Just as information and media are products of design, they themselves leave indelible marks on the environments in which they circulate and help structure. Architecture has irrevocably been altered by the proliferation and advancement of new media technologies and forms of communication, but architecture, too, is capable of mediating these forms of mediation—their materiality, their transmission, and the motivations they carry. From 2006–2016, the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery under the directorship of Mark Wasiuta at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation was the center of a sustained research practice experimenting with these intersections. As the title suggests, The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016 both records the possibilities of the archival exhibition as a mode, method, and problem of architecture, and is itself a record of a decade-long curatorial project that sought to reframe the documents, authors, environments produced by and producing architecture.

This book thus collects thirteen exhibitions that read architecture as a field coordinated by documents with distinct historical, mediatic, and disciplinary registers. The book, and the exhibitions it presents, recognize that architectural documents take shape according to different discursive and institutional exigencies. Yet, in these exhibitions the architectural archive is hardly stable or uniform. Rather, the archive appears as a term, process, mode of organization, underwriting architecture’s media, histories, and effects.

With contributions from Martin Beck, Caitlin Blanchfield, Craig Buckley, Glen Cummings, Keller Easterling, Noam M. Elcott, James Graham, Branden W. Joseph, Adrian Lahoud, Leah Meisterlin, Felicity D. Scott, Anthony Vidler, Mark Wasiuta, Ines Weizman, and Mark Wigley.

Charles R. Butcher is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the legacies of historical states and state systems, democratization, and civil resistance.

Ryan D. Griffiths is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. His books include Secession and the Sovereignty Game: Strategy and Tactics for Aspiring Nations (2021).