Postdoctorat | Eric Crevels - The Constellations of Craft in Architectural Production: Understanding Labour and Collaboration in the works of Victor Horta [Hortence]

The project Constellations of Craft (CoC) seeks to offer a new perspective for archival studies in architecture. Its main objective is to identify the agencies of builders and craftspeople working in the construction of the buildings design by Belgian Architect Victor Horta, through a careful analysis of documents often overlooked in historical architectural research. The project tackles the absence of the workforce’s voice in architectural history and archive, contributing to a more comprehensive historiography and the development of more inclusive archival policies. Victor Horta was one of Art Nouveau’s main contributors, and his production reflected the period’s rationale, combining new technological developments with complex handmade ornamentation. Precise accounts of how this unique blend was materialised, however, remain largely untold, and most of its agents, unknown. Traditionally, architectural discourse has almost exclusively focused on the practice of architects, excluding from historical accounts the knowledge and the work of other agents active in its construction, especially builders, craftspeople and other holders of tacit, embodied knowledge. This invisibility is translated in the collection of architectural archives, whose policies prioritise the acquisition of documents made by architects, such as technical drawings and sketches. Still, some traces of their labour make their way into architectural archives, embedded inbuilding logs, contracts, ledgers, correspondence and similar documents. While rarely explored in architectural historiography —and often discarded by many architectural archives— this form of secondary material can be used to probe into the labour relations and the artisanal processes in the construction site. The projects proposes an in-depth analysis of this material, piecing together different fragments of worker agency into a renewed history of Victor Horta’s architecture, written from the perspective of the construction site.