Performing the Portmanteau: Slides, plurality, and architectural history in the making

This essay re-assembles the photographic slide collection of Michael Hugo-Brunt, a globe-trotting pedagogue who circulated between centre and periphery, practice and academia, planning, architecture, and urban design. Focusing on the material practices the slides afford, we use two creative acts—an exhibition and a series of ficto-critical texts—to interrogate the collection through techniques of material performance and narrative reconstruction. In re-assembling the archive, we show that architectural history is a thing in-the-making, situated in contexts and performed by people, and thereby demonstrate how architecture’s historical collections might serve as open-ended and experimental pedagogic tools.