Rethinking Architectural Legacies
Rethinking Architectural Legacies is an ongoing series of collaborative workshops between the Manchester School of Architecture (MSA) and the Zaha Hadid Foundation (ZHF). This project invites experts from across architectural practice, academia, and the museum and heritage sector to discuss the recent rise in legacy planning for architectural archives and collections.
The workshops focus on a different perspective, including Legacy, Site and Gender in relation to topics such as the interpretation of historic premises, the uses of biography and the creation of new museum or research facilities. The second and third workshops were held at the Zaha Hadid Foundation and included a presentation by Catherine Howe (ZHF), which explored Zaha Hadid’s work and the Foundation’s mission to preserve and promote her artistic legacy.
The second workshop on Site considered aspects of site such as conservation, restoration, historic recreation, along with a site’s relationship with a collection. Other topics explored included both the physical and immaterial aspects of sites, encompassing their change of use over time and potential reimagining, their significance to communities, pedagogy, memory and oral recollection, site-specific installations and other creative responses.
The third workshop on Gender examined the relationship between gender and architecture through a dissembling of the term architect with its monolithic, masculinist, white assumptions. Instead of the fixed concept of the heroic model of the male architect, it explored how the addition of adjectives such as ‘female’, BAME/POC/, ‘queer’ and collective/collaborative empowers difference, and revises the meaning of the word ‘architect’.
A fourth and final workshop on Archive is planned for early 2024 at the Manchester School of Architecture.
The workshops are convened by Professor Dana Arnold (MSA), Professor Jane Pavitt (ZHF) and Dr Catherine Howe (ZHF).