The 2025 Fitch Colloquium, titled Fragments of the Imagination: Provenance, Preservation, and the Afterlives of Architecture, brings together leading voices in preservation, architecture, art history, museum practice, and the humanities to examine the conceptual, ethical, and artistic stakes of working with architectural fragments.
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Organized by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) in collaboration with Provenance Projected—an international research collective exploring the social, material, and historical lives of buildings and their futures—the colloquium asks:
How might architectural fragments be mobilized to reimagine the built environment—not as static inheritance, but as a site of imaginative transformation?
How can institutions such as museums, archives, and landmark commissions be rethought in light of the provenance and circulation of architectural fragments?
How does provenance shape disciplinary knowledge and epistemologies within architecture, preservation, art, and beyond?
This year’s colloquium is grounded in GSAPP’s experimental approach to preservation pedagogy and its teaching collection of historic architectural fragments housed in the Preservation Technology Laboratory.
The colloquium will conclude with a concert in Columbia’s St. Paul’s Chapel of choral music from sixteenth-century Iberia. Curated by music historians Susan Boynton and Eric Rice, the program explores the afterlives of medieval chant. The music will be performed by University of Connecticut’s Collegium Musicum under the direction of Eric Rice, in collaboration with singers from the Department of Music at Columbia University.
Named for the founder of formal preservation education at Columbia University and in the United States, the James Marston Fitch Colloquium became an annual event in 2000. In a day-long colloquium, students, alumni, and guests hear speakers and engage in discussion over current issues in preservation—attempting to discover and define the leading edge of the discipline.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required for all attendees. Columbia University campus access is restricted to Columbia affiliates (with a valid CUID) and to pre-approved guests. To attend an event at GSAPP, please register through the form below at least two business days in advance of the event to request campus access and bring your ID.
