Poetics in the Architectural Archives: Possibilities for Imagining Pasts and Futures

Abstract

This thesis problematizes the production of architectural archives and attempts to transform them from static to creative spaces through poetics. It frames and expands three digital projects on which I collaborated with Seattle Civic Poet and Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna: the Seattle Poetic Grid (2017), Washington Poetic Routes (2019), and Poetic Shelters (2020). In architecture, discussions about what constitutes its archives, who can access them, and how they are to be used are still framed around preserving the facts of the discipline and profession. As such, which spatial truths are missing among architectural records, how do we reproduce the status quo when we fix imaginary, and what might we gain from inspiring imaginary in the archives? This thesis argues that architecture’s archives should follow queer archival practices and feminist poetics in order to start constructing more expansive archives of space, and it presents several poems from the Seattle Poetic Grid, Washington Poetic Routes, and Poetic Shelters as spatial records for said archives. These collections of poetry are an archive of the present in and of themselves, while as a practice, poetics enable us to read and imagine traditional archives in new ways.