Archivo Activo is a public program of LIGA–ARCHIVOS through which we activate and bring visibility to existing archives by inserting them into contemporary discourse. For this inaugural session, we invited four young architects and architecture studios to engage with the RAÍCES DIGITAL – UNAM archive—an online, publicly accessible collection of architectural magazines published throughout the 20th century. Raíces Digital, Sources for the History of Architecture is a project developed by the School of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), under the direction of Víctor Arias.
For this first edition of Archivo Activo, we invited Tania Tovar (Proyector), Operadora, Departamento del Distrito, and Annik Keoseyan. Each was asked to explore the Raíces Digital archive and select articles, images, texts, or historical debates they found relevant for reactivation in the context of contemporary architecture or in relation to their own design practice. In addition, each participant contributed a short text explaining their selection.
Through this public program, we aim to draw connections between current architectural concerns and our collective legacy. This is not intended as an academic or historiographical exercise; rather, we welcome unexpected perspectives, visual collisions, and bold interpretations—reflections that may speak more to the present cultural moment than to analytical readings of the past.
The selected historical materials were discussed in a conversation held on June 1, 2021, featuring Tania Tovar, Edgar Rodríguez (Operadora), Francisco Quiñones and Nathan Friedman (Departamento del Distrito), Annik Keoseyan, Víctor Arias (UNAM), and Wonne Ickx (LIGA).
Access the full “Raíces Digital – UNAM” archive [here].
Operadora – Practice and product
Annik Keoseyan – Retracing Traces
Tania Tovar – Building in Cement: The Commodification of the Modern Idea
Departamento del Distrito – Everything Else
On Tuesday, June 1, 2021, we presented the third installment of the Active Archive series, “Raíces Digitales UNAM”, through an online conversation featuring Wonne Ickx (co-founder of LIGA), Annik Keoseyan, Nathan Friedman and Francisco Quiñones (Departamento del Distrito), Tania Tovar (Proyector), and Víctor Arias (coordinator of the research project Raíces de la arquitectura mexicana).
