Scandalous artifacts: practice between archaeology and architecture

This paper argues that architecture and archaeology are simply (and not so simply) forms of one another, that some resemblances between them are explicit and revealed, and that others have become obscured with time. Both disciplines use drawing and both often work with buildings or artefacts because, uncontroversially, architecture and archaeology share aspects of common origin. Of the divergent and now occluded resemblances between the two disciplines, this paper argues that design for architecture and reconstruction for archaeology are almost identical. It further suggests that once rendered explicit through forms of interdisciplinary analysis and practice, design-reconstruction enables ways for interdisciplinary research to practice in the space between them. Using Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term “scandal” for transgressive social practice to inform Julia Kristeva’s interdisciplinary “site[s] of encounter,” this paper attempts to characterise the kinds of drawing practices - scandalous artefacts - that may be made between architecture and archaeology.