharing ideas and practices of bidirectional teaching. The editors spoke of the practice of writing architectural history as a collective exploration of past, present, and future made possible by camaraderie,…