Architectural Fragments and their Entangled Temporalities — Object Biographies as a Method for Architectural Historiography

This paper proposes object biographies as a methodological framework for architectural research, particularly for studying fragments and their entangled temporalities. Architectural historiography has long privileged whole buildings and static representations, obscuring the dynamic lives of materials before and after construction (Cairns & Jacobs 2017). Object biographies offer a way to write temporally attuned histories that foreground transformation, circulation, and continuous revaluation. This contribution positions the fragment as a site of temporal entanglement: shaped by past uses, continuous negations of values, material transformations, and future imaginaries. Drawing from anthropology, archaeology, and critical heritage discourse (Kopytoff 1986; Bonnot 2015; Gosden & Marshall 1999; Joy 2009), my research focuses on processes of commodification and valuation of architectural fragments in the early 20th century. The research follows selected fragments—from dismantlement to their current locations—to understand how their cultural and social value was established, altered, and negotiated. Furthermore, this micro- historical approach also reveals the potential of using object biographies of architectural fragments as a vehicle to uncover the networks of actors— antique dealers, interior designers, demolition firms, auction houses, emerging museums, and heritage organizations—who shaped parts of the reuse economy of the early 20th century. Once a fragment is dismantled, it begins to travel, exposing the many “hands” and decisions that sustain its survival, value and commodification (Kennedy 2007; Thompson 2017). Beyond historiography, object biographies offer a compelling lens for analyzing reuse. Dominant frameworks such as life-cycle analysis (Ross 2020) or heritage conservation (Arlotta 2020) tend to favor whole-building preservation or technical metrics. By contrast, object biographies reanimate materiality post-demolition (Ross 2023), and allow for the valuation of fragments through embodied histories and provenance tracing. This challenges the binary of whole building preservation vs. waste and opens up new possibilities for reuse grounded in cultural meaning. Through the case study of a single fragment, the paper shows the methodological potential of object biographies. Ultimately, this paper argues that object biographies are not only a tool for understanding reuse, but a method for writing architectural history that is sensitive to material agency, social entanglements, and overlooked actors. They allow us to study fragments as dynamic entities that reveal the workings of the reuse economy and the construction sector— especially in the early 20th century—through the trajectories they trace and the actors they mobilize.