The mission of architectural archives for the protection of cultural diversity. The Italian experience

What is today the role of the architectural archive in the society? Are the cultural institutions responsible for the archives ready to open a wider dialogue with their communities? Contemporary architecture is a fragile cultural heritage, its documents are even more fragile. The awareness of the great cultural value of this patrimony required a long process by avant-garde institutions in Europe during the 1970s and the 1980s. The architectural archives – containing a wide range of documents as drawings, models, samples of materials, photographs and videos, written descriptions, contracts, correspondence – proved to be a heritage at high risk for their natural fragility and even more for the interest raised by iconic drawings in the market of museums and private collectors. In Italy in the 1980s a pool of pioneering institutions, public and private, started a movement to protect the conservation and the integrity of the archives of contemporary architecture. The aim was at the same time to preserve the location of the collections in the place of their production. In fact, Italy is a multicultural country, a collection of regions, provinces and towns with different history, morphology, culture, traditions, language. The variety and diversity of our culture is recognised as a high value and proved to be the successful tool of the Italian network of contemporary architectural archives which was at the origin of AAA Italia, the national association of architectural archives, founded in Venice in July 1999 (www.aaa-italia.org). Twenty years after its birth, the Italian network is still an avant-garde gathering the most advanced archival centres, museums and several private archives, and a relevant number of experts. In As a reflection of this experience, in 2001 the Italian Ministry of Culture (Mibac) promoted a national campaign for the research and protection of the private archives of the architects and engineers. This represented a real revolution, revealing an unknown treasure of large and small collections hidden in the territory. A new season of architectural research started from these new sources. Among the results of almost twenty years of collecting and studying such a large patrimony are the National Portal of the Architects’ Archives (http://www.architetti.san.beniculturali.it/), and the National Day of the Architectural Archives, a valuable exchange of professional expertise in the delicate phases of research, reorganization, conservation and restoration, cataloging and inventorying of the documents, and related sessions of education in the different fields. The Italian experience has now to face a new challenging season, with a reduced energy in terms of economical support and cultural forces. Museums and archives should widen their involvement in the society. As stated by the ICOM Siena Charter in 2014, they should extend their responsibility ‘in the open field of cultural heritage and landscape that surrounds them’, they should become ‘active managers of active protection of the culture of their communities’. I invite ICA and ICAM to cooperate in this direction to give a future to our mission.