Architecture is envisioned, commissioned, contracted, designed, invested in, built, owned, traded, stolen, abandoned, expropriated, inherited, disputed, overwritten, neglected, monumentalised, repurposed, demolished, amended, repaired, disseminated, forgotten, repeated, collected, archived, and catalogued. 

The provenance of artworks is a burning issue in current scholarship and politics. Transposed into architecture, provenance reveals other dimensions in the cultural, social and material lives of buildings and architectural artefacts, while reframing questions of movement, migration and circulation. In architecture provenance illuminates the intricate trajectories of fundamentally composite objects between complex origins and uncertain destinations. 

Provenance in architecture. A dictionary, edited by Uwe Fleckner and Mari Lending (Berlin: Hatje Cantz) examines architectural provenance across 101 key concepts from “Acquisition” to “Will”, contributed by sixty brilliant writers. The entries provide new ways of writing architectural history, highlighting how architecture moves, is destroyed, survives and is transformed.

Welcome to a conversation between Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg Institute, Uwe Fleckner and Mari Lending, the editors, and Oliva Horsfall Turner and Jorge Otero-Pailos who are among the contributors to the dictionary, followed by a reception.

https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/provenance-in-architecture-launch-2025