With the Historical Archive and Rhenish Picture Archive of the City of Cologne, one of the most important municipal archives in the country was reopened in September last year. The new building had become necessary because work on a new subway section on March 3, 2009 had caused the previous building to be undermined by groundwater and collapse. The consternation over the two fatalities and the loss of the archives, which could not be replaced, was felt far beyond the city of Cologne. The construction and memory gap, a pit filled with water, torn by the collapse still exists today. It is part of a memory practice that goes far beyond the institutional understanding of the archive or even challenges its self-understanding. Against this background, what does it mean to speak of architectures of the archive?

Bio:

Carsten Ruhl is Professor of Architectural History at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, spokesperson for the LOEWE focus on Architectures of Ordering (AO), and member of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture (CCSA).

Felix Waechter is Professor of Design and Building Construction at the Department of Architecture of the Technical University of Darmstadt. The buildings of the office Waechter + Waechter Architekten BDA have been awarded and published many times.

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