The project
In computing, “unarchiving” refers to the process of restoring compressed data. Building on this notion, the research project and platform Unarchiving Architecture investigates unarchiving as an operative concept, considering both the methodological and theoretical approaches to restitution in architecture. While digital technologies have transformed debates on restitution in museum studies, cultural heritage and archival theory, their implications have not yet been fully integrated into architectural discourse.
Here, digital restitution is understood as the circulation of documentation rather than the return of material objects, achieved by digitally reconnecting dispersed architectural records with the communities, sites and narratives from which they originated. The project brings together scholars, archivists, architects and community organisations to test methods for digitally reassembling, contextualising and critically engaging with architectural materials scattered across numerous archives. This diverges from the conventional notion of restitution, which focuses on objects such as doors, columns or manuscripts held in ethnographic and museum collections — objects that can theoretically be physically returned.
The distinction is vital, because architectural evidence is distributed across many institutions and professional domains and is seldom condensed into single artefacts that can be repatriated. Documentation of the built environment circulates widely: municipal planning records, engineering files, corporate archives, colonial administrative papers, private collections and technical drawings collectively exceed the boundaries of architectural practice itself. Unarchiving Architecture therefore positions digital restitution as a concern within architectural history, theory and practice by rethinking how dispersed materials can be placed in relation to one another. In concrete terms, unarchiving involves digitally relating fragmentary records, annotating or amending metadata, and reconstructing contexts in ways that open up new interpretations.
The need for such an approach grows more urgent in light of persistent inequalities in access and mobility, which prevent many of the communities most affected by histories of dispossession and erasure from consulting the very documents that concern their built environments. These communities, particularly in formerly colonised regions, find traces of their architectural histories housed in remote institutions, limiting their capacity for research and local heritage work. Moreover, these archives, concentrated primarily in the Global North, contain only partial and fragmentary traces: annotations, images, bureaucratic paperwork, datasets, drawings, testimonies and other residual materials.
For this reason, unarchiving cannot be limited to digitally relating records alone. It must also encompass scholarly, forensic and community-led practices that complicate singular archival narratives. Digital restitution in architecture requires more than a geographic return or a metaphorical decompression; it demands collaborative engagement with incomplete and politically charged sources and methods.
The platform
The Unarchiving Architecture platform is a research prototype designed to explore unarchiving as a form of digital restitution. Rather than operating as an exhaustive digital archive, it is a tool for engaging with scattered archival evidence pertaining to architecture and the built environment. It focuses on a limited set of materials to test how digital restitution might operate in practice: the emphasis is on process rather than completeness, and on engagement rather than accumulation.
The platform addresses the fact that architectural evidence relating to colonial contexts is often scattered across institutions, inadequately catalogued and physically distant from the places and communities it concerns. Although this material is largely held in the Global North, it remains difficult to locate and to relate within current architectural historiographies. The platform therefore operates alongside existing archives as a space for rethinking how architectural documentation is encountered and connected.
Drawing on critical reflections on the archive as a spatial and institutional apparatus, as articulated by Achille Mbembe among others, the platform recognises that archival visibility is never impartial. Rather than seeking to overcome these limitations through technical means alone, it treats digital visibility as a practice shaped by historical circumstances, institutional frameworks and ongoing disputes over access and interpretation.
The Collection Room
The Collection Room is at the heart of the platform, and works in two modes.
Map mode is an evolving cartographic interface that visualises the dispersion of architectural and built environment records connected to colonial contexts. It identifies where records are held, and the regions and sites they concern, making visible the fragmented geographies of archival accumulation. Each institution presents itself as a discrete collection with its own remit and catalogue; seen at once, they begin to look less like separate holdings than like the distributed infrastructure of a single accumulation.
Image mode links some of those archives to digitised materials, developed through partnerships with archives and institutions. These collaborations proceed as joint investigations, and aim at careful, iterative engagement with collections that are often only partially inventoried or overlooked within broader archival systems. A further part of the collection is devoted to international collaboration and, at this stage, opens with materials from the Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM), an initial exploration of one of Europe's largest colonial archives. Materials are accompanied by metadata and annotations identifying their potential architectural relevance, and thematic filters allow exploration by type, region or subject.
By bringing together disparate and occasionally misclassified materials within a single interface, the Collection Room illustrates that architectural evidence frequently exists in unexpected places and formats. It is an invitation to engage with these traces as provisional entry points for further research, rather than as definitive historical records.
Map data
The map covers the ten European states with the largest overseas colonial holdings — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden and adds Switzerland as a case study –– where the project is based at. Despite Switzerland not officially having colonies, Swiss archives nonetheless hold missionary photographic collections, the records of trading houses operating across British India and West Africa, the estates of architects who built in Lubumbashi and Lagos, and — at the Palais des Nations in Geneva — some fifteen thousand maps produced by the League of Nations body overseeing mandated territories.
Architectural and spatial knowledge is rarely documented as such in colonial archives. It sits embedded in administrative files, survey reports and expedition papers, dispersed across collections and catalogued in other terms — as correspondence, as ethnographic objects, as public works. Building fragments appear in museum inventories without architectural description; town plans are filed under governance. By showing where such holdings are concentrated, and in what quantity, it makes visible the stakes of that concentration and offers a starting point for the deeper research each collection demands.
It should be noted that the dataset is preliminary, and by no means complete. Corrections and additions are welcome.
Workshop and symposium
The platform developed alongside a three-day academic event held at ETH Zürich in February 2026, which combined practice-based experimentation with theoretical enquiry.
The workshop, “Unarchiving as Practice”, was held in partnership with the gta Archives and centred on photographs made by Swiss architects travelling through former colonial territories — documenting buildings, villages and construction sites that remain largely unstudied. Participants examined how such images circulate within archival systems and how classification frameworks shape what is recognised as architectural evidence.
The symposium, across two days titled “Unarchiving as Methodology” and “Confronting Infrastructures of Exclusion”, brought together keynotes, papers and roundtables on the theoretical, ethical and political dimensions of unarchiving: the silences built into classification systems, the geopolitics of digitisation and archival labour, and counter-archival practices operating outside or in friction with formal institutions.
A note on the material
These archival materials were produced in colonial contexts and carry the language, categories and imagery of the people who made them. Some of this material is distressing.