Archives and institutional reality
The archival discipline has an ancient history that is as long as the history of society or at least that of human institutions. I will not summarize this history, which is not my task here, but I will just point out the fundamental facts of archives (even more so—foundational), their construction around the idea of having to guarantee the exercise of rights within human societies through the legal value of their documents. I will cite an example to clarify and simplify the question. When we buy a house, we are all careful to keep the purchase agreement safely in a drawer; not, certainly, because of the document's literary or artistic value, but because, in case of a dispute of any kind regarding property ownership, it can be brought to court to become the basis of our rightful claim to ownership. Thus, when we say that a document has legal value, it means this very simple thing. So, the archival discipline has built its raison d'être based on the legal value of documents, whether these are notary acts or the acts of a public official. This is often translated into the archival vulgate with a bizarre slogan according to which archival documents arise "spontaneously" and that only over time do they become historical sources.
We will come back to the second part of the statement shortly. Now, it is worth taking a moment to think about the first point - the idea of a document's "spontaneous" formation: because there would be a chasm of meaning between a document produced by the records department of a municipality (or our purchase contract produced in a notary's office) and for example, the draft of a novel produced and preserved among a writer's papers. This latter document is not meant to have legal value; it was created to have artistic, historical or cultural value (in this would lie its "intent" or "non-spontaneity").
The architect's drawing is a very interesting case. Original drawings are like a novel's original draft, a document of "intentions." But when the project in its final version is presented in copy (blueprints) to obtain the required and necessary authorizations from relevant authorities, that is, when they are introduced into the archives of those institutions and participate in approvals procedures, the drawings acquire legal status. In some way, for archival purposes, the drawing is "born spontaneously" [sic] only in the passage from the person to the institution. Before this, for archival purposes, it does not exist. In this strange situation, when the copy outclasses the original, the crucial links between archival and institutional reality become clear; a relationship that finds its totem (or taboo) in the documents' legal value.
Personal archives
One of the most interesting changes that has occurred in the recent history of the archival discipline is the gradual dismantling of this totem, or at least a certain "relativization" of it in terms of the discipline. Naturally, it was always believed that the archivist had a second soul—devoted to documents' cultural value. This refers to the second part of the preceding statement stating that "only over time do the documents [relevant to the archival discipline] become historical sources." Let us return to our example—our purchase agreement. Once all parties agreeing to the contract have died (including ourselves), and perhaps after the property fell into disuse—perhaps expropriated and demolished to make way for a nice shopping center—then the contract in the drawer loses all legal value underlying its initial preservation. In parallel, however, it might acquire historical and cultural value because it tells the story of a building that no longer exists, perhaps describing its characteristics or an outmoded way of stipulating contracts (depending on whether attention focuses on the document's content or its form). Current archives become 'historical archives' over time, at which point the legal value of the document gives way to cultural and historical value. Archivists have have always built their practices in relation to this semantic metamorphosis (so to speak) of the documents.
What has occurred, again, we might say a bit schematically—during the 20th century, in particular during the second half of that century, was the affirmation of those documents that skipped the phase of legal value as legitimate archival objects, born as documents having intrinsic historic/cultural value: the personal archive, or rather documents that do not arise in highly formalized institutional practices, "spontaneously" one might say according to the prior slogan, but are born as "intentional" through the conscious practices of their creators. Oddly enough, the conquest of this terrain was not at all obvious and pacific for the archival practice, and for a long time the debate was stirred up by authorities who excluded the possibility for the archival practice to acknowledge this kind of archive, discussing whether these documents could even be called "archives" (at most, in this case, such archives might be considered a kind of sub-set, to be viewed with suspicion, in addition to the question of the legal value of the documents, due to the fact that personal archives are part of a rather anarchic universe not being produced "spontaneously" [sic] within rigid and interpersonal protocols; they are arbitrary and subjective worlds that are normally highly de-structured).
However, this could have remained a marginal factor that would not have changed the archival discipline, but during the 20th century, an historically unprecedented phenomenon occurred that was very well described by Stefano Vitali: "[...] the massive spread during the twentieth century of literacy and of more powerful and economical technologies for the reproduction and storage of images and sounds meant that almost everyone could now 'put together' their own archive, whether it be a simple collection of photographs or a larger group of traditional materials (diaries, memoirs, correspondence) or a new type (sound recordings, audiovisual materials, etc..) that can document an entire way of life. "[Vitali 2007/82].
In short, the personal archive has become a social and mass practice. And perhaps Vitali is right to connect this phenomenon to the expansion and change of the archive's audience in recent decades and, raising the bar in a suggestive way, to widespread anxiety about identity—both individual and collective—which goes hand-in-hand with the production of non-institutional archives.
Architects' archives
Of course, even personal archives are not a homogeneous block and their inclusion in the archival field came about in stages with different time frames in different areas. The approach of the archival discipline to the world of the records of architects was even more cautious. Riccardo Domenichini and Anna Tonicello, in a convenient and concise fresco, establish the late 1970s and later years as the critical juncture for the systematic inauguration, on an international scale, of the culture of preservation and the development of archival and museum valorization of architectural documentation. In 1979, the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture) was founded in Montreal along with the Frankfurt DAM (German Architecture Museum) and ICAM (International Council of Museums of Architecture) in Paris; in 1980, the IFA (French Institute of Architecture) was founded; in 1984 the Architecture Department of the Getty Institute in Los Angeles was inaugurated; in 1988, the NAI in Rotterdam (Netherlands Architecture Institute) was founded. Italy, for once, was fairly in step with these events. In 1978, the Accademia di San Luca in Rome began collecting the archives of its member architects; the CSAC was founded in 1980 in Parma (Communication Research Center and Archives). In 1988, the IUAV Project Archive in Venice and in 1989 the 20th Century Archives of the Mart (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, which also collects architects' archives) were founded. Finally, in 1999 the AAA / It (National Association of Architecture Archives) was established [Domenech-Tonicello 2004/16-17].
So the architectural archive has a relatively recent history, and this is due, in reality, to reasons that lie within the world of architecture itself; first with the architects, who, during that golden era of the post-war boom, systematically built what was designed and have always understood that the built work was the true 'document' \of their work (drawings, models, photographs and maps were working and transient materials in the same way that scaffolding that makes the construction work possible is disassembled and forgotten). Domenichini and Tonicello always cite another factor that probably played a role in favor of the renewed interest in the documentary sources of architecture in the historical/critical world—the end of a period of very strong "ideologization" of architectural studies that was still pervasive until the 1970s [Domenech-Tonicello 2004/15].
Architectural archives bring difficulties for the archival discipline as it was constructed and as it developed with its conceptual and technical tools. Unlike personal archives that are easily "digestible" with the traditional descriptive tools of the archival discipline that are similar to those materials to which I referred previously, the specific field of architectural archives presents new problems for the archival discipline – ranging from the extreme variety of preserved materials (graphic techniques and paper types, the endless mechanical technologies for copying technical drawings, model-making materials, techniques used for conditioning the materials themselves, and so on), to the need to face a new and "non-standardized" vocabulary (the standardization of the descriptive vocabulary is one of the most open frontiers of the archival discipline, especially since the introduction of computer technology and the need to fully exploit the enormous potential—or research purposes for example—of electronic databases).
It would be interesting to reflect upon how difficult it is for the archivist to manage data such as the drawing scale or the redefinition of the traditional relationship between "original" and "copy" (just think about blueprints that are the "original" submissions of a project, while the drawing on tracing paper, the original matrix [sic], is basically a work in progress; not to mention the contemporary world of the digitalization of design practices that opens an abyss of difficulty that will become even more treacherous for the archivist in the near future). In short, without going any further into the technicalities here, I believe that it is clear that the world of architectural archives can be understood as an interesting challenge for the archival discipline.