History is material. It takes the form of books, drawings, monuments, and other physical matter, each produced through acts of making. This seminar explores how these material practices developed in tandem with modern efforts to recover, build, and even destroy the past. Inspired by the cross-disciplinary “material turn” in the humanities, sessions focus on key moments of modernity when architecture became a medium for not only constructing the past, but also making it “usable” for the present and the future. Each week considers how a material operation makes history (printing, rendering, preserving), sometimes by assigning value (Gothic Revival) other times by justifying erasure (modernization). Coursework combines readings with in-class exercises and museum visits to consider issues of materiality, embodied labor, and memory. Moreover, departing from canonical frameworks of Western knowledge, we consider alternative cosmologies and expanded narratives for situating architecture in time.