The challenging yet rich terrain of family and television archives in architectural research

Between 1968 and the late 1970s, three little-known Belgian architects created modular housing, conceived as open systems where inhabitants themselves became designers and builders. These process-based architectures—rarely documented through plans or models—are best traced through alternative archives such as films, television, and family photos or videos, which capture the human and collective dimension of the projects. Combined with oral history, these sources provide a polyphonic narrative that brings forward the voices of inhabitants and other often-overlooked contributors. I will present several key archives and demonstrate how they collectively form a complex and compelling narrative, remaining faithful to the multi-voiced nature of these projects and show how they highlight a more sensitive, imperfect, and situated history of architecture, aligned with contemporary debates on broadening the notion of authorship and acknowledging the plurality of actors involved.