Screenshot of the Archigram Archival Project website, accessed March 2011.

Royal National Theatre, London, England, 1967–77 (architect: Sir Denys Lasdun).
Photograph: EAHN

Central ‘Saloon’ of the Reform Club, London, England, 1836–41 (architect: Charles Barry).
Photograph: Anthony White, courtesy of the Reform Club

Members of the EAHN in the courtyard of the King William Building of the Royal Naval College, the former Royal Maritime Hospital, Greenwich, England, 1698-1728 (architect: Nicholas Hawksmoor).
Photograph: Carmen Popescu

London Business Meeting Wrap-Up

Thirty-two members of the EAHN convened in London to attend the Sixth Annual Business Meeting at the Victoria & Albert Museum on Saturday 12 February 2011. The points on the agenda resulted in the following reports and decisions:

● The minutes of the Fifth Annual Business Meeting held in Bologna on 20–21 February 2010 and of the Special Business Meeting held in Guimarães on 17 June 2010 were approved.

● Turin is on offer to host the Third EAHN Conference. The decision will be taken at the Annual Business Meeting of 2012.

● The current officers will finalize the provisional Règlement Intérieur and present the final version at the Annual Business Meeting of 2012.

● The Secretary, Maarten Delbeke, reported that the EAHN membership has increased to 1,355 individual members and six institutional ones. One hundred and seventy-nine members indicated that they are willing to actively participate in network activities. Over the last year the Secretariat sent out thirty messages to members through Constant Contact (so-called CoCo-messages) and produced four issues of the Newsletter. Fifty percent of the members open the messages and click on the links they contain.

● The Treasurer, Tom Avermaete, reported expenditures of 16,000 euros and a deficit of 1,000 euros over the last year. For this year, costs will remain by and large the same. Half of the budget is secured by a grant from TU Delft (8,000 euros), the other half still has to be acquired. Apart from the institutional members, only forty-one individual members have paid the—voluntary—annual fee, which makes intensifying the fundraising imperative. Tom is working along a three-pronged plan: increase the number of paying members, both institutional and individual, by a more targeted approach; apply to national and European funds for subsidies; and search for sponsors and/or advertisers. The ultimate goal is not just to close the gap, but to create a sound financial basis, necessary for realising such plans as further development of the network’s website and starting a peer-reviewed annual publication.

● The chair of the Publications Committee, Nancy Stieber, announced the setting up of an entirely new Editorial Board to oversee and develop the strategy, content, and vision of the network’s different publications (web, newsletter, and a planned peer-reviewed annual publication, its first volume to be published in 2012). It was decided that this executive board has to be installed and active by June 2011. Its chair will also preside over the Publications Committee, which will continue as an open platform at the annual business meetings. Sadly, Nancy confirmed that she would step down as chair of the committee as of 13 February and not put up for any other office. She was warmly thanked by the President and applauded by all present for her invaluable services to the EAHN, as was Susan Klaiber, who per January 2011 resigned as chief-editor of the Newsletter.

● Regarding the network’s website, it was decided to encourage Josie Kane and Davide Deriu in developing the web 2.0-based online tools that will change the website into an interactive forum, while creating ‘members only’ or even more restricted areas where necessary. The President stressed that a precise assessment of the development costs was necessary, and that Josie and Davide would closely operate with the new Editorial Board.

● The members of the network’s executive board (Adrian Forty, president; Mari Hvattum, vice-president; Maarten Delbeke, secretary; and Tom Avermaete, treasurer) were officially re-elected for another year.

● The next business meeting will be held in Israel, organized by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan. Options and details will follow later this year.

● The chair of the Conference Committee, Hilde Heynen, reported that preparatory work on the Second EAHN Conference is going well. On the basis of the proposals received the committee agreed on a broad set of sessions and themes. Members will be kept informed of upcoming deadlines by coco-messages.

● The chair of the Journals Ranking Commission, Javier Martínez, presented a detailed classification scheme, which will enable users to search with varying sets of criteria. The committee aims at setting up the database within the year and possibly present it at the Brussels conference, June 2012.

● Carmen Popescu presented a proposal for a tour in Scotland, September 2011, to be combined with the EAHN/DOCOMOMO conference in Edinburgh (for details, see the article in this News section). Furthermore, she asked for and was granted the creation of a Tours Committee (meanwhile, a call for applications has been sent out).

More than any business meeting in EAHN history, this one was flanked by an impressive quantity of extra activities. On Thursday 10 February early arrivals could attend Tanis Hinchcliffe’s public lecture at Westminster University on the interplay between aerial photography and urban planning in the mid-twentieth century. She demonstrated how planners used even perspective photos as if they were reliable maps. On Friday afternoon there was a guided tour to the Reform Club in Pall Mall. With all participants properly dressed—which gave rise to some hilarious tie knotting outside Charles Barry’s sumptuous architecture—the EAHN members enjoyed the Roman grandeur of this club building that so cleverly hides its early Victorian technical features, such as the warm air blown into the rooms from holes drilled between the dentils of the cornices. The little exhibition laid out for the occasion in the Print Study Room of the Victoria & Albert Museum displayed several of Barry’s designs for the edifice from the RIBA drawings collection.

On Saturday 12 February, after the Business Meeting, there was an hour for viewing Barry’s neat drawings, followed by a small forum on architecture, archives, and the web. Here, Murray Frazer presented the archival project that makes the work of Archigram, a seminal pro-consumerist architectural group founded in London in the 1960s, available free online for public viewing and academic study. From the time it went online a year ago, the website has attracted over 150,000 visits, and visitors made as many as 600,000 downloads. Next, Barnabas Calder gave a paper on the project of airing the extensive archive of Sir Denys Lasdun, best known as the architect of the London National Theatre. The cataloguing is mostly done and up on the RIBA Library Online Catalogue. Yet the ultimate aim, for which he is busy to find funding, is to put images from Lasdun’s archive online together with analytical texts, thus making scholarly analysis available worldwide. The forum closed with a talk by Kurt Helfrich on archiving digitally born design records. He pointed to some basic problems of digital archives, such as the need for keeping operative all versions of the software with which to read CAD files, the consequent costs of software licences, and the difficulties of, for instance, pinning down a design to a fixed point in time, or conserving and labelling its successive stages.

The programme ended on Sunday 13 February with a visit to the Queen’s House and the former Maritime Hospital in windy and chilly Greenwich. Guided by John Bold, an expert on the buildings’ history, the EAHN members admired the layout of what is now a World Heritage site, and savoured the guide’s not always pc explanations.