Although architecture museums have only become prevalent in the past thirty years, the first recorded use of the term can be traced back over two hundred years. Since 1806, when Jacques-Guillaume Legrand proposed a ‘complete museum of architecture,’ these institutions have attempted to actively guide architecture’s development. By collecting archives, producing exhibitions, funding publications, organizing lectures, and even commissioning new architectural work, architecture museums have purposefully intervened with architecture. As Foucault has previously argued, power and knowledge are inevitably associated. If power is required for the affirmation of knowledge, knowledge has implications for the constitution of power. Therefore, the production, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge are inevitably, and always, political. As architecture museums have traded in knowledge to forcefully shape architecture’s production, reception, and consumption, they have occupied a territory where power and ideology, knowledge, and legitimacy intersect—where the political is materialized.

Approaching the political realm in a broad sense, this session intends to question the processes and contexts in which architecture museums operate. It aims to investigate the often implicit negotiation of competing knowledges, perspectives, intentions, and interests that occur within these institutions. Grounded in history and theory, this session invites contributions that question the power structures within architecture museums, particularly, their intersection with the political, cultural, and architectural spheres. How have these institutions resisted, subverted, opposed, accepted, or extended political power? What have been the intellectual, cultural, social, aesthetic, and practical implications of such underlying power structures? How have they been materialized? What has been championed and silenced? How has the political realm shaped the discursive territories and the disciplinary archive of museums? How have they shaped the museum’s relation to producers and audiences? By engaging these, and other pressing issues, this session will investigate how political structures have been translated within the architecture museum.

Session Chair: Sergio M. Figueiredo, Eindhoven University of Technology