AA History and Theory Lecturer Klaus Platzgummer presents at Harvard GSD’s Surfacing symposium

AA History and Theory Lecturer Klaus Platzgummer will present at Surfacing, the 2026 edition of Cambridge Talks, organised by doctoral students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning at Harvard GSD. This year’s symposium, which takes place 24–25 April, invites emerging scholars to explore the making and unmaking of surfaces – how material and conceptual notions of surface shape relations between humans, infrastructures and environments, and how these processes bear political, social and spatial significance.

Klaus’ lecture, titled Archives in the Absence of Paper: The United Nations Headquarters and Microfilm 1947–1968, focuses on microfilming – a technology used to record paper documents on film reels and widely adopted by bureaucratic administrations in public and private institutions during the first half of the twentieth century – and how it shaped the organisation of the United Nations’ archival infrastructure. It examines how the absence of paper surfaces affected the spatial capacity of infrastructures for bureaucratic documentation and, consequently, the institution’s epistemic power and political agency. This research forms part of Klaus’ doctoral research project at the AA and his wider investigation into the epistemic dimensions of architecture.

Find out more about the symposium here.

Image Credits: United Nations Archives, Registry Section (1946–1979), Folder 570, Survey of Storage Space (Filing Envelope), 1963–67.