Agnete og arkitekturhistorien – arkivets potentialer i tilblivelsen af fortællinger om en arkitekt

Abstract

The subject of the article is the donation of architectural drawings by Agnete Frederikke Laub Hansen (1886‑1970) to the Architecture collection of the Royal Danish Library in 2020. Laub Hansen was the first woman to graduate from the Royal Danish School of Architecture in 1915, but she never worked officially as an architect, and no buildings carry her name. Before the 2020 donation, no official drawings by her were known to the public either. The article takes its starting point in the donation of the architectural drawings and examines which stories about Laub Hansen the archives make possible and what potential the archives themselves possess as a framework or repository when writing architectural histories. This leads to a twofold investigation: On the one hand, the article examines various archival documents and, in particular, the architectural drawings. The outcome is a new context and story about Laub Hansen that challenges the previously dominant narrative about Laub Hansen as ‘Denmark’s first female architect’. On the other hand, the article takes a closer look at the underlying motives in archival practices regarding Laub Hansen that have influenced her place within survey works and collections. Such mechanisms shed light upon the active, never neutral and constantly changing role of archives. This leads the article to conclude that archival traces, when their underlying motives are taken into consideration, hold a vast potential that can contribute to establishing nuanced and more inclusive architectural histories.