Finding myself: An accidental autoethnographic researcher in an unruly archive ‘in-the-making’

As I gently leafed through the contents of a battered blue folder of architectural ephemera, pages torn from journals, newspapers and magazines, I was bemused to come across an image of my much younger self, looking back at me. This project addresses the problem of finding yourself, literally and metaphorically, in an unruly archive ‘in-the- making’ as I bore witness to, and am an ongoing participant in, the transition of the working documents of a commercial architectural practice to an institutional archive in a state collection. This interregnum (between working memory and institutional memory) affords a critical moment to explore the distinctive qualities of the ‘soon-to-be’ archive, how it might be constituted, what it might exclude and to anticipate its future deployment. The project also acknowledges my own scholarly unruliness, with a conflicted status as a former employee of the practice and the impossibility of impartiality, but which comes with a privileged status that allows rare access, with the realisation of the undisciplined nature of what might be considered an emerging accidental autoethnographic practice, one that I am improperly trained to undertake. The project explores the uncomfortable tension between obligation and aspiration, between the requirement for scholarly responsibility and the desire for intellectual play. By scrutinising an underexamined aspect of the architectural archive – the image text assemblies and printed matter made by the architect, published in journals, given to clients and staff and whose spatial and pictorial narratives underpin the theoretical concerns of the practice’s buildings - the project considers what is lost, gained and transformed through an individual’s intervention in an unruly archive ‘in-the-making.’