At the Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability, our research critically examines how architectural knowledge is inherited, produced, circulated and archived. We examine the coloniality of architecture, including its visual regimes, pedagogies and archival systems, and consider how these legacies continue to shape buildings, spaces and design imaginaries today. We approach research as a methodical practice of dismantling, unarchiving and refusing. Across our projects, whether working with archival collections, project plans, or critical texts, we aim to examine the structures that have universalised architectural heritage as a single timeline of value and progress. Instead, we aim to highlight underrepresented and marginalised architectural histories, challenge established viewpoints, and reimagine how architectural knowledge can be accessed, shared and generated in new ways. Our objective is to encourage plural, situated and equitable approaches to the design, teaching and understanding of architecture. We aim to achieve this both within the context of architectural education in Switzerland and in broader global contexts.

The publication Dismantling Architectural Fictions asks how imperial fictions continue to shape what architecture knows, teaches, and preserves. It traces the intangible dynamics that still govern architectural study within Eurocentric academic contexts — from the universal center inscribed in maps and timelines, to the archives that decide whose heritage is remembered.

The essays set out the epistemological position of the Chair for Architectural Heritage and Sustainability at ETH Zurich. They argue that architecture has never been neutral: it functions as an apparatus that organizes and hierarchizes bodies in space, and it carried colonial legal, economic, political, and scientific regimes into the built environment as empirical "truths."

Rather than proposing conclusions, the authors offer readers a foundation for positioning themselves according to their own perspectives and intentions. The contents are presented in condensed form and reflect ongoing discussions with students in the architectural design studio at ETH Zurich.

The exhibition The Image in Question: Dismantling Architectural Fictions presents the research and teaching practices of Professor Mariam Issoufou's Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability at ETH Zurich. The exhibition takes the historical translocation of Babylon's Ishtar Gate as its central case study — an investigation that lays bare how architecture is produced, inherited, displayed, and taught. Three practices structure both the argument and the space itself, unfolding as a spatial experience in three acts: unarchiving, which reopens the archive and the assumptions it holds; dismantling, which takes apart the fictions architecture tells about itself; and refusing, which declines the terms on which that inheritance arrives. More than a showcase, the case study performs the Chair's three pillars in visual form: the digital platform Unarchiving Architecture, the publication Dismantling Architectural Fictions, and selected outcomes from the Chair's design studio series At the End of the World: Museums.

In Tools of Refusal, we explore how architectural tools have been used to both uphold and challenge harmful ideologies. Visual tools such as diagrams, maps, drawings, models, and photographs have played a central role in the exercise of imperial and patriarchal power, shaping space, norms, and political agency. Although often regarded as merely technical or representational, these tools have been instrumental in constructing spatial and social realities. This project brings together contrasting histories of visual instruments used to assert or resist colonial, racialised, classed, or gendered claims. Each case study is accompanied by a critical analysis of how a specific architectural tool was used to advance an argument, revealing the political power embedded in architectural representation.

Book Club is a space for collective reading, discussion, and reflection. Each session focuses on a theme aligned with the studio’s design agenda, drawing on texts from architecture, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and environmental humanities.Students work in groups to present two parallel readings, not to summarise them, but to cultivate comparative dialogue. Sessions unfold through collective discussion and visual mapping, critically relating our architectural practice to theory, encouraging multiple interpretations and deeper engagement.Guiding questions include:

What touches and affects me?

What do I understand or not understand?

What are the key concepts, questions, or provocations in the text?

How does the text relate to architectural practice and pedagogy?

What remains unresolved, or is opened up for future inquiry?

What personal, cultural, or disciplinary references does it resonate with?

How might it shape my thinking and doing in architecture?

Focus Work allows students to contribute to the Chair’s ongoing research through independent yet embedded inquiry. Projects engage with themes such as historiography, visuality, and the politics of architectural knowledge, while aligning with one of our active research lines (Dismantling Architectural Fictions, Unarchiving Architecture, or Tools of Refusal). Each Focus Work should reflect the core practices of the Chair: dismantling, unarchiving, refusal and rewriting. The outcomes should combine written analysis with a visual or digital component, such as a cartographic intervention, small-scale installation or archival reinterpretation, and must include a clear thesis.

Unarchiving Architecture considers what restitution means when it is not possible to return architectural history as physical objects. Although museums can repatriate artefacts such as doors and columns, or manuscripts, most architectural evidence exists in the form of scattered documentation, such as plans, notes, photographs, and surveys. This documentation is scattered across archives in the Global North, and was largely produced outside the communities it concerns. This symposium and workshop adopt 'unarchiving' as a method to digitally reunite these fragmented records with the places, narratives and people from which they were removed.

Bringing together scholars, archivists, designers and community partners, the events will test experimental strategies for digitally reconnecting and recontextualising architectural evidence shaped by colonial and postcolonial histories. At a time of stark inequalities in access and mobility, Unarchiving Architecture considers how digital tools, alongside embodied and community-driven practices, might help define what restitution can mean for architecture today, not just as the return of objects, but as the return of potential knowledge and the recovery of histories obscured by colonial and postcolonial archival practices.