Anooradha Iyer Siddiq and Rachel Lee
Presented with the HTC Forum
Part of the MIT Fall 2026 Architecture Lecture Series
The Work of Collaboration
Collaboration has often occupied an ambiguous place within architectural history, a discipline that continues to privilege individual authorship, singular expertise and archival authority. Collaboration can unsettle these privileges. By bringing researchers together it reshapes the questions we ask, the evidence we value and the histories we are able to write.
Taking the Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration project as a point of departure, we reflect on collaboration as both a feminist practice and a mode of historical inquiry. Drawing on our shared work, as well as subsequent projects developed with artists, designers, archivists, communities and fellow researchers, we consider how collaborative methods have transformed our scholarship.
Rather than presenting collaboration as an exception to scholarly practice, the lecture argues that it is a way of producing more generous, situated and critically engaged architectural histories. Looking back at one collaboration and forward to many others, it asks what kinds of historical knowledge become possible when research is understood as a collective endeavour.
Rachel Lee
Rachel Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at TU Delft. Her research explores colonial and postcolonial architecture and urbanism, migration, gender and heritage, with a particular interest in how architectural histories are researched, written and shared through archives, collaboration and material culture. Her work spans archival research, oral history, exhibitions and digital publishing, developing collaborative approaches to architectural history. Her work includes Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration, a long-term collaboration with architectural historian Anooradha Siddiqi; Planted!, a collaborative digital archive tracing the global histories of a colonial chair; Sourcery!, a research platform exploring new archival methods and knowledge infrastructures for architectural history; and ongoing research on the architect Otto Koenigsberger.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an art and architectural historian of Africa and South Asia, Associate Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and Visiting Scholar at the Harvard University Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her work narrates global migration and displacement, racial and environmental justice, and colonial and postcolonial spatial politics through historical research on significant structures and figures little recognized as purveyors of political, social, and aesthetic value. Her historical research on architecture, craft, settlement, land, and experiences of migration and territorial partition draws from two monographs, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press; 2026 Society of Architectural Historians Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, 2025 African Studies Association Best Book Prize Honorable Mention) and Ecologies of the Past (in progress). For more, see www.anooradhaiyersiddiqi.net.
This lecture will be held in person in the Sidara Auditorium (W41- 1216) and streamed online on YouTube.
Lectures are free and open to the public. Registration is required.
