Sofie De Caigny, coordinator of CVAa, was elected as secretary-general of the executive committee of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums (ICAM). Her election as board member was ratified during the 17th ICAM conference in Montreal and New York (21-28 September 2014).
ICAM was founded in 1979 and gathers researchers and professionals from architectural museums and archival collections on a conference every two years. The Flemish Architecture institute (VAi) and the Centre for Flemish Architectural Archives (CVAa) have been members from their founding onwards and have participated to several of the conferences since, presenting papers or chairing a thematic session.
During the 17th ICAM conference, Sofie De Caigny presented a paper on hybrid architectural archives (based on the CVAa research trajectory on digital archives). Fellow board members of Sofie at ICAM will be, amongst others, Barry Bergdoll of the architecture collection of MOMA New York and Mirko Zardini of CCA Montreal.
Many of the ICAM members are architecture and design musea, but some of the members are institutes such as CVAa and VAi, which do not have a collection of their own and have a more coordinating roll. The conferences and the international network are very relevant for CVAa and VAi. For architectural culture and archives in Flanders it is equally important to have a Flemish/Belgian representative in this ICAM network.