ArchitecturalArchives.pk

About

ArchitecturalArchives.pk is an open access resource for the study of architecture and its histories in Pakistan. It is not a database or a catalogue, but a prompt – an invitation to reflect on the built environment in Pakistan and to ask how its textures and effects might be documented for posterity. To this end, it compiles a variety of archiving tools as well as reflections on different archival strategies. The website is itself a building site, a work-in-progress.

The material gathered on ArchitecturalArchives.pk responds to two related challenges. The first challenge is the absence of any dedicated archive compiling histories of architecture in Pakistan. Those conventional components of architectural archives - drawings, plans, studies, client correspondence, administrative records - remain dispersed in private offices, closed state registries, and individual collections. There is no purpose-built storehouse or institution readily accessible to students of architecture or the general public who might be interested to learn about building and design in Pakistan in the decades since independence in 1947.

The second challenge that shapes this project is one posed by architecture itself to the idea of the archive. Architectural archives are typically composed of those ‘conventional’ components noted above – that is, they are collections of documents, and are structured by practices familiar to state and official archives, which are organised and designed to secure and preserve paper materials. But architecture is a complex, material practice. It is not simply concerned with design and the communication of vision, but also navigates the intricacies of a site, the contingencies of building and the unpredictable dynamics of dwelling. Architectural evidence, as Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi has written, is “polyvalent and polyphonic.” The diversity of architecture – as object and practice – reflects“the diversity of history itself.” (497)

As our first publication, The Time of Building, puts it in its introductory chapter:

Who and what else must be considered in our archives of the built environment? In this book, builders and craftsmen appear crucial. But what about a building’s clients, residents, visitors, or users?...Beyond human actors, can we also account for a site’s geography, its climate, the incursions of flora and fauna, a building’s (dis)connections to infrastructure or surrounding architecture, the passing of traffic, the migration of pigeons? What about the saints who, according to the Sufi tradition, continue to inhabit the Mazaar [designed by Kamil Khan Mumtaz] in Baghbanpura?

Alongside thinking about how and what to archive, this project is concerned with how an archive functions as an intermediary between the past and possible futures. The questions raised here are not merely of academic interest but bear relevance for architecture as a profession in Pakistan. Pakistan’s architectural histories are rich with examples of experiment and innovation but also of destruction and exploitation. How do such histories help architects to face the challenges of the present? In what ways might they provide inspiration or serve as a warning? This invitation, this prompt, strives not toward comprehensiveness but aims rather to capture something of the diversity of architecture in Pakistan, demonstrating the consequences of architectural thought and practice for society, culture and the horizons of politics in this country and beyond.

This website has been generously funded by the Queen Mary University of London Impact Fund. It builds on research completed by Dr Chris Moffat as part of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-2020).