A lecture titled Decoding CCA: How Architectural Archives Shape Contemporary Cultural Discourse was held in Meeting Room C1, Tongji University’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) on June 10, hosted by researcher Wang Ying. Martien de Vletter, Deputy Director of Collections at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), served as the keynote speaker.

De Vletter introduced CCA’s archive operation model as an open intellectual resource library, sharing its exhibition-driven research, cross-institutional archive sharing and inclusive curation practices without over-reliance on full collection coverage. After the talk, architects and archive managers from domestic design institutes and Tongji scholars held in-depth discussions. They talked about core conflicts between design firms’ legal-oriented final drawing archives and academics’ demand for sketches and process materials, drawing inspiration from CCA’s culture-focused archive strategy.

During her visit, de Vletter toured the archives of Tongji Architectural Design Institute and East China Architectural Design & Research Institute, as well as CAUP’s library and historical archive featuring Dai Fudong and Wu Lusheng’s manuscripts. She exchanged views on digital archive technical challenges, copyright and open-access rules.

This event facilitates cross-border exchange on architectural archive management. It offers new ideas for Chinese institutions to shift static archives into dynamic producers of architectural cultural narratives, boosting domestic archive preservation and research innovation.