Provenance in Architecture

The provenance of artworks is a burning issue in current scholarship and politics. Transpose provenance into architecture and it reveals new and surprising dimensions in the social, material and cultural lives of buildings and architectural artefacts, reframing questions of migration, movement and circulation. Provenance in architecture illuminates the intricate trajectories of fundamentally composite objects from their complex origins to their uncertain destinations.

This dictionary examines architectural provenance across 101 key concepts from “Acquisition” to “Will”. The entries provide new ways of writing architectural history, highlighting how architecture moves, is destroyed, survives and is transformed.

Uwe Fleckner is a professor in art history at the University of Hamburg and conducts provenance research as a director of the Research Centre of "Degenerate Art."

Mari Lending is a professor in architectural history and theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and directs the international research project “Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity.”