Under the title Hors Catégorie, the 2025 edition of the VAi Research Day explored how archival classifications shape – but also limit – our understanding of design heritage. In what follows, we bring you a recap of the day, alongside the commissioned drawings by Telma Lannoo that gave visual form to these urgent questions. Lannoo’s visual impressions offer another way to look back at the conversations and ideas exchanged throughout the day.
Research Day 2025 consisted of three thematic sessions, bookended by two keynotes: a performance that set a critical and reflective tone for the day, and a lecture that approached the topic from a broad perspective. The speakers challenged participants to reconsider the limits of disciplinary thinking and to explore alternative modes of reading, archiving, and valuing research that operate beyond conventional categories
Central to the discussions were questions of how objects, disciplines, and forms of authorship are categorised, and which blind spots these systems inevitably produce. The keynotes further explored how to engage with practices that elude, transcend, or actively contest institutional and historical classifications, raising the pressing question of what to do with practices that remain hors catégorie.
The day's theme was also extended to the way it was captured: instead of hiring a photographer, VAi commissioned artist Telma Lannoo to draw her impressions of the various contributions to the research day.
The day started with a keynote performance by Pia Jacques.
Pia Jacques is a graphic designer and artist. She develops narratives based on documents from institutional and community-based archives. Pia is interested in the encounter between abstract systems of archival organisation and the realities of everyday life in these enclosed spaces. Her stories can take the form of performances and textile or printed objects.
For the Research Day 2025, Pia developed a custom performance based partly on visits to the VAi Collection. Using a vintage overhead projector to graphically illustrate her narrative, Jacques recounted her experiences of being guided through an archive by collection specialists. A story of pest control, care and coincidence emerged, which culminated in questions of design authorship and archival agency.
The first session, moderated by Tine Poot (design consultant at the VAi Knowledge Centre), focused on sourcing the archive.
When we think of design archives, traditional sources like plans, models, and drawings often come to mind. This session instead explored non-traditional, ephemeral, and digital sources: family videos, activist magazines, personal correspondence, social media and even video games. Working with these types of sources raises epistemic and ethical questions. What kinds of knowledge are being transferred or preserved through these alternative sources? Who determines what is considered valid, and based on which criteria? How can we ensure that the sources we use — or generate — represent a plurality of voices and experiences, rather than reinforcing dominant narratives?
Elodie Degavre addressed the potential and difficulties of working with video material from family and television archives. Video material offers unique insights in the way built environments are used, and the television archives of the 1970s in particular show a broad public interest in architecture. At the same time, access remains difficult: the collections of state broadcasters are not freely accessible. By working together with French broadcaster RTBF on her film La vie en kit, Elodie was able to access these archives.
Javier Fernández Contreras focused on the particularities of the interiors that feature in videos shared on social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Twitch. He explained how these 'hyper-architectures' are not stable objects but evolving processes that are algorithmically shaped, user-generated, and deeply performative. Digital environments pose unique challenges: researchers have to get a grip on enormous amounts of material, and try to categorise and order them. Javier showed how he and his team at HEAD - Geneva University of Art and Design employed sample sizes in the thousands, which requires a different methodology than traditional design studies.
Eline Inghelbrecht presented her research on the counter-projects for Brussels developed by activists and other citizen groups during the 1970s and 80s. She paid special attention to the magazine La Ville et l'Habitant (The City and the Inhabitant), a magazine published by Inter-Environnement Bruxelles (IEB) between 1978 and 1986. She shifted the focus from the written to the visual discourse that marked the participative and environmental approaches of the period. Eline pointed out how cartoons used persistent visual metaphors such as octopi to translate urban design and planning concepts to a wider activist consciousness.
Rixt Hoekstra considered the archive of Truus Schröder and her role as commissioner, inhabitant and co-designer of the famed Rietveld-Schröder House. After Schröder's archive was acquired by the Centraal Museum following her death in 1985, it was long considered secondary to the existing material from Gerrit Rietveld's estate. But Rixt pointed out that as an archive not just of the house itself but also of the life that took place within it, Schröder's material — which includes family photos, correspondence, and many other types of sources — provides an incredibly rich account of the history of the Rietveld-Schröder House. Rixt nevertheless experienced issues publishing about it, because the role of Truus Schröder is still seen as minor and insignificant by some traditional architectural historians.
The second session, moderated by Katrien Weyns (head of the VAi Collection), revolved around ways of navigating the archive.
Every archive, library or collection necessarily relies on systems of registration to make sense of its own contents. Such systems are a precondition for accessibility, allowing archivists, librarians and visitors alike to navigate the endless rows of books and boxes with a certain sense of purpose and precision. This session questioned how these institutionalised systems also transform the content they represent: the labels, categories and keywords provided to the user might also limit the extent of what can be searched for. How can institutions make room for other ways of navigating their collections? And to what extent is it possible to democratise such institutionalised inventories by enriching them with user-based perspectives?
Tiphaine Abenia gave an insight into the archive of the Sitterwerk Foundation, located in the Swiss town of St. Gallen. Next to a large art library, the foundation also keeps and manages an extensive materials archive. Tiphaine recollected how she experienced that both collections are constantly (re)classified through the engagement of users. Each visitor re-organises the library or makes new connections between the various materials from the collections, a process that is enabled and supported by digital tools. The library's books are only periodically put back into place using a robot arm that identifies the books through a RFID chip; until then, researchers are encouraged to put the books relevant to their interests together on the shelves. Access to the materials archive is also tracked, and user are invited to gather their interests on a so-called Werkbank, which is then saved into the classification system.
Carole Kojo-Zweifel presented her experiments to develop new classification systems for the library of CIVA, which includes books on architecture, landscape and ecology; after CIVA's imminent move to KANAL, an art library will be merged with this collection as well. Through several 'biblio-remix' workshops, she gathered user-input on ways to classify and order the books ways that can account for overlapping themes and topics; something which existing library classification systems cannot do. One example was to order the books according to their relation to four main themes: the city, the natural environment, home, and the human. By assigning each book a colour beloning to one or multiple of these themes, a different way of ordering emerged which was reflective of relations, and not just of classes or identities.
Stefanie Korrel and Ernst des Bouvrie reported on the Asterisk* project at the Nieuwe Instituut. Part of Nieuwe Instituut's 'Collecting Otherwise' initiative to rethink and reframe perspectives on its existing collection, Asterisk* was developed as to address and respond to the need for a more thorough, critical, and contextualised way of describing archival objects. Asterisk* is a tool to add new information to the Collection Management System to foreground underrepresented and invisible actors and contexts. Think of contextualising colonial archives, identifying names of people who have remained anonymous in design processes, or the adjustments of dated and hurtful terminology that is part of older metadata. Additional context or more speculative (of personal?) interpretations can be added on the public collection platform. This happens in collaboration with external researchers from various cultural backgrounds, but also through the involvement of users through a suggestion form that allows crowd-sourced metadata to be gathered.
The third session, moderated by Janno Martens (postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven and freelance research associate at the VAi Knowledge Centre), looked at ways of performing the archive.
Once design archives are absorbed into institutional collections, they often become detached from the dynamic contexts in which they were originally created. Whether approached through historical, journalistic, or artistic lenses, research into these collections typically involves a degree of physical and intellectual distance. This session explored what might happen when we reverse this approach. What if, instead of distancing ourselves, we actively seek proximity to the material? The speakers showed the potential of engaged, embodied, and dynamic interactions with archival collections. Can a more performative and participatory approach to archives reveal new insights — ones that remain hidden in more traditional modes of inquiry?
Sina Brückner-Amin, Mechthild Ebert and Manuela Gantner presented how the Werkarchiv of Conrad Roland was activated at the saai Archive (KIT Karlsruhe). Roland's archive provided unique challenges for archivists, because he had developed his own categorisation system, based on colour codes, to order his work. Part of his legacy consists of playground equipment consisting of pyramid-shaped nets. By inviting a former employee of Roland's office to reconstruct a disassembled model of one of these pyramids, aspects of the design and construction process were re-activated within the archive. The whole process was captured on film and shared on social media, with the film eventually being added to the archive as a new part of the collection.
Laura Lievevrouw and Breg Horemans shared their disparate approaches to the embodied gestures of architects by using a top-down camera to show the audience how they handle physical material in their research practices. Laura showed how the manipulation of plans from the Westrand cultural centre by Alfons Hoppenbrouwers yielded new insights about its original siting. By overlaying preliminary design sketches over the current situation, she found out that Hoppenbrouwers initially intended the building to be situated the other way around — a significant fact, given that its eventual siting has been critiqued for the way it 'turns away' from the outskirts of Brussels. After Laura, Breg explained how he uses the archive of TAAT collective to retrieve and capture embodied gestures within design processes. By literally retracing his body and environment from photos and videos from TAAT's archive, he showed how redrawing these episodes provided him with a better understanding of the implicit and tacit aspects of being involved in design and construction.
Gjiltinë Isufi gave an insight into her research on the Gjilan prison in Kosovo. From the 1980s up to the Kosovo War of 1998-99, the building was used by the Yugoslav and Serbian forces to imprison Kosovo-Albanian political activists. To understand the traumatic lived experiences of incarceration, Gjiltinë created new drawings and models of the prison; relying on existing ones is not possible because all archival material has been destroyed during the war. She pointed out that spatially capturing the sometimes contradictory oral accounts of the prison allowed her to reconstruct both the prison's physical properties as well as the ways in which it operated. In turn, these drawings and models could be used to structure further conversations with formerly imprisoned people, and uncover details that would've otherwise remained obscure due to the traumatic nature of the recollections.
The day ended with a keynote lecture by Anna-Maria Meister.
Anna-Maria directs the Lise Meitner Research Group “Coded Objects” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI) - Max Planck Institut, and is full professor for architecture theory as well as co-director of the saai Archive at KIT Karlsruhe. Meister’s work focuses on processes of design and the design of processes, the materiality of knowledge systems, history of ideas and methodological experimentation. She is a licensed architect with degrees from Princeton and Columbia University and works across medial divides, including exhibitions and installations.
In her lecture, Anna-Maria addressed a wide array of topics under the title 'Hidden in Plain Sight'. Taking case studies ranging from the design of coffee cups at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm around 1955 to the reconstruction of the so-called 'sarcophagus' that envelops the radioactive remains of the Chernobyl reactor in present-day Ukraine, she began by pointing out how design is entangled with politics, identity and symbolism on all scale levels. Moving her lens to the daily practice of archiving, Anna-Maria emphasised the many practical matters that impose invisibilities and vulnerabilities on collections: long email threads between legal departments and rights holders, leaking roofs and insect infestations, and collection profiles with vastly inadequate gender balances all punch holes in design histories. She concluded that it is not despite, but because of these holes and gaps that archives tell their stories — an intelligence of loss.
Do you want to read more about the people who presented at the Research Day 2025 and the presentations they delivered? Download the programme booklet to find out more.
