Spoken-not-spoken, Written-not-written: From Gossip and Rumor to Architectural History

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the communication of professional practitioners in architecture, understood here as language in action, and explore the space that scholarship leaves between informal / oral and formal / written accounts of history or between what is spoken and not spoken and written and not written by those working within and beyond the discipline. While formal interviews are acceptable methods used in historiographic research, informal conversations are often seen as spurious. But this need not be the case. I will show in this essay how I positively employed gossip and rumour- sources often dismissed because they are deemed subjective, sensationalist, and unverifiable- in my own practice of recording stories about architectural history.