Setting the Table: Conversations Across Architectural History gathers research from the 2024/25 cohort of the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Architectural History MA programme to consider how architecture is shaped by intersecting systems and practices — policy, security, coloniality and decoloniality, labour, sensing, destruction, repair, and representation. Rather than isolating buildings as autonomous objects, the projects within treat these forces as co-authors of the built environment and its histories.

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The table is a space of interaction. In the accompanying exhibition, its surfaces are ‘set’ with ideas and artefacts — photographs, documents, models, films, and ephemera — so visitors can serve themselves, compare approaches, and assemble their own routes through existing material. In recalling the seminar setting as a place to gather, question, and exchange, the surrounding displays reveal the production of research around a common centre. Here, the table serves as both prompt and invitation, calling us to look closely and think together.

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The book carries forward this invitation, unfolding across four sections — Situated Agencies, Behind the Glass, Edge Habitats, and Next Passages — each staging its own conversation whilst reflecting a shared commitment to architectural history as a situated, collaborative practice.

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Situated Agencies treats architecture as agency embedded in legal, ritual, media, and colonial frameworks. The contributions show how built form shapes and contests political, cultural, and ideological orders: Anna García Molina on Amancio Williams’s unbuilt Church and Preventive Health Ship as a missionary-medical instrument of moral, hygienic, and spatial control; Eden Northcott on the BBC’s acrylic screening of Eric Gill’s Prospero and Ariel and the indivisibilities of contested heritage; Guillermo Gómez Tejera on the Fashion and Textile Museum as transculturation between Mexican modernism and Bermondsey’s cultural economy; Joe Williamson on the BT Tower through Cold War Protestant ritual, telecom myth-making, and surveillance; Zaina Abou Seif on Hassan Fathy’s drawings and prose as affective instruments of cultural sovereignty. Together, the chapters locate agency in procedures, images, and institutions that often remain offstage.

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Behind the Glass brings visibility to concealed spaces, practices, and infrastructures that sustain cultural and architectural systems. The papers examine overlooked architectures of work, storage, and documentation: Claudia Vargas Franco re-reads Ernö Goldfinger’s 2 Willow Road from its service rooms and routines, proposing ‘part-architecture’ methods to address archival gaps; Helga Beshiri contrasts display and storage at the Wellcome Collection, the Petrie Museum, and the V&A Storehouse, testing how ‘open storage’ recasts accessibility, provenance transparency, and decolonial politics; Macarena González Carvajal reconstructs the Smithsons’ Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: '54–'65, arguing that exhibition design operates as provisional architecture mediating artworks, viewers, and institutional narratives; Mark Bessoudo reframes Google Street View as an unintentional urban archive within traditions of architectural photography, tracking how pragmatic capture and temporal layering migrate into historical interpretation. Mounts, crates, catalogues, servers, and screens emerge as spatial media through which value is produced and public culture kept in motion.

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Edge Habitats follows interfaces — arks, tanks, ducts, walls, and data stacks — where environments are sensed, serviced, and made. Treating ecologies as hybrid networks, the essays trace how instruments and protocols negotiate Other-than-human life, evidence, and design across planetary, urban, and domestic scales: Issy MacGregor reads post-Fukushima marine monitoring as radiological architecture — a ‘bucket logic’ in which media apparatuses, tanks, and fish co-produce publics and proof; Qing Tang examines the architecture of digital waste, from retrofitted bunkers to university data centres and online residue, to show how destruction, disposal, and displacement organise material and immaterial ecologies of data; Ertuğ Erpek reconsiders the New Alchemy Institute’s arks and bioshelters through second-order cybernetics, foregrounding self-regulating habitats of care and feedback; Steven Schultz relocates passive-solar technology from performance metrics to lived routine, showing how the Trombe wall scripts domestic comfort as social choreography. Edge conditions appear as laboratories of cohabitation where environmental claims are tested in practice.

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Next Passages examines how urban landscapes are shaped by overlapping temporalities — standards, images, ruins, and repairs — through which cities and structures are narrated and remade. The chapters track passages from past to next: Eleanor Moselle on Paris’s pneumatic clock network inscribing standard time via the sewer; Audrey Zhang on French Gothic Revival polychromy and the chromatic debates that recast medieval space and its futures; Kitty Alexander on Bristol’s St Mary-le-Port as palimpsest, where representation orchestrates vacancy, value, and redevelopment; Jazmine Simmons on imaginaries of a flooded London that render hydrological futures present and reshape public attachment to the Thames; Lora Lolev on Maison Martin Margiela’s off-centre runway shows as site-specific interventions rerouting attention, tenure, and meaning across urban margins. Permits, images, atmospheres, and affects operate as temporal instruments, choreographing new futures for built environments.

Across their differences, these projects speak to a shared ethic — a recognition of the sociopolitical and material agencies that inform design and history-making. They set the table for architectural history to become an active practice of care, collaboration, and repair.