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HAL
open science

# Mediated Archives: The Interiors of Instagram and TikTok

Javier Fernandez Contreras, Paule Perron

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## To cite this version:

Javier Fernandez Contreras, Paule Perron. Mediated Archives: The Interiors of Instagram and TikTok. Architecture Archives of the Future, 2023. hal-04306404

HAL Id: hal-04306404

https://hal.science/hal-04306404v1

Submitted on 3 Dec 2023

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Distributed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 - Universal - International License
Jaap Bakema Study Centre

ARCHITECTURE

ARCHIVES

OF THE FUTURE

Tenth Annual Conference

November 2023
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Architecture Archives
of the Future

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Introduction 9

Platforms 17

Open Digital Architecture Archives or the Infinite Metaphorical
Iteration of Architecture
Xavier Van Rooyen (Université de Mons, TU Delft) 19

Progress Though Preservation:
The Value of an Active Archive in Practice
Aymée Thorne Clarke (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners) 27

Beyond Provenance: Designing Building Archives
Erin Besler (Princeton University) and Sarah Hearne
(University of Colorado, Denver) 35

Data, Memory, Manual:
Operationalising the Architectural Archive as a Tool for Design
Leo Stuckardt (MVRDV) 41

Curatorial Practices 49

Curating Croatian Architectural Archives:
Curating Croatian Architectural Futures
Ana Martina Bakić (Zagreb University) 51

Zaha Hadid Foundation: Interdisciplinarity and Intersectionality
Jane Pavitt and Catherine Howe (Zaha Hadid Foundation) 59

Archives without Walls:
A Reflection on Post-Custodial Architecture Archives
Sergio M. Figueiredo (TU Eindhoven, Curatorial Research Collective) 67

Archived:
The Western Museum Archive as Open-World Game
Andreea Iliescu (Royal College of Art) 75
Archival Constructions

Archives of the Ordinary: On the Archive of Research
Maryja Rusak (ETH Zürich)

Immersed in a Virtual Harvest:
Formation of a Collective Narrative-Driven, Spatial Archive
Based on 3D-Scanned Architectural Assemblies
Maria Kyrou (Universität der Künste Berlin)

From Collecting to Connecting or How Not to Collect
Martien de Vletter (CCA)

83
85

93

103

Social Media

Mediated Archives:
The Interiors of Instagram and TikTok

Javier Fernández Contreras and Paule Perron
(HEAD - Genève (HES-SO))

Progressive Archiving:

Strengthening Architectural Practice through Digital Integration
and Integrative Approaches

Meltem Yalçın Uysal (Independent Scholar)

Continuity or Discontinuity of Architectural History:
Digital Repositories and Social Media as Archives

Jovana Tošić (Information Technology School - ITS Belgrade)

createGalleries.py:

An Abstract Formulation of an Art Gallery in Venice

Julian Besems (The Bartlett School of Architecture, ETH Zürich)

111

113

121

129

137

Precarious Archives

A Living Open Architecture Archive:

Lessons from Docomomo and Architectuul Collaboration,
Challenges and Potentials

Meriç Altıntaş Kaptan (Istanbul Technical University),
Christian Burkhard (Architectuul, Universität Kassel),
and Uta Pottgiesser (TU Delft, TH OWL)

Ghost Archives of Socialist Modernism in Lithuania:
Unsolicited Accounting of Centralised Planning Institutes'

Project Documentation

Algimantas Grigas (Kaunas University of Technology)

Unboxing the Martha Levisman Collection:

A Case of Cultural Activism Arrives at the Di Tella
Architecture Archive

Isabella Moretti (Torcuato Di Tella University, Torcuato Di Tella
Architecture Archive / Cooperativa Espacial)

Unpacking Soviet Architecture Collections:

Tbilisi Architecture Archive

Mariam Gegidze (Tbilisi Architecture Archive)

Old Media

Click, Whirr, Jam:

Architecture in and through the 35mm Photographic Slide
Philip Goldswain (University of Western Australia)
and Mark Sawyer (University of Tasmania)

Revealing Archives via Dialogic Mapping:

Explication of Discourses on Architectural Education
in Mimarlık Journal

Gizem Özer Özgür (Istanbul Technical University)

Journals as Maps: Reconsidering BiDiRIA

Federico Deamprosis, Andrea Gritti, and Luka Skansi
(Politecnico di Milano)

145

147

155

163

169

175

177

183

191
Metanarratives

The Powers of Metadata:

Stories of Archival Knowledge Constructions
Mechthild Ebert (KIT/saai Karlsruhe) and Anna-Maria Meister
(KHI, Max Planck Institute, KIT/saai Karlsruhe)

'The Az W Collection Online Meets the Encyclopaedia of Architects': Our Kickoff Project to Something Larger
Monika Platzer and Iris Ranzinger (Architekturzentrum Wien)

Cherchez la Femme: Finding the Feminised Line
Dana Arnold (Manchester School of Architecture)

199

201

209

217

Decolonising

Indigenising the Archive:

Girjegumpi - The Sámi Architecture Library
Carlos Mínguez Carrasco and Frida Rosenberg (ArkDes)

Reading Sino-African Archives:

Expanding Histories of the South
Meghan Ho-Tong (University of Cape Town)

Futurising Latin America:

With the Anxiety of Presentism, We Enter the Archive
Patricio del Real (Harvard University)

223

225

231

239

Archival Excess

Activating Social Housing Archives (Meeting Minutes)

Heidi Svenningsen Kajita (University of Copenhagen)
and Jos Boys (Independent Scholar)

In Search of Architecture in Non-Architectural Archives:

Learning from the Archive of the Swiss National Bank
Ludo Groen (ETH Zürich)

Museum-Archive in Polygyros, Chalkidiki, Greece:

New Technologies, Exhibition Design, and Archival Research
Smaro Katsangelou (Florida Atlantic University)

Bootleg Archives:

Lessons from Exhibiting Unsanctioned Architectural 'Heritage'
Ana Miljački (MIT)

245

247

255

261

269

Biographies

277

Schedule

301
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Nederlands Documentatiecentrum voor de predecesseurs of Bouwkunst ("Netherlands Documentation Center for Architecture") Nieuwe Instituut. Collection Nieuwe Instituut, Archive NDBK</figcaption></figure>

# Looking Back, Looking Ahead:
Ten Years Jaap Bakema
Study Centre

This year's annual conference marks the tenth anniversary of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, the special research collaboration between the Nieuwe Instituut and the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TU Delft. Looking back to 2013 this seems like another era, and yet at the same time it also feels as if we've only just started. In the early Spring of 2013, I was approached by Guus Beumer, the then freshly appointed director of the Nieuwe Instituut. The Nieuwe Instituut itself was a wholly new creature, the result of a merger between the Netherlands Architecture Institute, the Premsela design institute and Virtual Plaform, the digital culture institute. It was the outcome of a new right-wing cultural policy in the Netherlands, and much contested as such. One of Beumer's ambitions was to embed the Nieuwe Instituut in larger, multidisciplinary networks to try and fend off future reorganisations motivated by ideological agendas. Among others, he was interested to bring academic research and design expertise as represented by the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft to the Nieuwe Instituut. Together we came up with the idea for the collaboration through the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, a versatile and small unit situated between Delft and Rotterdam, to facilitate exchange, and to combine research and the national collection of architecture and urban planning at the Nieuwe Instituut to create a programme of public activities focused on urgent societal questions.

To name the collaboration after Jaap Bakema (1914-1981) was a logical choice for many reasons. The archive of the Van den Broek & Bakema office and its equally famed predecessor of Brinkman & Van der Vlugt is the largest archive in the collection and holds some of the prime architectural projects of Dutch architectural history, among others the Lijnbaan shopping street in the rebuilt centre of the war devastated city of Rotterdam. As a professor in Delft, and an architect in Rotterdam, Bakema also embodies the combination of both places. More importantly, Bakema represents an approach to architecture, which had gone lost under the impact of postmodernism and neo-liberalism in architecture. For Bakema architecture as a discipline exists only in the middle of society and its messy state of ongoing 'growth and change', one of the key mottos for modern architecture in the post-war decades. Architecture was to address society's needs and desires, or it should not exist at all. Architecture as autonomy was never an option for Bakema. He proposed to think of architecture as fundamentally relational, already in 1951 at the CIAM conference in Hoddesdon, which is quite different from promoting cultural or ethical relativism it must be added. Social questions belong to the question
of architecture. Bakema's proposition to build towards an open society, in which people are enabled to live by their own convictions and aspirations was founded on this believe. The notion of an open society, as a question rather than a fixed agenda, turned out to be also an excellent guideline for the development of the public activities of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre.

## EXHIBITIONS AND RESEARCH

Initially, the focus was on the creation of exhibitions as output of research as well as a vehicle for ongoing investigations. In 2014, the Jaap Bakema Study Centre curated the Dutch Rietveld pavilion at the Venice architecture biennale and restaged Bakema's contributions around the question of an open society as a guide line for architectural design and urban planning today, two years before authoritarianism ad populism regained new momentum with the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA, and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. In Rotterdam at the institute we co-curated the Structuralism show, together with Herman Hertzberger and the colleagues of the Nieuwe Instituut, especially Suzanne Mulder and Ellen Smit. It focused among others on the relevancy of architectural design regarding social interactions for today. Other exhibitions were produced with young emerging architects, such as the Belgium office of Rotor based on a research studio at TU Delft around re-use and Dutch architectural icons like Hertzberger's Ministry for Social Affairs and Employment which will be demolished, and with Studio Ossidiana on notions of ecology, biodiversity and more-than-human design, especially birds. A very special exhibition was developed together with the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, at the invitation of its director Penelope Curtis, to look into the specifics of exhibition design and museology of the mid-twentieth century. Selected designers we restaged included Franco Albini, Lina Bo Bardi, and Aldo van Eyck. Parallel activities involved research by students of the Berlage, including a master class on museum and exhibition design with Barry Bergdoll. While in Lisbon Rita Albergaria sought to develop carefully designed reconstructions of the selected displays, for the Rotterdam edition Jo Taillieu chose instead to approach the question of scenography as a question of translation of the original displays, which resulted in a constellation of fragments that together built up into a most poetic and contemporary experience for the visitors.

All exhibitions were research driven and also instigated new research. They were archive based, and often linked to new archival acquisitions for the national collection. Students were actively involved, as well as designers, all in order to bring out the archival materials, to make public the ideas and traditions which they carry, and to confront these with the questions of today. This research dimension of the programme of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre resulted in a shifting focus from exhibition making toward accommodating guest researchers, postdoc fellows and PhD candidates, even complete PhD networks. Around the question of an open society the ongoing PhD programme Architecture and Democracy was initiated, together with TU Delft

colleague Jorge Mejía. Burcu Köken works on architectural media in the Cold War decades, and Íñigo Cornago Bonal is looking into housing design, user agency, and the concept of Open Building. A second, national PhD programme with parallel work packages concerns The Critical Visitor project for 2020-25; it's NWO sponsored, and initiated by Eliza Steinbock, together with Hester Dibbits and myself. A consortium of circa 15 cultural and academic institutions looks into questions of intersectional diversity and inclusion in the world of heritage, especially museums and archives. A third PhD programme with a consortium of ten universities, and various cultural institutions and architectural firms has been completed last summer: Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing (TACK), led by Tom Avermaete, ETH Zürich, and Janina Gosseye, TU Delft. It's EU funded, and brought together ten PhD candidates who also visited Delft and Rotterdam for seminars and a two week summer school, while four of them were hosted for research secondments.

## DIGITAL TURN

While PhD research and hosting postdoc fellows and visiting scholars will remain crucial to bring the archival materials out for new research and new audiences, another dimension of the activities of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre emerged quite prominently during the last decade as crucial to future architectural research and knowledge: that is the ubiquitous new digital technologies, their histories and entanglement with architectural design, as well as their almost autonomous impetus toward new and unexpected developments in archival studies and curatorial practices. This 'digital turn' can be easily retraced from the themes addressed by the series of annual Bakema conferences organised in the last years: three out of ten conferences were exclusively focused on the digital turn in architecture and archival studies, while also this tenth edition of the Bakema conference will be dominated by questions of digital technologies and their evolving uses. In 2016, we devoted the conference Between Paper and Pixels to the topic of transmedial traffic in architectural drawing, with a pop-up exhibition of all sorts traces of the digital in the archives of the national collection, from the first plotted drawing for the Siemens research centre by Van den Broek and Bakema to the black box of so many terabytes of the digital archive of MVRDV. The conference was concluded with a wonderful keynote by the late Will Alsop. In 2020, we looked at prehistories of the digital again, under the heading of Repositioning Architecture in the Digital, organised together with Georg Vrachliotis. And in 2022, also with Vrachliotis, we focused on Building Data: Architecture, Memory and New Imaginaries.

This focus on the digital was not anticipated at the start of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre. Yet, various parallel developments made this a natural outcome and new direction. First of all, there was the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced us to move the institute's public programme to the realm of on-line events and presentations. An early test with 3D photography of the Habitat exhibition, to create a hybrid platform that could integrate archival documents with
research and online exhibition visits, was now made public for instance. It accelerated the idea to explore the possibilities a global, multi-institutional platform for a Virtual CIAM Museum, to bring together the dispersed CIAM archives in a new medium that would allow new ways of doing research and new ways of knowledge production and dissemination. Together with PhD candidates from the TACK network, who also had to be most inventive due to the limitations of the pandemic, we tested various prototypes: a remote field work exercise with Jhono Bennett with the Lijnbaan as an example, a test for an interactive visualisation of Jaap Bakema's correspondence network with Claudia Mainardi, and a VR installation as a reconstruction of the work room and archive of Alison Smithson, proposed and designed by Paula Strunden.

## PROTOTYPES

Working with prototypes allowed for a controlled development of potentially very big projects, and a learning experience for the team and for the institute, in terms of working with the technology, the necessary time planning and funds, related archival work (digitisation, curation of data sets, etc.), but also in terms of testing new audiences and new narratives. Especially Paula Strunden's VR installation Alison's Room: An Extended Reality Archive turned out to be most successful. Not only could everyone themselves literally experience the new possibilities, which made the conversation about VR and its possibilities much more concrete, but it also brought quite surprisingly new audiences due to the selection for the Gouden Kalf awards of the Dutch film festival in the category of digital culture, which meant the installation travelled to Utrecht, and to the Rotterdam Architecture Film Festival, too.

The prototypes were presented in November 2022 at the conference of Disclosing Architecture (Architectuur Dichterbij) at the Nieuwe Instituut, which was the platform for a bigger multi-million euro project, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, that aims at new ways of preserving our archives, and new ways of disclosing them, in particular through digital technologies. Ever since the start of the Nieuwe Instituut, the digital had become a natural field of exploration, since one of the original institutions behind the merger was Virtual Platform. Hence, a range of experiments with visualisations in particular were consistently produced. For instance, in the context of the Structuralism exhibition, artist and designer Richard Vijgen proposed new archival interpretations based on metadata software (Adlib) to rethink interfaces and relations within the collection holdings. Thus, the Nieuwe Instituut, as an interdisciplinary organisation by definition, provides the natural context to further expand the experiments with the digital turn in architectural archives and curation. It is the ambition of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, together with the Nieuwe Instituut and TU Delft, to further develop the Virtual CIAM Museum as an umbrella project in the coming years, together with other international partners, starting with the GTA institute of the ETH Zürich, and the Getty Research Institute.

## A NEW GROUP

To better support the work of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre in the coming years, a new group has been formed within the Department of Architecture at TU Delft, which I proudly present here: Architecture Archives of the Future to further focus the research and innovative work in the field of digital technologies, architectural archives and curatorial practices. The new group will work within a newly formed section Building Knowledge which also hosts the groups of Kees Kaan, professor of architecture and leader of the Complex Projects group, and Georg Vrachliotis, professor of digital culture and leader of the group Data, Design and Society. This tenth edition of the annual Bakema conference of the same name is the informal kick-off of the group, which was latently already active under the wings of the group of Architecture and Dwelling, which I led in the last years as well. The new group will be much more prominently visible and able to develop its own programme, and also its own courses, starting with a MSc studio devoted to the design of a Virtual Architecture Museum, in which students will engage in new ways in architectural design research, presentation and experience.

The group already consists of eight people in total, I'm very happy to announce, all of who I highly respect for their dedication to architectural research and education. Alejandro Campos Uribe was initially a Marie Curie postdoc researcher, but has now a position as lecturer and researcher. Our group benefits from the Spanish Margarita Salas foundation, which funded two postdoc fellowships held by Paula Lacomba Montes and Elena Martínez Millana. Burcu Köken and İñigo Cornago Bonal are PhD researchers as part of the Architecture and Democracy programme. Winnie van de Sande is our most excellent student assistant, while Fatma Tanış is the crucial hingepoint for the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, working between the Nieuwe Instituut and the Architecture Department.

## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This introduction to the proceedings has been different from earlier ones due to the anniversary of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre. Needless to say this special collaboration between TU Delft and Nieuwe Instituut was only possible due to many supporters and enablers, a few of those I would like to mention here in gratitude for their help and inspiration. First of all, Guus Beumer, as first director of the Nieuwe Instituut who held his ground despite all the headwind he had to endure. Together with him, Floor van Spaendonck and Behrang Mousavi worked from the side of the Nieuwe Instituut to make the Jaap Bakema Study Centre a success from the very first start. I feel privileged this support of the early years is continued by the current Board of Directors, Aric Chen and Josien Paulides. In Delft, the collaboration found the unwavering support of Dick van Gameren, first in his capacity as Chair of the Department of Architecture, today as Dean of our Faculty. Karin Laglas, Dean of the Faculty in 2013 was wholly supportive to make this adventure possible. The current Chair of our Department of
Architecture Kees Kaan has proven to be an excellent sparring partner to secure the future of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre. The advisory board members deserve a special mention: Tom Avermaete, Hetty Berens, Maristella Casciato, Carola Hein, Laurent Stalder, and Georg Vrachliotis. Last but not least, the various coordinators of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, without whom all our activities would not be possible: in the past Victor Muñoz Sanz, Soscha Monteiro de Jesus, Janno Martens, and today, Fatma Tanış. As a final mention I'd like to thank and honour Max Risselada, with whom I collaborated on the Team 10 exhibition, as long ago as the early 2000s, for the then Netherlands Architecture Institute, together with Suzanne Mulder and Tom Avermaete. Already then we were discussing the possibility of a research institute situated between Delft and Rotterdam as part of our shared fascination and love for archives, and how they form exciting, almost boundless resources for new stories, design practices and future imaginaries. This conference and its proceedings with its rich range of archival research practices by the participants are proof that many share this fascination and love, and that archival research is taking us now in wholly new directions, which are just a taste of things to come.

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Platforms
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Silodam typologica iteration generated by Bing Image Creator. Image courtesy of Xavier Van Rooyen.

# Open Digital Architecture Archives or the Infinite Metaphorical Iteration of Architecture

## OPEN DIGITAL ARCHITECTURE ARCHIVES OR THE INFINITE TYPOLOGICAL ITERATION OF ARCHITECTURE

Digital archives raise the question of how to preserve them, display them or catalogue them. The question we would like to address here concerns the potential of digital archives to be integrated into an ideation process, enabling the creation of new architectural types based on archives of the past.

In a vision of an open society, the data represented by digital archives can from our point of view be more widely opened up to academics and practitioners alike, to increase their potential for use.

In the book *Copy Paste: Bad Ass Copy Guide*, the past is considered as 'a vast archive on which we can and must build'<fnref n="1" />. From our point of view, by opening up all digital archives contained in research centre, we can consider digital archives as an open gigantic typological catalogue unknown to all. Considering this possibility of open-source archives, data contained in research centre have the potential to be considered again and reinterpreted through a process of automation and the use of Artificial Intelligence made possible with the emergence of the second digital turn.

## The Second Digital Turn and the Potential of Open-Source Archives

The use of computer-aided design has long been the subject of theorising, by Mario Carpo, Greg Lynn or Peter Eisenman. Mario Carpo has devoted a number of books to the subject, tracing its recent history back to the 1990s, at least as far as architecture is concerned. Following Carpo, the first digital age gave birth to a blob style, also known as the 'style of the spline'<fnref n="2" /> and CAD software were used to design a non-standard architecture.

During the second digital turn, data has become central in the automation process of designing architecture. Algorithm and data-driven architecture gave rise to 'the second digital style, the style of data-affluent society and of a nouveau data-rich technology, [...] the style of the late 2010s'<fnref n="3" />.

<footnote n="1">1. Winy Maas, Felix Madrazo, *Copy Paste: The Badass Architectural Copy Guide* (Rotterdam: nai010, 2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Mario Carpo, *The Second Digital Turn. Design Beyond Intelligence*, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Mario Carpo, *The Second Digital Turn*, 56–57.</footnote>
The second digital aspect was also a way to develop the possibility of
creating a collaborative virtual network, where ‘computer-based design and
manufacturing is giving rise to new forms of digital artisanship, narrowing
the Albertian divide between conceivers and makers. Likewise, the digitally
enhanced horizontal integration of actors and agencies in the design
and production process is already challenging the modern notion of the
architect’s full authorial control and intellectual ownership of the end
product. New digital platforms for open-ended, interactive collaboration may
beget endless design variations, revisions, or versions loss of design control
and of authorial recognition, and even, in the most extreme cases, collective
or anonymous results<fnref n="4" />.

Such an open-source data network has been discussed between different
architectural archives research centre and can, as such, can be used for
digital archives access and be an ‘open-ended, interactive’ platform that can
give the designers access to unknown architectural references that can be
exploited into a data-driven design process.

Open-source data address issues of data privacy, intellectual property
rights, and the quality control of shared digital architectural archives
to ensure responsible and ethical use. It also questions limitations and
challenges associated with opening up digital architectural archives.
According to Carpo, this question of authorship is rooted in Leon
Battista Alberti's drawings<fnref n="5" />: once he signed and annotated his plans, his
copyright began to exist. Yet architectural projects have always been
open to reinterpretation, since history is a vast field of investigation and
precedents. Was this not the case when Rem Koolhaas distorted the plan
of the German pavilion at the Barcelona International Exposition (1929)
to fit the circular layout of the Triennale? Does Koolhaas reference his
approach and then offer us a personal, discursive version in his collages
for Casa Palestra in 1986? Whose intellectual property is it, then? For
Koolhaas, the reference serves to support a critical and ambiguous
interpretation ‘whereas Koolhaas consciously and deliberately challenges
moral values by celebrating athletic activity and sexual pleasure in an
architectural icon of the fascist period’.<fnref n="6" />

Open archives can play the same role as Mies' plan in Koolhaas' work for
academics and practitioners and as such will challenge 'the modern notion
of the architect's full authorial control and intellectual ownership of the
end product' to 'relinquish the legacy of the authoral privileges the design
professions have so laboriously struggled to acquire over time'<fnref n="7" />.

Anteriority of Architecture

Using history and archives into a design process refers to what Peter Eisenman called the anteriority of architecture.<fnref n="8" /> In the 1990s, the reference to this anteriority was not exhaustive in the American architect's work. It was essentially a question of capitalising on all the knowledge acquired by the architect through the analyses he carried out of Renaissance architects' projects (Alberti, Brunelleschi or Palladio) or the spatial analyses illustrated in his PhD-based on the works of Giuseppe Terragni. Open-source archives therefore represent a potential for greater comprehensiveness, and the capacity of computers to process data is far greater than the knowledge acquired through the research work of a single researcher.

In different internationally renown architectural offices, Rhinoceros
and Grasshoper are often used to test different variations of way of
assembling different typology for example. Algorithm and data-driven
architecture enable ‘a process of differentiation [that] can now be scripted,
programmed, and to some extent designed’<fnref n="9" />. With the emergence of the
artificial intelligence, offices such as Zaha Hadid Architects, led by Patrick
Schumacher, use Dall-E or Midjourney to reinterpret, combine or merge
their own archives, their own anteriority into an ideation process to test
variability.<fnref n="10" />

As such, new technologies since the digital turn and more specifically
Artificial Intelligence enrich architectural practice with the potential to create
new typologies, new variations of types based on anteriority of architecture
and digital archives such as MVRDV's, preserved at the NI. In order to
conceptualise contemporary public buildings that 'requires developing
new types of buildings and building elements'<fnref n="11" />, AI tools can re-invent past
structures and existing typologies, through research and design as well as
research by design capitalising on digital archives as a vast resource of
data and types. Online platforms such as DigitalFUTURES provide tutorials
to help designers master Dall-E and Midjourney.<fnref n="12" /> Of course, such use of
digital archives in design process needs a critical methodology to develop
innovative buildings. Moreover, by capitalising on certain types of archival
documents, the research we present here was primarily aimed at discovering
how to integrate image generators into a design process, a tool that some
practicing architects have already seized upon. This paper explains the
different steps of the exploration we made using different archives and
image generator through the course of history and theory of architecture in
UMons (Belgium).

<footnote n="4">4 Mario Carpo, *The Alphabet and the Algorithm* (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 117–118.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Mario Carpo, *The Alphabet and the Algorithm*, 44.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Mathieu Berteloot, Véronique Patteeuw, “OMA’s Collages. OMA. The First Decade”, OASE 94 (2015), 67.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Mario Carpo, *The Second Digital Turn*, 142–143.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Robert Somol, *Peter Eisenman: Diagram Diaries* (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 37.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Mario Carpo, *The alphabet and the algorithm*, 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Patrick Schumacher, "AI and the Future of Design Roundtable Discussion, Digital FUTURES world", April 8th, 2023 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjUb48f4Roc].</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 TU Delft Public Building Group statement, https://www.tudelft.nl/en/architecture-and-the-built-environment/about-the-faculty/departments/architecture/organisation/groups/public-building.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 See https://digitalfutures.international/.</footnote>
## AI DIGITAL ARCHIVES DATA-DRIVEN GENERATION

Following Mario Carpo, 'thanks to data-driven Artificial Intelligence we can now mass-produce endless non-identical copies of any given set of archetypes or models. The GAN technique can produce similarities working the analytic way by abstracting one ideal prototype out of and common to many similar images- or, by reversing the process, generating many realistic images similar to their models; by applying the two processes sequentially, GAN can produce a new set of non-identical copies collectively similar to one or more original datasets'<fnref n="13" />.

As such, the course assessment was at first inspired by GAN technique. The first intention was, based on projects by MVRDV and the late Belgian organic architect Jacques Gillet, to test the typological recognition potential of common image generator tools, with the aim of shaping several variants of reference projects, to challenge the ability of artificial intelligence to create potential alternatives, just as Grasshoper and Rhino. Digital archives and unbuilt typology would as such, serve an unprecedented exploratory universe in the architectural design process.

Our first intuition was that using AI and digital archives in the design process can really become 'a kind of combinatorial theory that allows given elements to be associated with each other in all possible ways, first abstractly, independently of their distinction, and then according to the distributive requirements of the different terms'<fnref n="14" />. The different results of this first exploratory phase did not meet this objective.

## AI IMAGE GENERATOR POTENTIALITIES

Unlike Patrick Schumacher and Zaha Hadid's office, we did not use realistic renderings to generate AI image, but architectural drawings and built projects pictures were used as an input to generate image and/or variations.

Firstly, we used pictures of Silodam as a first input and we defined a normal degree of influence for the final output. The different output we were able to generate were collected and put together to constitute a kind of typological catalogue.

Secondly, we digitised a significant percentage of Jacques Gillet's archives preserved at the GAR architecture archives research centre in Liège, to exploit them for our AI exploration. In the archives, we discovered a lot of hand drawings of the Sculpture house, and some really impressive hand drawings made during different travels in Dordogne in France. These expressionist drawings contain a huge spatial potential that we wanted to use as input through AI re-interpretation.

Both explorations did not offer any real alternatives to an architectural project. In fact, the images obtained are of course only two-dimensional, and cannot be used as a three-dimensional object. But what do these images represent? How can we exploit these images and archive plans, which in the final output, according to the prompt, deviate greatly from the original document?

The action of AI image generator is to generate 'many realistic images similar to their models'<fnref n="15" />, but in fact, the resulting image operates a semantic shift similar to what Véronique Patteeuw associates with the collage process in the work of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. For the researcher, 'the action of collage—that of collecting, accumulating, piling up, selecting, cutting up and assembling in sequences heterogeneous elements, figurines and objects, in order to achieve a suggested reality—evokes new narratives, new dialogues and new temporalities. Combining motifs and pictorial fragments disconnected from their original meanings, collage doesn't close off the imaginary, but opens it up. It does not seek to approximate reality, nor does it pretend to sublimate reality; it possesses a certain autonomy. Far from being a finished document, collage is a tool for initiating dialogue. As Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa points out, collage offers 'archaeological density and a non-linear narrative through the juxtaposition of fragmented elements, derived from irreconcilable origins'<fnref n="16" />.

AI image generator does not generate a final document just like collages. Archaeological density in our exploration is made possible by using archives as an input. What is generated is much closer to a metaphor, a primary generator, in the words of Rosario Caballero-Rodriguez.<fnref n="17" /> The researcher tells us that metaphor in architecture represents knowledge, as does the anteriority of architecture. It helps the architect to think through a project and translate it into a form. Metaphor plays the role of a primary generator, which can be pinned down into four categories: denotation-exemplification, expression and mediated reference. Through denotation, metaphor describes, represents, and even imitates the world, but the world is reinvented through exemplification and expression. This reinterpretation, this expression-exemplification, is the basis of the experimentation carried out with the students, exploiting the tool embodied by image generators using artificial intelligence. What we were able to discover is that using archives in an ideation process as an input subject to variability due to the image generator tool, becomes, once the output has been obtained, a representational tool and generative of an architectural process, in the same way as collage, metaphor or sketch. It is representational, because it enables the project concept to be expressed, and generative, because in itself it contains the potential for spatial organisation, and the potential for action and transformation of the architectural reference. The final output is not a final document but a reality that is yet to come, a potential version of a vision, 'a project of form'<fnref n="18" />.

<footnote n="13">13 Mario Carpo, *Beyond Digital: Design and Automation at the End of Modernity* (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023), 122.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Leonardo Benevolo, *Storia dell'architettura moderna* (Rome: Laterza, 1964), Vol. 1, 79.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Mario Carpo, *Beyond Digital*, 122.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Juhani Pallasmaa, "Hapticity and Time, Notes on Fragile Architecture", *The Architectural Review* (May 2000), 80; Véronique Patteeuw, "Le collage dans l'oeuvre de l'OMA (1978-1989)", in Xavier Van Rooyen, *Open Architecture* (Liège: Gar éditions, 2019), 247.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Rosario Caballero-Rodriguez, "From Design Generator to Rhetorical Device", in Gerber Andri, Patterson Brent, *Metaphors in architecture and urbanism* (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013), 91.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Giulio Carlo Argan, *Sur le concept de typologie, in Projet et dessin, Art, architecture, urbanisme* (Paris: Editions de la Passion, 1993), 58.</footnote>
In this way, Artificial Intelligence image generator and open source archives open up the potential of digital archives not only as a research or exhibition object, but as an immense database that can enable infinite typological iteration and it represents a possible use of Open architecture archives for the Future. Nevertheless, to overcome the limitations associated with authorship, to 'relinquish the legacy of the authoral privileges the design professions have so laboriously struggled to acquire over time the architectural profession simply has to accept that the design process of many architects is inevitably initiated from an architectural anteriority that is subject to reinterpretation', like in Winy Maas's publication *Copy Paste: Bad Ass Copy Guide*. In any case, we have the intuition that platforms such as Archdaily already disseminate a gigantic amount of architectural content that can be used and reinterpreted by other project authors and are moreover stored long-term on servers and therefore already accessible to all. Open architecture archives can play the same role in a near shared future.

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

Project Analysis and Repository. Image courtesy of Aymée Thorne Clarke.

Aymée Thorne Clarke (RSHP)

# Progress Though Preservation:
The Value of an Active Archive
in Practice

RSHP (formerly Richard Rogers Partnership / Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners) are still custodians of their archive, holding almost 50 years' worth of material. The collective nature of the partnership has, perhaps, prevented the creation of a single author foundation and this too is reflected in the archival practices employed. The collection also comprises the archives of the previous incarnations of the practice, overlapping from one to the next, with a continual evolution of ideas by reoccurring and successive creators. The title of this paper refers to the potential for an active archive to support the foundation of theory, and in the realisation of that theory support evolution in architecture, particular to RSHP. As a way of examining this subject, six archival and journalistic fields of preservation, and subsequently interrogation, are utilised to explore the archival process in an architectural practice.<fnref n="1" />

## WHO

The discourse surrounding architectural authorship is extensive and varies greatly between period and agenda. However, it is worth analysing in the context of the RSHP archive, as it can, occasionally, curtail its productive use. It is widely acknowledged that collaboration and co-authorship are at the centre of the profession. The different contributions, skills and interests of the Richard Rogers Partnership founding partners were frequently noted for their complementary nature and raise the question of what an author is to architecture or the practice.<fnref n="2" /> Is it the person(s) who draws the concept sketch, instructs construction, or defends the design principles the practice follows? Does authorship function, as Foucault asserts, as more than the product of a person?<fnref n="3" /> And if so, what purpose does the name of an individual serve? These questions are tied closely to the history of the profession as defined by Alberti, as well as ideas of authority and ownership.

<footnote n="1">1 International Council on Archives, ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description, Second Edition (Ottawa, 2000). The six mandatory fields of archival description and the corresponding field for the purpose of this paper are as follows: 3.1.1 Reference code(s) (What), 3.1.2. Title (Why), 3.1.3 Date(s) (When), 3.1.4 Level of description (Where), 3.1.5 Extent and medium of the unit of description (How) and 3.2.1 Name of creator(s) (Who).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Richard Rogers Partnership, Flexible Framework (Berlin: Aedes, 1991), 56. 'It is an overriding aim of the practice to produce work of the very highest quality. Each of the four founder partners has a particular area of specialism and is consequently involved in every project taken on by the practice'. Further to this, it is a stipulation of the RRP/RSHP Constitution that partners are selected for their unique contributions to the practice.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?' in *Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology* (The New Press, 1998).</footnote>
One of the primary means to create legacy is through authorship, evidenced through text and the archive, as architectural history remains characterised by the dominance of individual figures.<fnref n="4" /> As a practice operational during the 1980s, RRP was not immune to the portrayal of the 'Starchitect', which has led to distortion of the external understanding of architectural process. Whilst the content of the archive should inform histories by researchers, it can also be susceptible to those very texts and media through inherited misinterpretation.<fnref n="5" /> Equally, retrospective archival interventions can call into question the motives of the archivist, after all who is authoring the authors? Far from the neutrality of the traditional archival model, in active practice one becomes a participant in attribution, in terms of authorship and other value-based decisions by which the archive may be interpreted.<fnref n="6" />

Internally, attribution validates the collective process and the contribution of all parties involved, whereby giving individuals agency and value. This can also include external co-authors, such as engineers and contractors, whose specialisms can have a significant impact on design.<fnref n="7" /> The challenge of capturing the complexity of architectural authorship, requires more than recording material to reflect the authors and processes by which it was created. Simply recording the collective undermines the individual contributions, and authors who hitherto may have been ignored; whereas recording all individuals both reduces and amplifies everyone to the same status. To mitigate centralised responsibility, openness and accessibility become necessary aspects of archival description, especially with the rise of digital tools that can obscure the hands of many.<fnref n="8" />

## WHAT

Identification, however, is only one point of feedback. What constitutes architecture to a practice? The answer to this often aligns with the principles and particular creative process of the architects involved, and therefore dictates the types of material assigned greater value in the archive. There is a symbiotic relationship between the realised and communicated projects (which can range from a building to an unrealised competition entry) and

how those projects have been conceived (which is intangible but could include theory, context and interpretation). The latter is often the aspect of architecture that is hardest to capture and is possibly easier if the authors have been prolific writers or speakers.<fnref n="9" /> Conversely, the technocratic nature of the current architectural market, set against quantifiable goals, has resulted in archive deposits of standardised sets of information, largely for legal protection, rather than considered material of unique value to the practice.<fnref n="10" />

When RSHP relocated to an office of their own design, The Leadenhall Building, Senior Partner Graham Stirk stated the project was 'a breakthrough where the methodology and the consequential architectural statement were together', a principle that extends as far back as the shed projects of the 1980s and is an approach that still informs projects today.<fnref n="11" /> The expression of a holistic approach, in which inventive engineering solutions were combined with systematised industrial components, was key to projects such as Inmos, Patscentre and Fleetguard. However, the methodology by which these projects were created and assembled remained rooted in analogue traditions, created by hand. At Leadenhall, the methodology had largely caught up, and aspirations such as digital fabrication and automated assembly that had reoccurred in practice designs since the 1970s, were realised.<fnref n="12" />

But how can this be read and recorded in archive? The example above demonstrates both immediate and distance knowledge transfer; the latter occurs through those who have been at the practice for extended periods or have a broader knowledge of the practice back catalogue. They also demonstrate a type of knowledge *beyond image*. Although not formally a theory-based practice, there is a culture based on design principles and precedent, with interactions during competitions / early stages often providing fertile ground for such conversations. As the motivation at RSHP is to build, unrealised projects can become incubators for ideas and arguments, the development of which can extend across projects and even decades. All of which suggest that it is essential to capture such discussions, in some form, close to the point of creation. This reaffirms that an active archive requires creative and assertive methods, agile enough to deal with many forms of output (image, text, data, etc.), to make legible the specific approaches or principles that may otherwise remain intangible, as a source of learning in the present and future.

<footnote n="4">4 There is a clear correlation between how architectural accolades are awarded to individuals, despite the body of work on which they are based being the product of collective practice. Although not the subject of this paper, misrepresentation as the result of the circular nature of text, media and awards, which can filter out certain persons or influences, remains a media issue more than an archival one.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 F. Gerald Ham, 'The Archival Edge', *The American Archivist*, Vol. 8, No. 1 (January 1975), 8. 'If we cannot transcend these obstacles, then the archivist will remain at best nothing more than a weathervane moved by the changing winds of historiography'.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 The traditional model refers to that established by archivist Hilary Jenkinson, who emphasised the neutrality of the archivist. Subsequently this model was adapted by Theodore Shellenberg to accommodate separate definitions for records and archives, ultimately leading to records management and appraisal, processes requiring active participation from the archivist.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 For example, several industrial buildings designed by the practice during the 1970s and 80s incorporate structure in a dominant role, the difference in structural expression across these projects reflects the character and particular concerns of two engineers: Anthony Hunt and Peter Rice.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Mario Carpo, *The Alphabet and the Algorithm* (USA: MIT Press, 2011), 43. 'Interactivity and participation imply, at some point, some form of almost collective decision-making. But the wisdom of many is often anonymous: anonymity goes counter to authorship and, since the inception of the Albertian model, authorship has been a precondition for the architect's work'.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Kenneth Megill, *Corporate Memory: Records and Information Management in the Knowledge Age* (Munich: KG Saur, 2005), 11. Megill defines corporate memory as 'active and historical information in an organisation that is worth sharing, managing and preserving for later use'. It is not limited to a tangible record type that is physical or digital, it can be embodied by members of staff, and holds value for record context and collective memory.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Terry Cook, 'From Information to Knowledge: An Intellectual Paradigm for Archives', *Archivaria* 19 (Winter 1984-85). This could also be seen as a wider symptom of institutional / administrative archival collecting, largely traced back to the introduction of management structures, high staff turnover, computers and significant volumes of information without the resources to manage it.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Graham Stirk, Interview with Peter Murray, Thames Wharf Studios, 30 October 2014.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Key projects include Zip-Up House (1969), ARAM (1971), the Autonomous Dwelling series (1969-1991), Industrial Housing Korea (1991), and most recently, the series of modular housing projects with AECOM.</footnote>
## WHY

The retention of architectural records for their legal and evidential value, has been both a blessing and a hindrance at RSHP. In the past, it has led to the storage of a significant quantity of physical records, placing pressure on the archival process of appraisal; and whilst digital material has been retained, it has been difficult to maintain, leading to losses in the collection. Due to the different properties, it has been challenging to prove digital and physical media should be part of the same archive catalogue, that ultimately seeks to record the collective memory of the practice.

The idea of architecture being expressive of a moment in time, has its own lineage in architectural history. Collective memory could be seen as the product of both architectural and archival practice, where the former uses and adds to the latter throughout the process and thus, emphasises the value of the archive in practice. One of the greatest assets of any archive is context, and the complex interrelationships that can be recorded through association, which arguably reflects the part to whole concerns of architecture itself. Yet the archival labour and theory required for contextualisation often goes unrecognised, and failure to assimilate the influence this has, can also limit the understanding and use of an archive. Jacques Derrida's 1995 book, *Archive Fever*, was one of the first texts outside the discipline to acknowledge how 'archivisation' shapes history, memory, and identity, and contributed to archival practice's postmodern paradigm shift.<fnref n="13" /> By recognising the dependency of practice and archive, the relationship becomes reciprocal, but only by embedding the archive in practice with active engagement can it be truly beneficial.

For this reason, the RSHP repository, comprising over 11,000 packages, was relocated off-site in 2021, and archival activities were integrated into the main office at The Leadenhall Building. This has enabled tangible engagement that was previously impossible, as well as demonstrating the coexistence of historic and contemporary projects, which can initiate discourse, association, and critical reflection.

## WHEN

As a 'second-generation' practice, inheriting the catalogue which includes canonical works such as Lloyds of London and Centre Pompidou, could be seen as burdensome. It is therefore essential to understand those architectural responses in the context of their time, and whether that is or is not appropriate to current conditions.<fnref n="14" /> Precedent is used in architecture all the time; to substantiate credentials for business purposes, or as

a testbed for the ongoing refinement of the design ethos in which past ideas are appraised in the light of emerging design challenges.<fnref n="15" /> It can be used immediately, from one project to the next, or from a distance. Some have questioned how such distance in function or time could be useful, whilst others view the distance and separation in support of 'the system of discursivity' that establishes the possibility of what *could* be said.<fnref n="16" /> Similarly, the reoccurring or reactionary themes in the arts during certain conditions have been a common theme for philosophers and historians, each with their own interpretation; from Hegel to Wolfflin.<fnref n="17" />

Yet, looking back can be perceived negatively due to the associations with imitation, even within a practice reflecting on their own work. It may also be perceived as self-indulgent and insular, effectively excluding any wider context, and leading to the negative perception of archives as monuments to the past. In Mark Wigley's essay, *Unleashing the Archive*, he explains that the expectation to produce experimental work forces architects to move 'beyond the archive', whilst acknowledging how all architectural practices are archive creating and using, a dynamic relationship rather than a conclusive one.<fnref n="18" /> This acknowledgement echoes the objectives of the Records Continuum and Engelbart's Dynamic Knowledge Repository.<fnref n="19" /> The recent AI summer has shown us how important existing records are, in terms of both language and image. The proliferation of work emerging from Midjourney would not be possible without the vast number of images and descriptions available online. It is essentially a technology based on precedent and feedback loops, albeit one with limited meaning or understanding.<fnref n="20" /> Herein lies the difference between imitation and inspiration, and the delicate balancing act of 'past rhetoric and evolution'.

## HOW

How materials and tools are used for design and construction is also specific to a time, and arguably elicit particular forms of architecture as a result. The main purpose of these tools is to communicate a design to be constructed or already completed, which can range from unrealised projects to a built structure. Traditionally, the architectural drawing is evidence of authorship and participation in the creation of the built product through its notational

<footnote n="13">13 Jacques Derrida, *Archive Fever*, trans. by E. Prenowitz (USA: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Mario Carpo, *Beyond Digital: Design and Automation at the End of Modernity* (USA: MIT Press, 2023), 117. Carpo discusses the search-based (rather than rule-based) use of precedent, if it has been recorded and can be retrieved, an iteration could happen again based on the occurrence of the same or similar conditions. Although he also acknowledges that the 'same conditions' require further clarification and rarely occur identically.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Such ideas could include, but are not limited to, structural, technical, contextual and formal.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Manfredo Tafuri, 'The Tasks of Criticism', in *Theories and History of Architecture*, trans. G. Verrecchia (Norwich: Granada Publishing), 227-237, and Michel Foucault, 'The Historical a Priori and the Archive', in *The Archaeology of Knowledge*, trans. by M. A. Sheridan Smith (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 146-7.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Henrich Wolfflin, 'The Problem of Commencement', in *Principles of Art History*, trans. by M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 234.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 M. Wigley, 'Unleashing the Archive', *Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism*, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 2005), 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara. Reed, and Frank Upward, eds., *Archives: Recordkeeping in Society* (Wagga Wagga, N.S.W.: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, 2005) and Douglas Engelbart and Jeff Ruilifson, 'Bootstrapping Our Collective Intelligence', *ACM Computing Surveys*, Volume 31, Issue 4es (December 1999).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Melanie Mitchell, *Artificial Intelligence: a Guide for Thinking Humans* (UK: Penguin Random House, 2019). Mitchell recurrently questions the level of understanding in various AI models of learning, including image identification, gameplay and language recognition.</footnote>
function.<fnref n="21" /> As described in detail by Mario Carpo, the subsequent periods of historic technological change have developed new tools for drawing, designing and construction.<fnref n="22" /> But it is not only the historic shifts from machine to digital making that affect the objects of the architectural archive. There are smaller developments dispersed between, that can require their own preservation considerations, such as the use of letratone and diazo prints. The hundreds of dyeline prints that exist for early projects, such as Lloyds and Inmos, are key to understanding the economy of scale, methods of production and coordination of that time.

Equally, there is other media within the collection that has been utilised for specific purposes in the development of a project including graphic, numeric and textual analysis. This highlights the capacity of architecture beyond the image, one in which the requirements of a client / brief are approached using the most appropriate tool to define, refine, and communicate, as economically as possible, the approach.<fnref n="23" /> This too is reflected in the development of archival descriptive standards, ultimately to enable interoperability (searching and linking) across many separate catalogues. As proposed, it is the content or emphasis on certain fields that should result in the most appropriate form of representation for each unique project or archive.

## WHERE

The representation of the building located in the archive is, often, not identical to the physical manifestation on site. Those who have worked in practice through design development or on-site during construction, will know how many changes can occur and how many parties are involved in the process. Placing preservation emphasis on the built product, obscures the value of the archive material that records both the various iterations of design that were not realised, and the contributions of other 'authors' involved.

To further emphasise the difference, well preserved or maintained archive materials may age in terms of appearance, but their content will remain unchanged, whereas the building can and will change. This does not only happen through occupation and function, but also in the physical additions and reconfigurations users may make throughout a building's existence. Adaptive reuse is becoming an increasingly prominent solution to the damaging consequences of demolition and new-build, and therefore places renewed value on the archive and the variety of material it holds. At RSHP, we have begun to see the second lives of some early projects, and the archive has been an active resource in understanding how to engage, both visually and performatively, with the original fabric makeup.

Interventions and additions to existing buildings by other authors have also occurred, such as Billingsgate Market and British Library, and question how or if these separate archives could be reconciled. Almost ten years ago, there was a proposal within the practice to link the RSHP archive with that of another prominent practice, and possibly more beyond that. In the context of adaptive reuse, this wealth of knowledge sharing would be extremely beneficial, as well as providing the potential to support a more cohesive form of civic architecture as the city evolves. Competition has perhaps impeded such a level of openness and accessibility, but within practice, these remain the two most important tools to activate an archive.

## CONCLUSION

The fundamental design principles, for RSHP, enable particular responses to changing contexts, materialised by different authors, whilst retaining identity and, a less favourable term, style. They act as a feedback loop, a dialectic, to argue a way forward in continual pursuit of a more refined or representative solution. There is, I think, a correlating archival field for each of the architectural concerns valued by RSHP, highlighting the active relationship between the two.

<footnote n="21">21 Robin Evans, 'Translations from Drawing to Building', in *Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays* (Singapore: Architectural Association Publications, 1997), 152–193.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 Carpo, *Beyond Digital and The Alphabet and the Algorithm*.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Edward Robbins, eds., 'Interview with John Young: The Richard Rogers Partnership', *Why Architects Draw* (USA: MIT Press, 1997), 184. Both John Young and Mike Davies have emphasised the importance of the diagrams and graphs, compiled with Marco Goldschmied, to the success of a *Design Strategy for Lloyds, London* competition report, RSHP Archive (1978).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Detail photo of a timber purlin in a barn in New Jersey, 2023. Image courtesy of Erin Besler.</figcaption></figure>

Erin Besler (Princeton University)
and Sarah Hearne (University of Colorado, Denver)

# Beyond Provenance

To imagine any building as an archive is a profound act, with promise to simultaneously futurise the past and curate the future. Working beyond metaphors that describe the aggregate of surfaces and connections, what might it mean to archive a building piece-by-piece? This critical transformation requires the establishment of new cataloguing systems linking materials to information, recording the lives of buildings, and the materials that comprise them. Such a consideration of the distinct histories of building materials presents a significant transformation for their meaning and performance, as well as an epistemological challenge to historians and architects. In contemporary approaches to the recent material turn, where historians are activating geographies of material extraction in order to expand the global historical record of architectural contributions and effects, on the other hand, amid growing calls to arrest the damages of unfettered ecological exploitation, many practitioners are considering the speculative realm of reuse. At the convergence of these positions—though until now it has remained only tangential to architecture—provenance emerges as a site for critical speculation.

As described by historian Achille Mbembe, any archive is both a collection of documentation collated together, imbued with status by an institution, and the building that it resides in.<fnref n="1" /> In this definition architecture provides the spatial organisation and aura central to the transference of power happening therein. This pairing between buildings and documents is somewhat intrinsic, yet differently nuanced, to the concept of an architectural archive. Where the 'archive' is most commonly referred to as the paperwork, documents, and drawings sets that were produced in the architect's office during the design and oversight of a building's construction. Considering the architectural archive in this way foregrounds an authorial mode of validation emphasising the procedures carried out in producing a building. As these items enter collecting institutions they are processed according to cataloguing standards and finding aids are developed, facilitating access to the material in a way that reinforces the design process. Recent historiography seeks to intersect these author-based archives with external sources, constructing archives from municipal and federal records offices, consultant's records, private client records, and methods that turn toward oral histories.

At the same time the majority of building records are not found in archives at all, either due to lack of assigned value, storage capacity, or having suffered various forms of damage. As such there is an increasing interest in material research and a reappraisal of the building itself. Documenting

<footnote n="1">1 Achille Mbembe, “The power of the archive and its limits,” in *Refiguring the Archive*, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michèle Pickover, Graeme Reid, Razia Sale, Jane Taylor (London: Springer, 2002), 19–27.</footnote>
existing buildings, testing materials, observing marks of wear, manufacturing
stamps, and other forms of forensic or critical preservation produce an
alternative set of embodied information. These forms of evidence activate
construction histories and narratives of site workers, the stories of occupation
and use, and alterations to the building over time. This type of information
is more difficult to capture, and often historically devalued as it decentralises
the architect in favour of a broader definition of architecture.

Rarely however has the research that emerges out of the building coincided
with the development of a parallel information structure to match the
archive. One key exception is provided by the Historic American Building
Survey (HABS) that was initiated in 1933 as a Works Progress Administration
project. The program sought to document American 'building arts' with
a mixture of written, drawn, and photographed material. This mobilisation
was an employment project for out-of-work architects, illustrators, technical
drafters, and photographers, during a period of economic depression. But
it equally produced a form of information architecture with standard drawing
sets and conventions. The subjects of these measured sets were just as
often ordinary and everyday architecture, a wider net of valuing that shifted
from singular authors to boosterist appeals to the value of 'americanness'
and ideas of national heritage. Significantly as the model of sourcing, these
documentation sets shifted over the decades toward pedagogy. Many
students were involved in the study and documentation of buildings as part
of their studies of architectural history.<fnref n="2" /> Within these processes we find
entangled figures like Esther McCoy: journalist, historian and sometimes
practicing architect, who wrote many reports for buildings as part of her
preservation activism. HABS takes the built environment as a source to
be surveyed and catalogued, but as it collapses data and measurement
it detaches information from the building. The paradox of these records
is they have been used to support demolition over preservation when seen
as sufficient simulations of the building itself.

Reconsidering the relationship of buildings to their information footprint
today is especially relevant within the research currently undertaken around
the possibility of a circular economy. Within this context building materials
carry 'passports' that validate composition, use, dimensions, previous
location, and past assemblies. The passport manages the passage and value
of a building element according to its placement from one construction
to another. It is worth returning to the art historical concept of provenance
that traces the origins of an object to the original site of its making and
subsequent changing of hands. More recently provenance research has
been used within art historical scholarship around the networks and trade
of collectors illustrating the structures of the art market. This model then
offers a curious counterpoint to early activities that codify material into
passports as we establish terms for the circular economy. In the case of
building material passports we consider not the authenticity of an item but

rather its integrity as it moves from site to site. Expanding the passport
information set according to a model of provenance also acknowledges
the possibility of other types of information for the work of historians;
information that may be embedded in building material itself, but evading
notice and cataloguing.

As the idea of a circular economy for building elements grows in popularity,
one returns to questions of material value and the poles that potentially
open up between arresting a building in a state of importance as a whole,
and mobilising and maintaining each individual building part, embodying
and distributing a unique set of information. At root in the formation of
these poles, preservation at one end and recirculation at the other, are
broader questions relating to the status and ethics of concepts like never-
ending progress. The circular economy handily bypasses critical reappraisal
of the devastation of development, growth, and construction, by mining
existing 'resources' above ground already in the built environment as a less
controversial site of extraction. Yet the possibility of this closed circle of
materiality remains futile simply because institutions with the capacity to
take on risk associated with rapidly moving building elements from one
site to another are lacking. Testing bodies in the United States, like ASTM,
along with the purported reproducibility of mass-produced elements, ensure
that one standard-tested beam performs the same as the next. Circularity
relies on the development of information structures that mitigate capacities
for risk, deploy methods of recording, and expand values associated with
documenting in order to archive an entire building. Where might one begin
in this task? What do material marks and signs of use tell us? Who or
what made them and why? The epistemological model for these questions
requires a shift in scale of attention toward different categories of things
found on building elements.

CAPTURING EMBODIED INFORMATION

It is fairly easy to spot holes in a building. Looking at an example from a 19th
century barn in Hopewell, New Jersey, the first thought might be that the
material has degraded due to a leak or an infestation, the most inconspicuous
authors. But holes can also tell a different story. The holes in this piece of wood
are an origin story, and a source of information. They are two-hundred-year-old
hollowings that were used to fasten timber members as they were transported
on local canals and waterways. It connects to a forest in a mountainous
area in Lënapehòkink, and a route down Lenapewihittuk. Beginning in 1755
thousands of logs were strapped together into rafts, the pine and hemlock logs
were disassembled and sold as lumber at markets. The Delaware River would
facilitate timber trade for Philadelphia's growing furniture and shipbuilding
industries and subsequently supply the building industry in Trenton, New Jersey
and the greater Delaware River Valley. This particular raft would end up at one
of the many lumber mills in Hopewell, New Jersey that processed the felled
timber giving rise to an early building industry and trade location. These
holes are marks that both ground the material object and also mobilise it.

<footnote n="2">2 Vernon Shogren, Historical Research in the Undergraduate Curriculum, Journal of Architectural Education (1947-1974), Vol. 18, No. 2 (Sep., 1963), 27-28.</footnote>
If we continue to look at building assembly technologies we find more
holes. In addition to the mortise and tenon system, which necessitated
moments of material absence for pinned connections to occur, nails are
also present. Nails were a valuable commodity. Originally hand hammered,
the Revolutionary War led to a shortage of nails in the United States,
when England as the main producer and supplier cut the chain. As a result,
older buildings were often burned down to salvage nails leaving only the
stone foundation as a retroactive site of excavation. In the late 18th century
nail production became less costly. The invention of cut nails facilitated
the growth of balloon framing over heavy timber construction. That both
are present in the same building suggests an object of transition marking
the decline of one system of knowledge and the beginning of another.
Throughout the various locations this barn appears over the years: including
Sanborn fire insurance maps, an incidental aerial photograph taken by
the aviator Charles Lindberg in 1932, or even the possible encounter of
this building with a project like HABS, the holes and the locations they
trace back to are markedly absent from the material record. In a scenario
of reuse the holes become a key feature, a point of distinction between
one beam and the next, and a focus for a material passport. As such
they illustrate the possibility to transform the epistemological basis of
architectural materiality.

As we preserve buildings in place we build stories around uniqueness, context, and origination. The question of provenance enters the record at the moment an object becomes mobile. As the field of architecture moves toward a model of circularity, which relies on the mobility of material objects, might we begin to think about a non-authored context? There is a paradox inherent in this question: the more a building performs as an object of historical study, the less it performs as an object of reuse. What critical transformations are necessary to mobilise a building that has been archived?

Actively archiving buildings and their material histories requires new platforms for compiling, recording, and visualising embodied information and lived performance. A collection of web-based interactive applications called *Housemate*, designed and developed by Erin Besler with Daniel Maslan and a team of designers and engineers, is one example of a cataloguing system that builds records around building components and links them to histories of extraction, manufacture, assembly, and application. This system relies on material passports, 'digital twins' where seemingly disparate industries, fields, and timelines are aggregated to produce an inventory of that which is already in use, and engages applied issues of logistics, infrastructure, extraction, and usability, and also a conceptual reconsideration of buildings as depots, lending libraries, sites of distribution and circulation. In doing so it expands the way the built environment is conceived, not only as the physical structures that surround us, but also as the hidden histories of origination connected to them. Building materials are linked to the stories and sites of acquisition, from quarries to storage depots, expanding the network of associated geographies, information, and contributors.

Considering information systems and scaffolding around the nascent circular economy that promise to in-time attest to the integrity of reused building materials, links to the early formation of provenance, rooted in the concept of place that certifies the 'life' of a work of art. Provenance protects value by connecting materials from one place to the next. More recently the field of provenance research has opened up to recognise the ways items have been stolen or acquired through other illicit means. This is a form of activism that often leads to the restitution of works to their rightful places of belonging. Provenance research covers knowledge from traditional connoisseurship, to archival, library, and material conservation. Often this research intersects with large historical events such as wars and material shortages. The art object then, as a commonly saleable and therefore portable item, requires an architecture of information that produces the accountancy around its making, sale, acquisition, and deaccessioning. While like any sort of archive these are imperfect and often obscure.
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Left: MVRDV Cloud</figcaption></figure>

MVRDV NEXT, 2021.

<caption>Right: Mnemosyne</caption>

Panel 39, Aby Warburg, 1925–1929,

<caption>Mnemosyne – Das</caption>

Original at HKW, 2020,

screenshot by the author.

at the virtual exhibition

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas

Leo Stuckardt (MVRDV)

# Data, Memory, Manual: Operationalising the Architectural Archive as a Tool for Design

## WHAT TO DO WITH 250K+ IMAGES?

The rapid development of sophisticated, computational design tools accelerates the production of born digital, architectural design artefacts. Generative modelling techniques, accompanying libraries of material specifications, schedules, tectonic assemblies and 3d-assets as well as efficient rendering pipelines exponentially increase the volume of data. As a direct consequence however, the life span of the design data itself – sketches, reference images, (site) photographs, scans and renderings – grows ever shorter. The consequences of this digital turn<fnref n="1" /> and the challenges it imposes towards the preservation, interpretation and eventual creative reuse of architectural archives become most apparent when directing one's observation at the architectural archive's most present medium – the operative image. Unlike the glossy images that publicly communicate an architectural project in its finite state, 'these are images that do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation'<fnref n="2" />. The immediate relevance of such images can be short lived. As the operation (the architectural design process) develops, they are quickly forgotten, overwritten by slightly modified versions of themselves. Viewed once and discarded as junk data, the sheer amount of archived digital objects is confronted with that very archive's unseaworthiness. How can we explore and relate material in the age of overwhelming digital production? How can we retrieve pivotal objects, buried deep in this sea of information?

Developed on the occasion of the exhibition *MVRDVHNI – The Living Archive of a Studio* at the Nieuwe Instituut between 2021 and 2022, the software *MVRDV Cloud* comprises an interactive tableau that analyses and positions all visual, virtual objects (image files) of MVRDV's first 400 projects on an infinite, multidimensional canvas: a total of more than 250.000 images, sketches, diagrams, screenshots, photographs and tabulations is made accessible to exhibition visitors, designers and users. Images can be dynamically arranged along two axes according to various metadata and filtered by type or spatial concept. Conceived as a self-learning, interactive map of the visual archive, an Artificial Neural Network learns to distinguish the design language of MVRDV as visitors interact with the tool and tag images.

<footnote n="1">1. Mario Carpo, *The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence*, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017)</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Harun Farocki, *Phantom Images* in Public, No. 29 (January 2014), 17, https://public.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/public/article/view/30354.</footnote>
These first 400 projects of MVRDV, created between 1991 to 2017³, mark not only the formative phase of the now globally operating Dutch architectural practice but also a transition towards digital production of the architectural profession at large. Stored simultaneously on the servers of MVRDV and the Nieuwe Instituut, *MVRDV Cloud* seizes the unique opportunity to engage with design information at the intersection of in-house reuse and institutionalised, open data. By operating on the complete, unfiltered archive it internalises a landscape of design narratives between big-data analytics and synthetic curation. Deliberately hosted in an office space within the NI, rather than a gallery, the exhibition sought out to explore the non-linear, at times coincidental or associative ways in which 'ideas and projects move fluidly back and forth between present, past, and future'.<fnref n="4" /> Hence the visual material of the digital archive has to be explored in its entirety, beyond the scope of published material: To dissect the creative processes and identify sequences of key archival objects, the operative image, which constitutes more than 90% of all images within the archive, needs to be prioritised over the representational one.

While not a conscious influence during the development of MVRDV'S *Cloud* project, the imperative of focussing on operative images establishes a connection beyond visual similarity to Aby Warburg's *Mnemosyne Atlas*. Borrowing the name of the Greek goddess of memory, the German Art historian envisioned the never finished project of the atlas as both the conclusion of the work of his life and a manual outlining a novel methodology for doing art history. Rather than singular cultural artefacts, images for Warburg take on the role of 'image vehicles' ('Bilderfahrzeuge') in the 'image migration' ('Bilderwanderung') of symbolic forms. Ideas, belief systems and world views, migrate through a fluid, non-linear transformation of visual stylistics, image programmes, fashions, fabrics: pictorial knowledge at large. The images assembled in the *Mnemosyne Atlas* turn operative: rather than artefacts only embedded in their specific historic, material and practical context, they take part in the understanding of life – or for that matter, architecture – in movement. In a letter to Karl Vossler, Warburg writes:

'Thanks to the zealous assistance Dr. Bing has accorded me, I have been able to assemble the material for an atlas of images which, by virtue of arranging them in a series, will spread out (i.e., display in space) the function of the ancient expressive values, originally imprinted through the presentation of life in movement, whether internal or external. At the same time, this will be the foundation of a new theory of the memorative function of images for human culture'.<fnref n="5" />

The term function, here, can be understood both as the *workings*,<fnref n="6" /> but also as the new-found *operationality*<fnref n="7" /> of images in their non-linear arrangement as multi-dimensional, permutational constellations.

## THE TABLEAU AS MNEMONIC FORM

While typical manuals tend to follow a rigid, sequential structure, both Warburg's *Mnemosyne Atlas* and MVRDV's *Cloud* remain in constant reconfiguration. The *Bilderatlas*' selection of images, their arrangements as series and even the number of panels remained in constant flux until Warburg's death in 1929. In its final—nonetheless unfinished—stage, it consists of 971 pictorial artefacts arranged on 63 plates covered in black velvet. At least two other arrangements have been photographed between 1924 and 1928. 'If Warburg, through a supplementary photographic *mise en abyme*, had developed the habit of photographing each arrangement of his material before completely changing it in favour of a new transformation, it is because the coherence of his gesture resided in the permutability itself. In other words, it resided in the incessant combinatory displacement of the images from plate to plate, and not in some kind of "final point" (which would be the visual equivalent of a form of absolute knowledge)'.<fnref n="8" />

In MVRDV's *Cloud*, the *mise-en-abyme* is no longer photographic: a parameter driven, digital tool allows users to correlate images through the sorting by various, quantified parameters. The integration of computer vision through deep learning<fnref n="9" /> allowed MVRDV's designers to teach the machine an initial set of classifications according to in-house design vocabulary. Envisioned as a self-learning map, images can be tagged, and new labels can be added by visitors of MVRDV's exhibition over the nine months course of the exhibition. In consequence, each interaction with the tool transforms it.

This capacity to learn is essential to the mission of the cloud as manual: It extends the linear logic of a single, objective timeline through a multitude of transversal vectors. These vectors, individual timelines of visitors, researchers, and designers, form an open network of potential readings. Personal memory and the memory of the practice converge towards a new, intuitive objectivity: a non-linear design manual that seamlessly transitions between the holistic gaze of the archive and zoom-ins that reveal clusters of images themselves. The cloud of data points transforms into constellations of pixel clouds. Similarly, 'it thus appears that the *Mnemosyne Atlas* is less the illustration of a pre-existing interpretation of the transmission of images than a visual matrix meant to increase the possible levels of interpretation'.<fnref n="10" /> But what exactly could be the productive potential of these possible levels of interpretation?

<footnote n="3">3 The majority of these images were created in the mid-90s, but a few of these first 400 projects took years to complete. Images of such projects extend the time span of archival material into the 2010's.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 MVRDVHNI: The Living Archive of a Studio-Announcements-e-Flux. Accessed September 1, 2023. https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/427266/mvrdvhni-the-living-archive-of-a-studio/.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Warburg in a letter to Karl Vossler, 12 October 1929, quoted by Schoell-Glass 2001, 187.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 "Function, as the way in which something works or operates", Cambridge Dictionary. Accessed August 30, 2023. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/function.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 "Function, as the natural purpose (of something) or the duty (of a person)", Cambridge Dictionary.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Georges Didi-Huberman and Harvey Mendelsohn. Essay in *Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art*, (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 301</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Image classification through the open-source machine-learning framework TensorFlow</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Didi Huberman, in *Surviving Image*, 304.</footnote>
Images on this map of interconnectedness stem from various disciplines and topics that are essential to the fluid processes of (MVRDV's) architectural design. While representational images within the firm's archive nearly exclusively display architecture, operative images, widely located in 'temp', *sketch, analysis or reference folders*, comprise a much more diverse set of images. As these images in themselves do not need to represent an architectural proposition, they can engage freely with a wider range of aspects around environment, technology, and human society: The image of a circus acrobat, headfirst in free fall, partially covers the photograph of a concrete texture and the rendering of a schematic 3d section with inverted black/ white contrasts between adjacent spaces. To its right, a desaturated aerial site photograph.<fnref n="11" /> The photograph of Johannes Kepler's model of the solar system next to a mythological depiction of Mars and above a newspaper clipping of the Graf zeppelin.<fnref n="12" /> Timelines are collapsed in both examples as they crosshatch mythical and scientific-rational worldviews. It is this very interconnectedness, the space between the archive's objects, that is revealed through the two-dimensional juxtaposition of operative images across projects, time and geographical contexts. As the user combines sorting parameters for each axis of the tableau with image filters, its nearly infinite possible states are folded into a single design instance. Thus, the sorting of things can be productive, but its rules need to be reassessed for every design operation.

(Image) metadata sorts images along the two axes of the tableau.

* Date-of-Creation

* Project Number

* File size

* Dominant Median Hue

* Project Location (Latitude)

* Project Location (Longitude)

Two sets of labels, classified through custom-trained neural networks filter the extents of the Cloud.

Medium

* Sketch

* Document

* Diagram

* Drawing

* Rendering

* Photograph

Spatial technique (MVRDV-specific)

* Pixel

* Stack

* Mountain

* Extrusion

* Object

* Barcode

* Tribune

* Tetris

* Fold

* Village

* Table

* Other

* *Expandable by users

As Winy Maas debates the benefits and drawbacks of various sorting techniques within MVRDV's project archive KM3, from chronological to programmatic, the conclusion sounds misleadingly simple: *Spatial Technique*. While the classification of designs into tectonic operations, 'spatial methods that stress the productive aspects of architecture',<fnref n="13" /> seem undebatable in the formal articulation of architectural projects as Barcodes,<fnref n="14" /> Stacks<fnref n="15" /> or Flips<fnref n="16" />, the operative images that inform them, will not carry all the characteristics of the spatial method in themselves. Rather they support specific operative aspects that, depending on their combination, can lead to different spatial techniques.

How can we assemble these nonlinear building blocks into a sequential architectural design operation? And what kind of readings or instructions will such a manual offer to the designer?

If Warburg's *Mnemosyne* traces the migration of icons through time and space, the *Copernican Turn* of world models from mythological to scientific, MVRDV's *Cloud* could become an instrument to better understand and influence the processes of architecture after the digital turn.

FROM MEMORY TO MANUAL

The urgency to open up architectural archives and develop means to interpret their internalised design blueprints becomes most apparent in light of the recent rise of creative AI and image generators such as Midjourney or Stable Diffusion<fnref n="17" />. Unlike conventional computational design tools and algorithmic design strategies, which are informed by knowledge, these intelligent machines learn from the raw data itself. As Trevor Paglen notes: 'Instead of simply representing things in the world, the machines and their images were starting to "do" things in the world'.<fnref n="18" />

In the, admittedly nascent, instances of application of creative AI for architectural production one cannot help to sense a blatant naivety. If these machines are trained on data that is publicly accessible on the internet and thus for the most part is representational in nature, it raises the question: Does a creative AI merely reproduce images that resemble architectural design or is it capable of *doing* architecture?

In order to access these 'productive aspects of architecture' and engage with process rather than end-result, it is imperative that operational design tools are based on operative, not representational data. The archives, the collective

<footnote n="11">11 MVRDV Cloud, sorted by 'Date Created' and 'Dominant Colour'.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Panel C of the final version of Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Aby Warburg, 1929.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Winy Maas and MVRDV. *Experiments Piece by Piece* in KM3: *Excursions on Capacities*, (Barcelona: Actar, 2005), 554–61.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Winy Maas and MVRDV in KM3: *Excursions on Capacities*, 860.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Winy Maas and MVRDV in KM3: *Excursions on Capacities*, 1116.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Winy Maas and MVRDV in KM3: *Excursions on Capacities*, 716.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Two popular diffusion-based image generators, each trained on vast amounts of image-caption pairs.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Trevor Paglen, *Operational Images* in e-flux Journal #59, (November 1, 2014).
http://e-flux.com/journal/59/61130/operational-images.</footnote>
memories of architectural practices, are the place where these operative images can be found. However, while representational data is carefully vetted by PR departments before it is published, the vast volume of these archives makes it impossible to do the same for their collections. Potential issues around copyrights, privacy, or competitive advantages might raise corporate concerns to make archives accessible to the public. Recognising the need for collaboration in both innovation and data stewardship, MVRDV donated all data of their first 400 projects to the Nieuwe Instituut in 2015.<fnref n="19" /> More than prototyping a technological solution, *MVRDV Cloud* seeks to further the potentials of this interaction between corporate practice and public institution. The author of the images returns to the, now public, archive and begins to decipher their own memory. Developed by MVRDV NEXT, the firm's in-house research and development unit, the source files of the *Cloud* application are also stored on the firm's servers, thus adding to the archive, and forming an ever changing, recursive series of tableaus.

Considering the shaping of these tools a continuous, fluid process and a central task for their end users (architects, designers), the critical combination of data-science<fnref n="20" /> and machine-learning techniques<fnref n="21" /> can offer an alternative path towards accessible, generative AI design tools. Clearly, a shift from published towards archival images alone could risk falling into the same trap of merely producing representations of operative images. However, while general image diffusion models and large language models compress millions of images or text into a singular model for new creation of images or text, *MVRDV Cloud* prioritises juxtaposition over superimposition. As Aby Warburg was most certainly aware of the impossibility of a final configuration of his *Bilderatlas*, the permutability of the virtual allows for open-ended repositioning and clustering of rapidly growing, archival images. It can expand rather than collapse the world contained in one image.

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="19">19 MVRDVHNI: The Living Archive of a Studio - Announcements - e-Flux.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Image statistics and metadata extraction, Python scripts by MVRDV.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 Image classification through TensorFlow, code by TensorFlow authors, implementation by MVRDV.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>Fitting Abstraction, 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2014. Photo by Ana Martina Bakić.</figcaption></figure>

Ana Martina Bakić (Zagreb University)

# Curating Croatian Architectural Archives: Curating Croatian Architectural Futures

Since 1980, every two years, the architectural community gathers at the Venice Biennale to absorb and discuss the future of architecture, its immediate prospects, and sometimes its past as well. Presentation techniques vary, but in the last three decades, different contributions can be roughly categorised as those that tend to design and present research, and often rely on existing architectural archives, and those that embody research in what Angela Vettese has termed ‘critical pavilions’, experimental pavilions that disrupt the spatial and political framework of the Biennale to achieve specific ends.<fnref n="1" />

In the aftermath of Yugoslavia's dissolution, Croatia has begun to participate in the Venice Architecture Biennale with its own national presentations in 1991. I will focus on two specific Croatian presentations in Venice that together dramatise the two ends of the exhibition-archive spectrum above. The highly anticipated floating Croatian pavilion in 2010, which happened to collapse on its way to Venice, follows the logic of the critical, or rebel pavilion, while the 2014 Croatian presentation at the Arsenale titled *Fitting Abstraction* presented archival research on Croatian modernism. In 2010, the floating barge that was to travel from Rijeka to Venice for the opening was a multi-coded and literally layered and transformative architectural object, rich in material and phenomenal effects, and inviting relationality with its changing context. It was designed and produced by a group of Croatian architects. I argue that we ought to read it (its making, floating and collapse) as a form of an architectural performance and experiment made possible in part by its historical moment, described by some theoreticians as a period particularly fit for experimenting.<fnref n="2" /> It was also a project that drew on references to collective work and art practices of these architects' own (previous) Yugoslavian experiences, on forms of cultural memory.

On the other hand, the 2014 Croatian pavilion, representing Croatia freshly after its entry into the EU, relied on a very different form of narrating Croatia's modernist heritage. Curated by a theoretician of architecture and architect Karin Šerman, and in response to Rem Koolhaas's request to national pavilions in 2014 to contend with a hundred-year period in their local/national narratives of modernisation, *Fitting Abstraction* proposed that

<footnote n="1">1. Angela Vettese, *The National Pavilions of the Venice Biennale: Spaces for Cultural Diplomacy* (Venice: Monos, 2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Ivan Rupnik, a *Peripheral Moment: Experiments in Architectural Agency, Croatia 1999–2010* (Barcelona: Actar, 2010).</footnote>
modernity has always been at the centre of Croatian identity. Its exhibition design invited audiences to consume this narrative as readers of history and its forms of evidence (photographs, drawings, models). Since the biennale explicitly bracketed the period between 1914 and 2014, during which Croatia had participated in two different Yugoslavian formations (Kingdom of Yugoslavia 1918–1941, and Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 1945–1991), and took part in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the insistence on Croatian modernity ensured an important form of narrative separation from Yugoslavian architectural heritage. My presentation will consider the key differences in these two ways of instrumentalising ‘the archive’ to project architectural and political futures out of it.

## 2010, FLOATING PAVILION, AN EMBODIED ARCHIVE

For Croatia's participation in the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice in 2010 and in response to Kazuo Sejima's theme *People Meet in Architecture*, the Croatian Commissioner of the Ministry of Culture, Leo Modrčin assembled a team of fifteen up-and-coming architects.<fnref n="3" /> According to the official presentation of the pavilion, the team began by considering ways in which they could prompt different proposals for a floating pavilion, that would then be exhibited in the space of the Arsenale as documents and models 'awaiting better times for its execution'.<fnref n="4" /> Very quickly, however, the architects opted for a single collective design-build project, that would travel to Venice, marking both the fact of Croatia's loss of access to the national pavilion of Yugoslavia in 1991, as well as the historical Italian-Croatian maritime links. The architecture of the Croatian floating pavilion was deliberately multi-coded from the beginning. It was a hybrid boat-architecture, relatively compact and of a non-standard materiality, with a ship stair at the entry, and an excitingly architectural carving of interior space, with a view of the surrounding scenery, but without a standard façade or windows, it was an exterritorial piece of Croatia, floating towards Venice. According to Ivan Rupnik's periodisation of the 'peripheral moment', as that extended period of Croatia's post-socialist, post-Yugoslav transition towards the EU, but before it had become subject to its regulations and financial structures, the floating pavilion was also a perfect expression of the kinds of experimentation that was possible in this underfunded and unregulated moment. Its space and its constantly variable interior and exterior effects were defined through extremely sparse, even minimal means, through a deployment of a dense matrix of steel construction armature. As a floating public space and a viewing platform, the floating pavilion presented a stage symbolically displaced to the sea, invoking Noah's arch that disseminated (an archive) of procedures and heritages from its origin point.<fnref n="5" />

Imagined from the outset as a participatory project, with a series of interventions (dockings) in public space, the floating pavilion was in dialogue with the local experimental heritage in architecture as well as in the realm of happenings and the 'new art practices' that sought to activate public space and culture with critical dialogue, humour, and art. Though these were the socialist era's shoe-string productions of art, they were institutionally supported to some extent, and more importantly, they are part of the cultural memory of the Yugoslavian period, and thus belong to the generation of architects who designed and built the floating pavilion.<fnref n="6" />

Though with successful individual practices, its architects insisted on the collective dimension of the project, including them (both in design and collective financing of the project) and many boat-builders. This insistence on the collective, which includes the audience for the completion of the project, could be seen as simply anachronistic, but it is much more interesting to think of it as a form of re-enactment, or as a 'retro-utopian' impulse in the generation of architects who were straddling two systems and different formations of the country.<fnref n="7" /> On the other hand, the floating pavilion's mobility was meant to support a kind of contemplative transference from an (architectural) object to an event in space and time, an unstable, multidimensional space rocked by the waves, and with constantly transforming views of the context. According to Miško Šuvaković's definition, these effects technically make it into a happening. Even its unexpected and unplanned deformation and collapse on its way to Venice (and thus failure to arrive) easily support Alan Kaprow's insistence on the uncertain outcome and open end of happenings.

Many local and international critics of architecture have written about the possible utopian dimensions of the floating pavilion project.<fnref n="8" /> Kindred with the 1960s and 1970s art practices that were self-critically examining their own position within the institutions of art in the socialist state and stepping out directly into the urban sphere, it is possible to read the floating pavilion as an interdisciplinary intervention, which includes and embodies such art practices, communicating them as values for the future. With its journey and end, it directly demonstrated the lack of practices which were simply 'understood' in a previous period (stable and complex cultural landscape oriented towards a diverse collectivity within a stable country and its institutional structures), as well as different temporalities that are intertwined

<footnote n="3">3 The members of the team were Croatian architects: Saša Begović, Marko Dabrović, Igor Franić, Tanja Grozdanić, Petar Mišković, Silvije Novak, Veljko Olujić, Helena Paver-Njirić, Lea Pelivan, Toma Plejić, Goran Rako, Saša Randić, Idis Turato, Pero Vuković and Tonči Žarnić.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Leo Modrčin, "Proven wrong," *Brod / The Ship / La Nave*, 2010 (Leo Modrčin's private archive): 11–15.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Its formal abstraction fits within Karin Šerman's categories in *Fitting Abstraction*, especially among other experimental projects that have been historically involved in pushing the boundaries, or those that have benefited from generative algorithms.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Among the art practices of note it might be important to invoke as a reference a happening titled *HIT Parades* that took place in the gallery of the Student Cultural Centre in Zagreb in 1967, when Mladen Galić, Antom Kuduzom, Ljerko Šibenik and Miroslav Šutej opened an exhibition that took on various attributes of a spontaneous happening, described by art historian Ivo Šimat Banov as an event in which 'the production of an ambiance and then its demolition placed greater emphasis on destruction and temporariness' than any particular content. Ivo Šimat Banov, "Mladen Galić ili biti samim sobom," online publication of Matica hrvatske, 2019, https://www.matica.hr/hr/575/mladen-galic-ili-biti-samim-sobom-29004/.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Boris Buden uses this term referring to Inke Arns to describe such backward-forward relationship in culture in general, whereas she used it to write about the Yugoslavian/Slovenian art scene. Boris Buden, *Zona Prelaska, o kraju postkomunizma* (Belgrade: Mala Fabrika Knjiga, 2009).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Vedran Mimica, "Utopijska putovanja," *Čovjek i Prostor* 672/673 (2010): 22–23; K. Michael Hays and Marrikka Trotter, "Fielding Fictions: a Conversation," *Log 22: The Absurd* (Spring/Summer 2011): 136–146; Ethel Baraona Pohl, "Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale," *Arch Daily*, last modified August 25, 2010, https://www.archdaily.com/74469/croatian-pavilion-at-the-venice-biennale.</footnote>
within it. The floating pavilion embodied and released for its makers and visitors some of the temporalities coined by the art curator Zdenka Badovinac for her 1993 exhibition, titled *The Present and the Presence: ideological time* in which logics and praxis of self-management from the period of Yugoslavia are deployed in the sphere of art and architecture; *future time* in which modernist utopias are meant to be realised; *time of the missing museum* (pavilion), *lived time* of bodily experiences, *transition time* from socialism to capitalism, *dominant time* of global neoliberalism and the *imaginary time* of future social equality.<fnref n="9" /> Though this made it a necessarily complex project, whose experience, at any point in the process, would likely provide only a partial understanding of these temporalities and their value systems, we can think of it precisely as a physical and procedural repository of important collective references without the authority of a state archive, or even an acknowledged collective, or national narrative of architecture. And yet this simultaneous glance at the rear-view mirror and forward was valuable precisely because it dwelled on both directions without sublimating their tensions.

## 2014, FITTING ABSTRACTION, AN ARCHITECTURAL NARRATIVE OF BELONGING TO EUROPE

As a response to Rem Koolhaas's theme for the National Pavilions at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014: *Absorbing Modernity, 1914–2014*, many national pavilions launched into historical investigations of their own architectural production, modernism as a style, as well as with forces of modernisation that had locally influenced ideas of progress and modern lifestyle. The Croatian curator Karin Šerman and her curatorial team undertook an extended theoretical and historical study about Croatian architecture and its absorption of modernism.<fnref n="10" /> Insofar as modernism corresponded with abstraction, they suggested it had always been a major component of the local/national architectural identity. Exhibition research resulted in the installation of the archive, that included works chosen at the intersections of historical and contemporary production, presented through photographs, diagrams and models. The installation followed the conceptual organisation into eight architectural themes, each of them relying on historical and vernacular examples of local architectural traditions.<fnref n="11" /> The themes—which were also termed ‘fundamental attributes of Croatian architecture’—were: Poetic Reduction: Latent Rhetoric, Sublimating the Regional: Sublimating the International, Engaging the Landscape: Interacting with Nature, Modernising Infills: Reinforcing the City, Generating the Social: Implanting Public Space, Artistic Alignments: Emancipating Modernity, Open Systems: Frozen Algorithms, Enacting Experiment: Expanding the Scope. They were developed following intensely (autonomous) formal architectural operations. In the exhibition, each of the ‘fundamentals’ began

with the earliest works, some from before 1914, starting with photographs of vernacular examples on the wall and continuing with documentation and dedicated graphics across horizontal surfaces, insisting thus on the continuity of each of the architectural genealogies proposed. The curators proposed that: ‘All eight of these decisive thematic lines rely precisely on modernist conceptual and instrumental apparatus, proving modernism as an effective bearer of national architectural identity’.<fnref n="12" />

Archival photographs, diagrams, documents, beautiful (abstract) models explaining architectural operations, and a historical timeline covering the last hundred years were added to historian's scientific apparatus. The timeline graphic included multiple registers of simultaneous historical developments that were said to have followed or existed as a complex background for the architectural developments. Socioeconomic changes, different political formations and ideological changes, key events in art and culture, as well as important publications, were presented as points of historical orientation for the abstract formal techniques rather than as their possible causes or explanations. They legitimated the newly created archive and narrative, but the cultivation of abstraction in Croatian architecture was seen more generally as a pragmatic outcome of scarcity and consistent internal tendencies towards abstraction.

Theoretician of art Claire Bishop has coined ‘dialectical contemporaneity’, a pair of terms that most generously describes the ways that the *Fitting Abstraction* archive was produced and presented.<fnref n="13" /> Bishop claims that critical examination of the past and its encounter with the contemporary, produce an archive as a platform from which to read and visualise the multi-temporal contemporary. This encounter ensures a simultaneous perspective of multiple different temporalities, in which time and values appear as key categories of the examination, which in turn results in alternative views of the past, the contemporary and possible futures. The construction of the archive itself is extremely valuable, especially in its retroactive indexing of traditions that have stayed underexamined despite their historical emancipatory social potential. And yet in some important ways, and despite its obvious reliance on chronology, *Fitting Abstraction* abstracted historical time, disabling the explanatory power of cultural, economic or political alignments between the formal moves it catalogued and their context. This also meant that Croatia's participation in Yugoslavia was simply understood as one of the frameworks imposed upon Croatian architecture and ultimately sublimated in its abstraction.

The floating pavilion embodied references, protocols, temporalities and values of an older period, advocating at the very end of ‘the peripheral moment’—before Croatia’s entry into the EU—for a future in which collectivity, participation and self-determination might be possible. Its physical collapse

<footnote n="9">9 Zdenka Badovinac, *Glossary of the Present and Presence* (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 2000).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Curatorial team for Fitting Abstraction: Zrinka Barišić Marenić, Melita Čavlović, Igor Ekštajn, Nataša Jakšić, Mojca Smode Cvitanović i Marina Smokvina.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Karin Šerman and Igor Ekštajn, *Fitting abstraction: 1914–2014, exhibition catalogue* (Zagreb: MSU, 2016): 8–9.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 The catalogue and the description of the exhibition online list them, https://fittingabstraction.com/.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Claire Bishop, *Radical Museology: or, What's 'Contemporary' in Museums of Contemporary Art?* (London: Koenig Books, 2013), 55.</footnote>
colourfully marked the closing of that era. It may be a stretch to claim it as a physical and experiential archive, but it was certainly a vehicle for a series of different access points to collective and individual cultural memories and a momentary opening towards a future in which some of those might continue to matter. Conversely, *Fitting Abstraction* took place just a year after Croatia officially joined the EU. The marked minimalising of the Yugoslavian narrative (the political and historical conditions that had been the context of half of the timeline under consideration) in the project has to be read as a direct reflection of the most pronounced concern and optimism about its fitting in and belonging to the traditions of European modernism.

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>Zaha Hadid Architects, Moonsoon Sketch, 1989–90 © Zaha Hadid Foundation.</figcaption></figure>

Jane Pavitt and Catherine Howe (Zaha Hadid Foundation)

# Zaha Hadid Foundation: Interdisciplinarity and Intersectionality

Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality are central to the ethos of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the legacy organisation initiated by Hadid in 2013 before her untimely death in 2016. ZHF was launched in early 2022, with a mission to preserve and facilitate public access to her work across architecture, design and art, with a collection spanning around 15,000 works, including paintings, drawings, models, product design, furniture and fashion, as well as works on paper, digital archives and a library. An architect whose distinctive methods derived from painting and whose work as a designer was also extensive, Hadid's commitment to the interdisciplinary nature of the arts was written into the statutes of our organisation and is therefore a key aspect of our work. As the only architectural foundation dedicated to the work of a woman of colour, and given Hadid's status as an Iraqi-British immigrant, we also have a unique opportunity to consider what this meant for her as an architect.<fnref n="1" /> Whilst Hadid was an architect of exceptional success and the first woman to win most of the profession's major awards, she nevertheless experienced discrimination and disadvantage at all stages in her career. To use her own words, 'some of the biggest difficulties that I faced were brought about not by my work, but by my existence as a woman, or as an Arab, or indeed, as an 'Arab Woman'. Ignorance and injustices, large or small, blatant or subtle, deliberate or – and perhaps worse – casual, not even recognised by their perpetrators'.<fnref n="2" /> Research undertaken for exhibitions, including a major retrospective in 2025, is allowing us to reconsider these contexts. In some cases, reassessing early projects has shed new light on the design methods employed in her studio. In others, reconstructing the circumstances of architectural competitions allows us to understand the disadvantages she faced, not only due to her unconventional approach, but also her status as an Arab woman. In this paper, we want to explore two of these examples.

An exhibition earlier this year, *Zaha's Moonsoon: An Interior in Japan* (2023), curated by our Exhibitions Officer Johan Deurell, provided a deep dive into Hadid's first realised project outside of the UK, the bar and restaurant interior for Moonsoon (1989–90) in Sapporo. Interdisciplinarity was central to the exhibition, for it showed not only how interior design was important for Hadid's

<footnote n="1">1 For further reading, see Jane Pavitt, “Making the Zaha Hadid Foundation”, in Dana Arnold (ed.), *Rereading Women and Architecture: Female agency and the discourses of architectural history* (London: Routledge, 2023), forthcoming.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Sophie Lovell, ‘Hadid: An Interview with Zaha Hadid by Sophie Lovell’, *Uncube Magazine*, No. 37, 2015, 7. https://www.uncubemagazine.com/sixcms/detail.php?id=15927105&articleid=art-1441185293554-a9de40e6-7535-46c2-91f2-0a07eb065c4f#!/page7.</footnote>
practice from early on, but also how her painterly method was employed collaboratively by her small studio at the time. Our exhibition showed their different design and presentation strategies for the project through concept, realisation and reception. Painting was central to Hadid's approach and carried out by David Gomersall and Kar Hwa Ho alongside her, using acrylic on cartridge paper to visualise the bar and restaurant in contrasting monochrome and red, oscillating between architectural drawing and abstract painting. Hadid struggled to translate her painting method into 3D-finding more conventional model making techniques inadequate for achieving her ideas of abstraction, layering, and transparency. Eventually, this was solved by the use of semi-abstract models made from clear and coloured acrylic. From 1986 to 1995, many of these were made for her by sculptor Daniel Chadwick. His Moonsoon model provided simultaneous multi-level views of the interior design, which was inspired by the opposing themes of fire and ice, represented in abstract shapes. The layering and transparency achieved by such models pre-figured the office's adoption of CAD from the mid-1990s onwards. Some of Chadwick's models were designed to be packed away in clear acrylic briefcases, for portability and a certain degree of showmanship as they were presented to the client. A Moonsoon briefcase model containing the series of project paintings, along with drawings and photocopied collages, allowed us to quite literally unpack the collaborative and interdisciplinary design methods of Hadid's office.

The archive holdings for Moonsoon showed the breadth of approach in the preliminary stages of the project. Whilst the drawings, paintings and models clearly point to the influence of modernist art and design on Hadid's work, the archive also revealed a plethora of photocopied inspiration material which we exhibited in the form of a slideshow (created by the exhibition designer Marwan Kaabour). This included Alexander Calder's *Floating Clouds* (1953), abstract sculptures for an auditorium interior in Venezuela, as well as images of Italian pasta, orange peel and a French Picon liqueur advert. We were also able to trace the abstract curvilinear forms of the interior to Hadid's own Arabic writing. Her early sketches for the project featured Arabic letter forms spelling out 'Zaha' [زaha] and 'monsoon'[نون شوم].<fnref n="3" /> In numerous interviews she reflected upon the significance of Arabic calligraphy in her work, referencing the influence it had upon avant-garde painters.<fnref n="4" /> She connected it to mathematics and geometry too, which she found particularly evident in Kufic script.<fnref n="5" /> Indeed, Kenneth Frampton referred to Hadid as a 'Kufic suprematist',<fnref n="6" /> acknowledging the influence of Kazimir Malevich upon her work, which he described as a 'cursive script' of 'transrational elements' that continued in the same vein as twentieth-century modernist abstraction.<fnref n="7" /> While earlier white male avant-gardes might be accused of

cultural appropriation for their calligraphic borrowings, Hadid's use of it in projects such as Moonsoon speaks of a more complex cultural hybridity particular to her experiences and education. As a young woman, she grew up in Baghdad, during the redesigning and rebuilding of the city by modernist architects from Iraq and the west. After a degree in mathematics at the American University of Beirut, she studied Russian constructivism and suprematism by way of Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at the Architectural Association in London. When calligraphy appears in her early sketches for Moonsoon, a private commission for a bar and restaurant in Japan serving Italian cuisine, then, it might be assumed the project is testament to certain sort of postmodern hybridity. However, on closer inspection, we can see how this was part of her own reinvention of the language of modernism, in ways that melded both Arab and western references.

Our second case study, which shifts the emphasis further towards intersectionality, is her unrealised project for the Cardiff Bay Opera House (1994–6).<fnref n="8" /> Her competition design comprised a public courtyard and glass perimeter wall with performance spaces set into it 'like jewels in a necklace',<fnref n="9" /> allowing for the enjoyment of views into and out of the building across Cardiff Bay and a sense of openness.<fnref n="10" /> The Opera House was intended as a symbol of national identity and urban renewal in Cardiff's regenerated bay area, and was therefore a subject of scrutiny for vested political and civic interests. Hadid's winning project was bound to attract a lot of attention. This international competition was an early instance in the UK where race, class and gender significantly entered into the consideration of her work on a very public stage, and a project that Hadid singled out as one where she was met with 'resistance and prejudice' in her career.<fnref n="11" /> Despite being awarded the project, the competition organisers responded to reservations about Hadid's proposal by opening up the competition further on two occasions. The ethics of this was widely questioned in the architectural press and referred to by Hadid as 'farcical'.<fnref n="12" /> Forced to compete again, she won a second time and then a third. By this point, the competition had become a *cause célèbre*. In the end, collapsing under the weight of political pressure and negative opinion, the project lost its bid for funding from the Millenium Commission at the end of 1995.

Much insidious press attention was given to Hadid's identity as an Iraqi and a woman; for example, the Welsh national daily *The Western Mail* described her as 'Baghdad-born and London-based Ms Hadid, 43 and unmarried'.<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="3">3 Many thanks go to Marwan Kaabour for his translation.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 See Zaha Hadid and Hans Ulrich Obrist, *Zaha Hadid and Hans Ulrich Obrist – The Conversation Series*, 8 (Cologne: Konig, 2007), 119 and "Interview: Alvin Boyarsky Talks with Zaha Hadid", in *Zaha Hadid*, ed. Germano Celant, Joseph Giovannini et al. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2006), 45.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Hadid and Obrist, *Zaha Hadid and Hans Ulrich Obrist*, 117.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Kenneth Frampton, "A Kufic Suprematist: The World Culture of Zaha Hadid. Planetary Architecture II", *AA Files*, No. 6 (May 1984), 101, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29543406.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Frampton, "A Kufic Suprematist", 101.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 This builds upon coverage of the Cardiff Bay project in Jane Pavitt, "Making the Zaha Hadid Foundation", forthcoming.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Nicholas Crickhowell, *Opera House Lottery: Zaha Hadid and the Cardiff Bay Project* (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 103.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 See also the description in Crickhowell, *Opera House Lottery*, 102–103.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Paul Rowland, "Award-winning businesswoman Zaha Hadid hits out at 'prejudice' over doomed Cardiff Bay Opera House project", *Wales Online*, 23 April, 2013, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/zaha-hadid-hits-out-prejudice-2996109.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Hadid quoted in Patrick Hannay, "Cardiff plot thickens as Nicoletti muddies the waters", *The Architects' Journal*, 1 December, 1994, ProQuest. See also "Cardiff Trustees bulk at Zaha Hadid's winning design", *Progressive Architecture*, Vol. 76, issue 2 (February 1995), 32, Gale Academic OneFile.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Nick Horton, "Avant-garde Zaha 'the best choice'", *The Western Mail*, 16 September, 1994, featured as</footnote>
There are also many gendered opera puns: Hadid is characterised as 'The leading lady of Cardiff Opera House',<fnref n="14" /> with titles such as 'Diva Zaha steals the show in Cardiff Bay'.<fnref n="15" /> These fitted into the negative characterisation of Hadid as outspoken, difficult and out of touch, which became viciously personal at times. An article by Joanna Pitman from *The Times Magazine* reads 'Zaha Hadid is an angry woman – angry that her brilliant visions are unappreciated by a dull, conformist world', describing her as 'Britain's most hated architect' and 'the architect as diva'.<fnref n="16" /> It portrays Hadid as exotic and dehumanised, commenting that 'she does not look like an architect', with her voice 'a deep, dark boom that oozes and bubbles noisily from the top of the stairs', and describing how 'The creature waiting at the top stands in titanic splendour, her hair long and burnt orange, her huge eyes bright'.<fnref n="17" /> The othering of Hadid continues in relation to the Opera House project: 'At the mention of Cardiff, she grabs and drains her glass as if it contains not orange juice but the lifeblood of her Welsh opponents'.<fnref n="18" /> She allegedly shouted 'It was really VERY difficult. No. It was ABSOLUTELY SHOCKING. The degree of antagonism – and not just with Cardiff – has been very personal and certainly not necessary'.<fnref n="19" /> The article prompted a response by Hadid herself, which describes Pitman's intentions towards her as 'vindictive', and asking her to correct inaccuracies about her background and shouting during the interview.<fnref n="20" /> Despite this, the cruel and prejudiced characterisation of Hadid in the British media that became pronounced during the Cardiff project was repeated throughout her career as her celebrity grew in the UK.<fnref n="21" />

Relating to her characterisation as a diva, elitism was also associated with Hadid's Opera House and demands further unpacking. While this was evident in the press on a personal level in relation to her family background and education,<fnref n="22" /> as Nicholas Crickhowell, the former chairman of the Cardiff Bay Opera House Trust, has pointed out in his book on the competition, accusations of elitism were fuelled by unclear public messaging about the building's use as a performing arts centre.<fnref n="23" /> The idea of an opera house for 'Welsh toffs' and 'populist clamour' became evident in tabloid press coverage,<fnref n="24" /> exacerbated when it was pitted against designs for

image 4 in Paul Rowland, "Zaha Hadid's doomed plans for a Cardiff Bay Opera House", *Wales Online*, 23 April, 2013, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/incoming/gallery/zaha-hadids-doomed-plans-cardiff-2996506. We are incredibly grateful for the excellent work of our two Research Assistants, Jihane Dyer and Cyana Madsen into the press coverage of Cardiff Bay Opera House.

a new rugby stadium. While highly supportive of Hadid's work, Crickhowell mentions numerous issues 'in persuading Zaha Hadid of the need to produce attractive presentations of her design that ordinary people could understand',<fnref n="25" /> the evolution of which can be seen through its presentation strategies. Her first competition model is described as 'unsympathetic' and created in a rush while she was busy with international teaching,<fnref n="26" /> turning out to be 'a rather brutal interpretation of her concept'.<fnref n="27" /> Another more conventional model including trees and people was produced towards the end of 1995, just in time for the Millenium Commission's decision meeting.<fnref n="28" />

One must also bear in mind that the strength of Hadid's office was in painting at this time, its interdisciplinary presentation methods at odds with more representational competition models and drawings. Many of the Cardiff Bay paintings feature Hadid's typical use of multiple perspectives and exploded views, her building reduced to abstract forms rendered in grey, white and black, recalling the style and colour palette of the Russian avant-garde. A particularly damning article by Colin Amery, a member of Prince Charles' traditional and conservative architectural advisory board,<fnref n="29" /> described Hadid as 'an archetypal member of that small group of international architects who perform, largely for each other, as a kind of travelling circus. The values they represent have little to do with local context or practicality', continuing 'Her design for the Opera House in Cardiff might have been impressive as a student copy of a Constructivist painting, but as a building it has no reality'.<fnref n="30" /> It proved difficult for members of the public and even the architectural community to fully comprehend, with one Cardiff businessman calling it a 'deconstructed pigsty'.<fnref n="31" /> This suggests why later paintings, much like the final model, are more accessible; for example, one of the auditorium uses lighter and brighter colours and a clear figurative rendering including the audience, orchestra and performers in situ, viewed through a single perspective. Elitism, then, was also connected to the style, education and culture embodied by Hadid's work, and the sensationalism around this caused her versatile and open design for a multi-use public space that was sensitive to the context of Cardiff Bay to be frequently overshadowed.

Reflecting upon Hadid's Cardiff Bay Opera House alongside Moonsoon, one can consider the interdisciplinary and intersectionality of her work, and how it gave opportunity for both success and failure within two very different contexts. One was a design for a private client during a period of prosperity and creative freedom for architects working in Japan, a centre

<footnote n="14">14 Susannah Herbert, "The leading lady of Cardiff Opera House"; "Architecture prize goes to Iraqi woman", *The Daily Telegraph*, 16 September 1994, 10, International Newsstream, ProQuest.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Pamela Buxton, "Diva Zaha steals the show in Cardiff Bay", *Building Design*, 19 September, 1994, 1, ProQuest.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Joanna Pitman, "arch fury", *The Times Magazine*, 25 November 1995, 25, The Times Digital Archive.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Pitman, "arch fury", 25.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Pitman, "arch fury", 25.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Pitman, "arch fury", 27.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Zaha M. Hadid, "Letters, arch fury", *The Times Magazine*, 23 December, 1995, 4, The Times Digital Archive.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 This is also discussed in Pavitt, "Making the Zaha Hadid Foundation", forthcoming. See also Simon Hattenstone, 'Saturday interview: Zaha Hadid: I'm happy to be on the outside', *The Guardian*, 9 Oct, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/09/zaha-hadid and Lynn Barber, 'Interview: Zaha Hadid', *The Observer*, 9 March, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/mar/09/women.architecture.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 For example, there is mention of her family arriving at her diploma show at the AA in multiple Rolls Royces (which she refuted in the aforementioned letter); see Giles Coren, "Small notes of triumph", *The Times*, 26 September, 1994, 17, The Times Digital Archive, Pitman, "arch fury", 27 and Hadid, "Letters, arch fury", 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Crickhowell, *Opera House Lottery*, 83.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 Crickhowell, *Opera House Lottery*, 140 and 151.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 Crickhowell, *Opera House Lottery*, 147.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 Crickhowell, *Opera House Lottery*, 32</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 Crickhowell, *Opera House Lottery*, 31.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28 Crickhowell, *Opera House Lottery*, 147.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 See Pauline McLean, "Adviser to Charles flays 'Bay necklace'", illustrated in Paul Rowland, "Zaha Hadid's doomed plans for a Cardiff Bay Opera House", *Wales Online*, 23 April, 2013, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/incoming gallery/zaha-hadids-doomed-plans-cardiff-2996506.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30 Colin Amery, "The Tyranny of the Few", *Financial Times*, 26 September, 1994, 17, Financial Times Historical Archive.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 David Gow and Owen Bowcott, "Architect hits high note with Welsh opera", *The Guardian*, 11 February, 1995, 8, ProQuest.</footnote>
of increased internationalism, and the other a large-scale regional public venture in the UK that was ultimately perceived to be a cultural and financial risk. On the rejection of her Cardiff project, Hadid said 'Do they want nothing but mediocrity';<fnref n="32" /> it could be argued that the intersectionality and interdisciplinarity of Hadid's work is what made it so extraordinary.

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="32">32 Quoted in Maev Kennedy, "Fury as Welsh opera plan killed", *The Guardian*, 23 December, 1995, 1, ProQuest.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>

Danish National Art Library Architectural Archives Vault, 2018.

# Archives without Walls: A Reflection on Post-Custodial Architecture Archives

As the sounds of gunfire and distant explosions flared once again in Sudan's capital city of Khartoum in April 2023, the Canadian Centre for Architecture's (CCA) decision, just a few years earlier, to collect the work of influential Sudanese mid-century modern architect Abdel-Moneim Mustafa appeared to be validated. No matter the violence nor the destruction that would be imposed on the city and its architecture, at least (some of) Mustafa's pioneering ideas and exceptional teachings would be spared from the conflict's horrendous toll. This operation, however, was not a conventional acquisition of an archival fonds for the Canadian centre. Instead of swooping in and acquiring a multitude of drawings and other assorted architectural representations to be held within the controlled environment of its archives' vaults in Montreal, the Mustafa acquisition was intended as a pilot project for the deployment of a post-custodial model to architectural archives. Therefore, the custodians of the Mustafa archive in Khartoum retained ownership of the archives while the CCA provided the expertise (and the financial support) for the archives' digitisation and dissemination for future research resulting in 242 files hosted on Wikimedia Commons.<fnref n="1" /> The CCA envisioned this post-custodial approach as a way to develop 'a model for a more collaborative approach to transnational archival work', specifically as 'means to support the collection and preservation of, as well as access to, architecture archives in Africa'.<fnref n="2" />

While the CCA was perhaps most vocal in associating a post-custodial framework to this project, the practice of dissociating ownership of archives from their management and dissemination has been experimented with – in varying degrees – by several architecture institutions. Effectively, as many architectural archives have recently developed initiatives focused on digital preservation and access to archival material without physical ownership or centralised custodianship, a post-custodial practice seems to precede its theorisation (and reflection) in the field.

When Wisconsin's State Archivist F. Gerald Ham first introduced the term 'post-custodial' to archival discourse in a landmark address to the 1980 annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, he identified a set of

<footnote n="1">1. The digital files produced by this project include not only digitised copies of original archival material (such as floorplans, elevations, sections and perspectives), but also new photography and video of Mustafa's most significant works in Khartoum. Wikimedia Commons, "Buildings by Abdel-Moneim Mustafa," 2022, accessed September 25, 2023, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Buildings_by_Abdel-Moneim Mustafa.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Canadian Centre for Architecture, "Find and Tell Elsewhere," May 2022, https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/find-and-tell-elsewhere; Canadian Centre for Architecture, "CCA Find and Tell Elsewhere: Abdel Moneim Mustafa," e-flux Architecture, May 2022, accessed September 25, 2023, https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/443946/cca-find-and-tell-elsewhere-abdel-moneim-mustafa/.</footnote>
strategies that amounted to nothing short of a paradigm shift in how archival materials were to be managed, preserved, and made accessible.<fnref n="3" /> Most notably, he presented a vision for a more decentralised, collaborative, and community-oriented approach to archival work in which archives' custodial responsibility was to be balanced with a greater commitment to facilitating access and engagement. Ham's notion of post-custodial archives was both incited and supported by society's increasingly electronic environment. He specifically identified the transformative power of digital technologies in enabling institutions to provide broader access to archival collections, reaching a wider audience and ensuring that archives remain present, relevant, and dynamic.

Decades earlier, in 1949, André Malraux had been similarly prompted by technological advances – albeit photographic rather than digital – to imagine a radical shift in how museums would collect, present, and cultivate public engagement with art. In the seminal publication *The Museum without Walls*, the eminent French intellectual, advocated for the widespread democratisation and accessibility to art by employing various means of photographic reproduction to capture and disseminate the aesthetic and intellectual essence of artworks, and thus overcome their physical limitations.<fnref n="4" /> Through the systematic use of photography on artworks, the imaginary museum, as Malraux termed it, would foster dialogues among different artistic traditions, times, geographies, and media, thus cultivating a much richer understanding of art and its enduring significance, enriching our appreciation of its diverse expressions. Ultimately, Malraux imagined that only once museums freed artworks from their physical constraints could art remain ever present, relevant, and dynamic, similar to what Ham would speculate 30 years later for archival material.

Considering the alignment and interplay between Ham's post-custodial model and Malraux's imaginary museum provides a valuable framework for examining current practices in architecture archives and museums, offering new insights into different approaches to accessibility, engagement, and the preservation of architectural heritage. Effectively, it prompts us to critically examine the role of institutions, the democratisation of knowledge, the impact of technology, as well as the shifting paradigms of participation (and even authenticity) in the architecture archives of the future. Ultimately, it challenges us to reflect on the potential of archives to transcend physical boundaries and foster a more inclusive, transformative, and intellectually engaging relationship with architecture.

A central tenet for both Malraux and Ham was that rather than sole custodianship (either by a museum or an archive), the emphasis should now be on shared stewardship, cooperation, and facilitating broader access to archival materials and artworks. That is precisely what the CCA was attempting to achieve with the Mustafa project, the initial *Find and*

*Tell Elsewhere* project, in which the notion of post-custodial approaches was dutifully mentioned.<fnref n="5" /> Similar projects in other architectural institutions, however, were not accompanied by the same awareness or reflection (at least, not publicly), as most seemed to be the inevitable result of the portability of newly digitised and digital-born material rather than any (declared) ambition to develop shared stewardship of materials or the broader dissemination of knowledge and ideas.

While ultimately—and practically—it may not be of great significance, it is worth noting that the separation of custodianship and dissemination within the realm of architecture appears to have primarily arisen as an outcome of the ongoing digital transformation in archival practices. Interestingly, these developments seem to have evolved somewhat accidentally as byproducts of the practicalities of digitisation and the ambition of enhanced accessibility, outpacing any comprehensive contemplation of their wider implications and repercussions.

A curious example of this condition is found in Denmark, resulting from the intended relationship between the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC) and the Danish National Art Library. While the DAC does not have its own collection and is focused on organising exhibitions, the Danish National Art Library, which holds all archives pertaining to Danish architecture, is focused on tending to those archives, which become the thread connecting the two institutions. To facilitate this connection—and since the two institutions do not share the same physical premises—several of the library's architecture archival holdings were digitised.<fnref n="6" /> At the time of this writing (in September 2023), a whopping 56.987 photographs and slides (primarily pertaining to Danish architecture), 85.429 drawings as well approximately 160 physical models had been digitised and made available not only to the DAC staff but also to the general public, through the library's digital collections portal.<fnref n="7" /> While ostensibly establishing a digitally-enabled continuity between the DAC's exhibitions and the library's collection, the practical result has been a remarkably increased access to a rather broad selection of archival material pertaining to Danish architectural history. Although this impressive project was never publicly discussed within a post-custodial framework, its practical results still clearly resonate with the ambitions set out by Malraux and Ham, particularly regarding the democratisation of access facilitated by digital reproduction. It is perhaps ironic that the DAC does not seem to make much use of the collection in their exhibitions and activities.

However, the separation between ownership of archival material from their management and dissemination also takes different forms. In Mexico City,

<footnote n="3">3 F. Gerald Ham, "Archival Strategies for the Post-Custodial Era," *The American Archivist* 44, No. 3 (1981): 207–16.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 André Malraux, *Museum without Walls*, 1st edition (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Canadian Centre for Architecture, "CCA Find and Tell Elsewhere."</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 While the National Library's main building is within walking from the DAC's own building in Copenhagen's harbour, the architectural archives are housed in an off-site facility in the outer suburbs of Copenhagen.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 The digitised renditions of the physical models are especially interesting since, to faithfully capture the models' three-dimensional aspects, the Danish National Library meticulously recorded them using 24 photographs, enabling visitors to digitally explore the models in a complete 360-degree rotation. Royal Danish Library, "The Architecture Collection," kb.dk, 2023, accessed September 25, 2023, https://www.kb.dk/en/find-materials/collections/architecture-collection.</footnote>
the architectural centre LIGA Espacio para Arquitectura has since 2020 established a new archival section with the declared aim of providing greater visibility and public access to valuable Latin American historical archives that have remained, for one reason or another, not readily accessible. Thus, the platform LIGA ARCHIVOS assembles, manages, and provides access to digital versions of these valuable, yet obscure, archives with the intent to promote and activate the historical archive. Without ever being mentioned as such, LIGA ARCHIVOS has adopted a true post-custodial model, much like the CCA's *Find and Tell Elsewhere*, in which the 'physical files always remain in the hands of the family or the respective foundation' so that 'they themselves always have control and care of their assets' while 'LIGA is [never] responsible for any original files'.<fnref n="8" /> Currently, the collection is composed of eight archives of three types: historical archives (mostly of architecture photographers active in Mexico), commissioned photography (of a couple of particularly remarkable buildings in Mexico) and reflective thematic collections (of curated selections of an, although bigger still quite obscure, online archive of 20th-century architecture magazines).<fnref n="9" />

The composition and organisation of this archival project make particularly visible a fundamental shift that accompanies the emergence of post-custodial practices in architectural archives (which had already been identified by both Malraux and Ham). Archivists purposefully wield a newfound (or, in fact, newly recognised) agency within this environment. In this particular case – much like with the CCA's Mustafa project – that is made evident by the ambition to make 'existing archives visible [by] inserting them into contemporary debate'.<fnref n="10" />

This is done not only by making more available, digital facsimiles of historical archives, but also by intentionally considering the implications to contemporary practice and discourse of the ideas and approaches, forms and expressions, embedded in those historical archives.<fnref n="11" /> There is much to say about the tyranny of the present, but I will leave that for another time.<fnref n="12" /> Instead, I would like to draw our attention to how this increasingly

fluid state has empowered architectural archives to move from a mode of affirmation towards a mode of interrogation, to use Malraux's terms considering the contrast between the physical and the imaginary museum.<fnref n="13" /> Arguably, this shift has become more evident as archival institutions not only increasingly take their agency for granted but are also no longer so timid about directing it at particularly (worthy) directions and, increasingly, work. Therefore, this mode of interrogation has been characterised by selections and interpretations, that is, new ways of reading and making sense of the archival material in their care.

But even as new approaches to the archive produce new readings, questions still linger. Although pioneering and worthy of praise, post-custodial projects within architectural archives still commonly fall short of establishing the much-needed connections that would allow them to fulfil the potential of Malraux's imaginary museum. In fact, for Malraux, the reproduction of artworks was only as valuable as the recontextualisation and the dialogues made possible by it. Reproduction was only ever intended to be a means rather than a goal. Malraux's ambition for a fuller understanding of art across time and space, as well as its democratisation, was dependent on both reproduction and recontextualisation. And if we can recognise in current projects a torrent of reproduction, the possibilities (and the infrastructure) for recontextualisation are still visibly lacking. Several of these projects are quite siloed and discrete, remaining mostly concealed.

Initiatives such as the new search portal under development for the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning managed by the Nieuwe Instituut (NI), dubbed as the Other Interface, present one promising way to respond to this issue 'simply' by being built around linked open data that connects various online sources as well as being also organised through histories that provide multiple readings to the collection.<fnref n="14" /> It is, however, too early to tell if this new search portal will effectively create new ways of understanding the collection and construct any meaningful connections beyond it, or if it is bound to collapse under information overload. Regardless of its success or failure, the Other Interface must be recognised for what it is: an attempt to forge a new way forward.

Other crucial issues do not have such a clear path ahead of them. One critical issue that is commonly poorly addressed by institutions adopting post-custodial models is what happens to the original artefacts once they have been digitised or reproduced. Beyond general claims that the material is returned to its original custodians, very little is known about the arrangements for safekeeping the material and continued support for these smaller institutions. This should serve in no way to question the ability (or right) of original archive custodians to safe keep material that they have been handling (sometimes for generations), but instead to question

<footnote n="8">8 In many cases, these are family archives or archives of small foundations with limited resources and contacts to disseminate their material. LIGA Espacio para Arquitectura, "LIGA-ARCHIVOS Info," LIGA-ARCHIVOS, September 2023, accessed September 25, 2023, https://www.liga-archivos.org/info.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Specifically, LIGA ARCHIVOS is currently composed of the historical archives of the architectural photographers Roberto y Fernando Luna, Juan Sordo Madaleno, Bob Schalkwijk, Armando Salas Portugal, as well as the commissioned photography of the Tamayo Museum (REGISTRO: Museo Tamayo) and the Heroico Colegio Militar (Arquitectura para Dioses), as well as (Archivo Activo – Raíces digital UNAM, a set of reflective thematic collections developed from Raices Digital (Digital Roots), the online publicly accessible collection of 20th-century architecture magazines assembled by the Faculty of Architecture at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. See LIGA Espacio para Arquitectura.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 LIGA Espacio para Arquitectura, "Archivo Activo – Raíces Digital UNAM," LIGA-ARCHIVOS, June 2021, accessed September 25, 2023, https://www.liga-archivos.org/raicesdigitalunam.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 There is also a clear parallel between the LIGA's activation of the UNAM's Raices Digital archive and the CCA's archival project Find and Tell program, since not only both instances promote "new readings that highlight the intellectual relevance of particular aspects of [the] collection today," but they do so by inviting experts to create particular arguments about the material in the archives by making significant selections and interpretations of that material. See Canadian Centre for Architecture, "Find and Tell," CCA, 2023, https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/find-and-tell.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 For a discussion of how presentism manifests itself in a digitally connected society, see Douglas Rushkoff, *Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now* (Penguin Books, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Malraux, *Museum without Walls*, 162.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Nieuwe Instituut, "The Other Interface," November 2022, accessed September 25, 2023, https://theotherinterface.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/.</footnote>
the ethical responsibilities of institutions towards those archives and the potential unintended consequences of post-custodial models to devalue original artefacts and drawings.

It is fundamental to question how the inequalities of power are acknowledged and negotiated in a post-custodial reality for architecture archives so as to ensure that these promising models do not end up replicating or enabling extractive and exploitative structures and, with them, further reduce the agency of the smaller archives to the benefit of the larger institutions.<fnref n="15" /> The answer to this, as in so many things in architecture, may lie in the details, since it is ‘through daily archival practice that the ethical choices which determine our relationship to global ideologies are made’.<fnref n="16" /> Under these terms, the agreements between institutions and custodians of archives (and their implementation) become crucial components to resist the risk of transnational exploitation and of post-custodial models to become themselves neo-colonial by extracting cultural capital (in the form of knowledge and ideas) from the original archive in a way that only benefit the status of the disseminating institution. In short, once the archives are introduced to broader networks of dissemination, how does it benefit original archive owners and their communities?

This is a crucial question for which I also do not have a clear answer. But as post-custodial models are becoming increasingly prevalent within architectural archives and more museums without walls are created, these are the types of questions that should be posed so that the reality of post-custodial archives can live up to its promises.

<figure><img src="image_19.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="15">15 Christian Kelleher, "Archives Without Archives: (Re)Locating and (Re)Defining the Archive Through Post-Custodial Praxis," *Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies* 1 (July 7, 2017): 9, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.29.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Hannah Alpert-Abrams, David A. Bliss, and Itza Carbajal, "Post-Custodial Archiving for the Collective Good: Examining Neoliberalism in US-Latin American Archival Partnerships," *Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies* 2, No. 1 (March 3, 2019): 5, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v2i1.87.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>The Fulani wooden mask, utilised in burial ceremonies across West Africa.</figcaption></figure>

Andreea Iliescu (Royal College of Art)

# Archived:
The Western Museum Archive
as Open-World Game

## PROJECT OVERVIEW

Western museums are built out of bricks cemented on imperial ideas. They do not convey the truthful story, but one of exoticism and othering.¹ 'Archived' critically examines the Western museum collection, proposing an alternative method of digital archiving in the form of an open-world game. This research aims to generate technoheritage² as an ongoing practice of decoloniality,³ where the emancipatory potential of digital technologies is utilised to re-centre knowledge towards the Global South.

Building on the concept of animism – the belief that seemingly inanimate beings and objects all possess a distinct spiritual essence,⁴ the project focuses on the West African art and craft of mask-making as a subject of study.

In Western museums and private collections, masks are viewed as artistic objects mainly appreciated aesthetically, and are stripped bare of their original function. Historically, African masks played a crucial role in traditional ceremonies – for instance, addressing tribal needs in times of war, ensuring a good harvest, or summoning spiritual presences in burial or initiation practices. Hence, masks were therefore not just symbolic; they were seen as ‘spirit traps’ that contained the soul for the benefits of the living. Some masks represent the spirits of deceased ancestors and the wearer of the mask is often believed to be able to communicate to the being symbolised by it, or to be possessed by who or what the mask represents.⁵

1. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, *Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum* (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1997), 12.

2. Sonia Katyal coined the term ‘technoheritage’ as the marriage between technology and cultural heritage. In this article, she argues that in order to understand the interconnectedness between technology and cultural heritage it is important to study the theoretical dimensions behind interactivity itself. See Sonia K. Katyal, “Technoheritage”, *California Law Review, Inc.*, Vol. 105, No. 4 (August 2017): 1115, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3030437.

3. ‘Decoloniality, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai explains, “is not a successor to colonialism and coloniality… Instead, [it] offers an alternative, one that is rooted in Indigenous thought and practice about nature, community, and solidarity.” But this alternative, as Appadurai assesses (and with which I [Olùfèmi Táíwò] agree) “rests on a reversal of the historical impact of capitalism and colonialism. It seeks to return us to an earlier period of precolonial splendour, when what we need to imagine, as [Achille] Mbembe argues, is an alternative future”.’ See Olùfèmi Táíwò, *Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously*, (London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2022), xvii.

4. Martin D. Stringer, “Rethinking Animism: Thoughts from the Infancy of Our Discipline”, *The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute*, Vol. 5 (1999): 541–555.

5. Rosie Lesso, “What Are African Masks?”, TheCollector.com, accessed on 15th August, 2023, https://www.thecollector.com/what-are-african-masks.
The proposal explores the cycle of life, death and afterlife, effectively the entities of The Body, The Mind and The Soul through the lenses of the West African mask; where The Body materialises into the physical object, with its corresponding tangible qualities (materiality, technique, aesthetic etc.). The Mind represents the craft and knowledge of its Maker, imprinted in the artefact, while The Soul is the mask's spiritual essence, the other-than-human entity embodied in itself.

## INTRODUCTION

I am interested in the political dynamics of representing cultural heritage. Specifically, I intend to surpass the notion that the modern Western paradigm represents the origin of universal consciousness.<fnref n="6" /> Thus, through this work, my intention is to craft a form of digital heritage – a speculative prototype that is insurgent and re-centred,<fnref n="7" /> where the use of video game engines is aimed at helping us understand cultural material in alternative ways. What remains important is that the ongoing discourse transcends issues concerning licenses and digital access to museums. Instead, what matters is who owns and mobilises data,<fnref n="8" /> together with the integral participation of artefact makers in the archival and digitisation processes.

Historically, museum collections came from wealthy donors who benefited from the empires. For instance, doctor Sir Hans Sloane funded his enormous collection – that would become the foundation of the British Museum – with earnings from his wife’s sugar plantations in Jamaica. Moreover, a significant part of the issue is how museums treat indigenous communities in their collections.<fnref n="9" /> Museum directors often claim that indigenous works tend to appear in the archives of ethnographic museums instead of art museums.<fnref n="10" /> Hence, this aspect does great injustice to indigenous communities and their epistemologies; the distinction helps to perpetuate the idea that these cultures are no longer living or continuing their traditions. Consequently, through this proposal I pose the following research questions: how can digital technologies be mobilised to address collective forms of resistance against colonial violence and rethink the notion of archiving in a non-extractive manner? Furthermore, how can the digital archive truthfully acknowledge colonial narratives and portray the complexities of colonial legacies? Ultimately, how can one critically engage with technology beyond merely resorting to digital solutionism?

Throughout my practice as an architectural designer, I have been negotiating the boundaries between the physical and digital realms, following

a research-driven, narrative-based approach to design. My multidisciplinary background, coupled with my academic and professional experience have stimulated my interest in the expanding definitions of architecture. I have pursued these with a focus on the role of digital technologies and environments, where I was exposed to the potential of game engines and video games as innovative tools for crafting new worlds, institutions, and representational forms within the architectural realm.

## GAMING – A TWO WAY ‘ECHO CHAMBER’

The field of gaming is inextricably connected with cultural practices and our everyday life. The games we both play and create serve as mirrors, reflecting the ever-shifting socio-political challenges of our times. Unfortunately, these virtual worlds often replicate and even magnify the same gender, racial and environmental biases that persist in reality. This is evident through the lack of female characters and their stereotypical representation, as well as the prevalence of violence in combat platforms and surveillance in virtual cities. In consequence, games can function as echo chambers for real-world issues, reinforcing and exacerbating societal problems.<fnref n="11" />

Conversely, the ideologies that originate from gaming are gaining significant influence in how our societies are governed. Interactive and immersive media is reshaping our perception of physical reality, and its impact extends beyond the gaming sphere. These influences are altering consumption habits, permeating consumer markets, and shaping societal values.<fnref n="12" /> The convergence of gaming and our everyday lives has profound implications for how we experience and navigate the world.

## GAMIFICATION

In our physical reality, gaming processes and interactive concepts have transitioned into operational frameworks for contemporary activities. The integration of gaming principles into fields beyond gaming itself, known as *gamification*, has become a pivotal socio-cultural phenomenon. This integration sustains prolonged engagement with products and services by incorporating long-standing elements of gaming, such as scoring, competition, artificial intelligence, and task-oriented approaches.<fnref n="13" />

Our behaviours have become measurable, mimicking gaming features like point systems, competitive dynamics, AI-driven experiences, and procedural

<footnote n="6">6 Charles Taylor, "Two Theories of Modernity", *Hastings Centre Report*, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1995): 24–33, https://doi.org/10.2307/3562863.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Joseph McLaren, "Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Moving the Centre and Its Relevance to Afrocentricity", *Journal of Black Studies* 28, No. 3 (1998): 386–97, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2784740.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Kulturutveckling VGR, "Nora Al-Badri: Babylonian Vision – Decolonising Collections", YouTube video, accessed 15th April 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0_cUE_ijk.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Barringer and Flynn, *Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum*, 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Barringer and Flynn, *Colonialism and the Object*, 13.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Architectural Design Studio (ADS) 8 20/21 was a platform at the Royal College of Art MA Architecture programme which investigated a possible architectural agency in the way the material infrastructure of gaming and digital technologies could be developed, explored and manipulated to foster other forms of organisation that responded to contemporary challenges. Tutors: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Kamil Hilmi Dalkir. See Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Kamil Hilmi Dalkir, *Architectural Design Studio (ADS) 8 Data Matter(s)–The Gaming Edition Studio Brief*, Royal College of Art 20/21, 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing, *Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt*, (London: V&A Publishing, 2018), 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Pestellini Laparelli and Hilmi Dalkir, *ADS 8 Brief*, 5.</footnote>
instructions. This becomes evident when engaging with social media rating
systems for expressing emotions with a single click, as well as health apps
monitoring fitness progress. Simultaneously, the influence of gaming culture
extends to visual arts, architecture, and cinema, practically transforming
these domains into extensions of digital environments.<fnref n="14" /> As gaming concepts
are intertwined with other aspects of daily life, the distinction between reality
and fiction becomes increasingly obscure.

METHODOLOGY

The Open-World Game as a Curatorial Instrument

I advocate for adopting the open-world game as a curatorial tool—essentially, an interactive method to approach the Western museum archive and its counterparts. Through gaming, one can not only uncover intricate layers of complexity, but also deconstruct the power structures at play. By actively involving the artefact makers in the digitisation process, as well as engaging the audience in determining the sequence of narratives through different levels of interactivity and participation, the open-world game can effectively undo the Western-centric perspectives often found in museum collections, which primarily place the role of the curator at the epicentre.

However, I acknowledge the risk of translating similar extractive problematics
into the digital medium; therefore, this prototype should be interpreted as
a curatorial strategy instead, focused on setting up a space for open table
conversations, whereby craftsmen and artisans participate in the digital
reconstruction of the archive. Moreover, I encourage consulting diverse
voices and perspectives in the process of data collection; particularly,
prioritising contributions from communities whose voices have been silenced
or appropriated, such as indigenous peoples from West Africa, who have
been directly impacted by British colonialism. Finally, through preserving
and consulting materials which document resistance movements, namely
photographs, documents and personal belongings of local groups, the proposal
can subvert the balance of distribution of power in the Western museum archive.

At last, it is important to be critical of who owns and controls technology,
for similarly to how ‘the imperial shutter’<fnref n="15" /> of the camera which immortalised
historical moments into photographs that can be archived and exhibited
in museums,<fnref n="16" /> 3D reconstruction techniques can be seen as equally
detrimental, continuing to exercise the Western gaze. Hence, it is advised
that the artefact makers address which are the most suitable processes of
documenting and recording the objects.

Digital Prototyping and Playtesting

For the purpose of this prototype, I have focused on the Fula people, also
known as the Fulani nomadic tribe,<fnref n="17" /> whose wooden masks are utilised in
funeral ceremonies in Nigeria. The game proposal consists of three levels,
each depicting a spatial context related to the three entities of the mask
(The Body, The Mind and The Soul).

Level One – The Body

With the displacement of artefacts emerge issues of cartography, as well
as indigenous people's habits, rituals and traditions, for these objects
constituted worlds within worlds for the communities from whom they have
been plundered. The forced migration of objects is inextricably linked to
the forced migration of people who are obliged to seek a home next to
the objects which have been taken away from them.<fnref n="18" /> As such, Level One
constitutes a critique of the Western museum collection, opening up with
a series of West African masks. The camera focuses on the Fulani mask
and its corresponding counterparts utilised in the burial masquerade. The
artefacts appear seemingly inanimate next to each other in a showcase until
approached by the player in the digital environment. Upon interaction, the
mask becomes personified, recalling the story of its displacement. With each
click, pop-up widgets with archival documentation and found video footage
take over the screen, constructing a wider picture of the artefact's context,
placing it spatially and temporally.

Level Two – The Mind

This level constitutes embodied knowledge, specifically, the art and craft
of the mask maker, transmitted through generations; this is a digital
reconstruction of a local mask workshop in Nigeria, where the tools,
materials and processes are laid out for the audience to understand the
making process behind each artefact. For example, African tribal artists
are generally men, who train for several years, usually as apprentices to
a mastercarver. The father trains his son, who is due to continue their craft
through the family line. These artists hold a respectable role in African tribal
society, as the creators of objects with such spiritual significance. Carvings
are made using an adze (a small axe with a horizontal blade that chops small
wood splinters from the surface) and finished with a knife and abrasives.
Although joinery is increasingly common, traditional techniques involved
carving objects from a single piece of wood. It is believed that carving
objects of power often involves spiritual forces. African carvings are usually

<footnote n="14">14 Foulston and Volsing, *Videogames*, 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 'The camera shutter is not a metaphor for the operation of imperial power, but it is a later materialisation of imperial technology. Photography developed with imperialism, the camera made visible and acceptable imperial world destruction and legitimated the world's reconstruction on empire's terms'. See Ariella Aisha Azoulay, *Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism*, (London: Verso, 2019), 6–7.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Ariella Aisha Azoulay, *Potential History*, 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 The Fula people, often described as the Fulani, are regarded as the world's largest nomadic group: about 20 million people dispersed across Western Africa. They reside mostly in Nigeria, Mali, Guinea, Cameroon, Senegal, and Niger. They can also be found in Central African Republic and Egypt. See Richard M. Juang, "Africa and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History", *ABC-CLIO* (March 12, 2008): 512.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Azoulay, *Potential History*, 3.</footnote>
exhibited with labels illustrating their tribe of origin; however, many peoples have well-known individual artists, who nowadays may produce works for both a local and an outside public.<fnref n="19" />

## Level Three – The Soul

‘The Soul’ depicts The Essence of the object itself, taking the form of a digital re-enactment of the funeral ceremony the artefact was initially designed for, where the wearer of the mask—the dancer—becomes an intermediary between the living and spiritual world of the deceased. The mask is worn by a chosen masquerader who gives it life by wearing it in a costume that takes on a new identity. In addition, other objects corresponding to the performance of the masquerade accompany the player into contextualising the artefact, such as local tools and medicinal plants.

During the performance of the burial ceremony, the wearer of the mask enters a trance-like state which tribes believe will allow them to communicate with ancestors, or to control the spiritual forces of good and evil. Within the communities that make them, the masks are primarily spiritual objects that are made to be used. In West Africa, it is often believed that wearing masks and using them during ritualised performances such as burials and secret society initiations can connect them with spirits beyond the real world.<fnref n="20" />

Masquerade is a practice of transformation, usually taking place during the rites of passage, such as initiation or death. It often maintains the knowledge of insider groups, where only certain people may be allowed to see it. With some exceptions, the actual performing is a male activity, and masks representing women are worn by men. Local traditions often relate that masquerades originally belonged to women but were taken away from them and can now be made and performed by men alone.<fnref n="21" />

## CONCLUSION

I propose that issues concerning representation ethics and bias in the digital archive need to be re-examined, given that the museum is an institution of privilege. The looting of objects from their spaces of origin renders them inaccessible to the majority. Therefore, I argue that by digitising museum artefacts one is performing an act of restoration – in effect, an exercise in worldbuilding. This proposal is founded on the belief that the digital environment, despite its origins in military research, presents a profoundly emancipatory and subversive space.

In my opinion, the digital environment serves as a cultural technique with the potential to democratise collections and histories, thereby activating artefacts and their associated narratives. While we may inhabit a post-colonial world, we also reside in a post-digital era, where the legacy of technology remains pervasive, silently permeating computing and its ubiquity.<fnref n="22" />

Over time, this speculative prototype could evolve into an open-source effort aiming to construct new realities for forgotten objects as a form of collective knowledge production. In future, these digital artefacts and performative interventions could challenge the prevailing power dynamics in Western museums, essentially, what Ariella Aisha Azoulay implies through ‘unlearning the archive’.<fnref n="23" />

<footnote n="19">19 Christa Clark, *The Art of Africa: a Resource for Educators*, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), 71.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Walter E.A. van Beeck, "African Indigenous Religions", *Oxford Research Encyclopedias, African History*, Oxford University Press (31 March 2020): 152, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.661.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 Henry Drewal, "Art and the Perception of Women in Yoruba Culture", *Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines*, Vol. 17, Cahier 68 (1977): 554, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4391558.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 Kulturutveckling VGR, "Nora Al-Badri: Babylonian Vision – Decolonising Collections".</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Azoulay, *Potential History*, 195.</footnote>
Archival Constructions
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /></figure>

Marginalia' research exhibition held at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, August 21–31, 2022, Oslo, Norway. Photo by Maryia Rusak.

Maryia Rusak (ETH Zürich)

# Archives of the Ordinary: On the Archive of Research

## ON THE MARGINS

Not all archives are created equal: some are treasured, while others are trashed.<fnref n="1" /> This poses a particular problem for architectural historians who venture outside of the conventional canon: for example, those interested in little-known architects, construction companies, industrial or material producers or bureaucratic entities. Despite being responsible for a large share of the built environment today, these actors hardly make it to the pages of architectural history books and professional magazines since they engage with ‘ordinary’ rather than exceptional architecture. Archives of these entities are vast but full of other documents, different from the design files architectural historians usually work with. Business archives are often incomplete, endangered by the constraints and conditions of storage, contingent on the political, social, and technological forces that influence what is worth being preserved and what is to be excluded from the historical record. Historians interested in the architecture of the everyday, then, find themselves performing a version of archaeological research, stitching together ‘imprints, tracks and trails of a once-living thing’.<fnref n="2" /> What does it mean for architectural historians to engage not with canonical objects or famous practitioners but with a different research subject that occupies a marginal position? How does this position then affect both the methods and the research outcome? Based on my recent research experience from a doctoral dissertation on a Norwegian construction company, Moelven Brug and a general interest in “other” producers of architecture, this paper discusses methodological problems that arise when dealing with other, more ordinary archives that architectural historians usually forego. I argue that investigations of these other archives lead towards a more open and democratic discipline.

## ON OTHER ARCHIVES

The main object of my research was an industrial company, Moelven Brug, a former sawmill located in a town some 100 kilometres north of Oslo. Founded in 1898, the company originally specialised in timber products: wooden barrels, furniture, carriages, sledges, equipment for agriculture

<footnote n="1">1. See, for example, Stamatis Zografos investigation of the qualities of different archives "On Archives" in *Architecture and Fire: a Psychoanalytical Approach to Conservation* (UCL Press: 2019), 18–38. On the violence and destruction of archives, see Jacques Derrida, *Archive Fever* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 19.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. See a description of fossil-hunting at https://jurassiccoast.org/what-is-the-jurassic-coast/all-about-fossils/what-are-fossils/, accessed January 12, 2020.</footnote>
and timber wheels.<fnref n="3" /> With the mechanisation of post-war agriculture, the company's products became obsolete, and it was forced to reconsider its future. From a modest commission for "houses-on-wheels" for Oslo municipality in 1951 – de facto temporary barracks for construction and forestry workers – the company developed an entire eco-system of prefabricated flat timber elements and complete sections, laminated beams, chipboard panels and other wooden products. From the late 1950s, Moelven products grew intricately connected with the expansion of the post-war Norwegian welfare state, building schools, kindergartens, housing and public buildings all around the country.<fnref n="4" /> At its height, the company employed more than 1200 people, while Moelven became a household name in Norwegian homes – by 1980, more than 85% of Norwegians were familiar with the company and its products.<fnref n="5" /> However, despite being responsible for constructing a significant part of the built environment in post-war Norway, the company's projects remained unrecorded in architectural history books.

In part, this had to do with the general uneasy place of mass-produced buildings in architectural history. While generations of architects have been enchanted by an egalitarian promise of prefabrication, when faced with rigid production frameworks and concerns of profitability and cost, sophisticated architect-designed building systems have often been stripped bare of generous aspirations of flexibility and change. Industrial building was left as a pragmatic instrument in the hands of cost-conscious developers and construction companies, often considered anonymous 'architecture without architects'.<fnref n="6" /> In Norway, in particular, industrial mass production had often been seen in opposition to the local tradition of craftsmanship.<fnref n="7" /> It is not surprising then that the prefabricated buildings of Moelven never made it to the Norwegian architectural history books. So how does one study something that is no longer there and that has not been properly recorded?

The project then has largely progressed inductively, shaped by material discovered in the archives. However, time and again, it has encountered significant archival resistance: the company's industrial archive was patchy and extensively premeditated. Despite a prolific building output, few construction drawings survived. To reconstruct at least some parts of the company's operations, I had to browse through thousands of pages of organisational documents, meeting notes, procurement documents, work contracts, union agreements and salary negotiations. Jacques Derrida, in his article *Archive*

Fever, offered a psychoanalytic reading of archives: they preserve records of the past and embody 'the promise of the present to the future'.<fnref n="8" /> The selection of what counts as knowledge appropriate for archival study is a strong act that excludes the possibility of studying objects and events that were deemed unimportant at the time of their creation. According to David Greetham, a specialist in textual studies, any decision on what is excluded or included in an archive is highly self-referential and even self-laudatory: archives strive to preserve the best, that which is at the current moment considered useful for future generations.<fnref n="9" /> However, future actors are excluded from this decision-making: one may want to study precisely that which is deemed inappropriate, that which is excluded, silences in the archive. The case of the Moelven archive is exemplary in this regard: curated by the company's archivists it amassed only 'ready-made' documents, brochures and pamphlets, excluding the processes of product development, drawings and other communication that were deemed unnecessary. As the practice of 'archivisation' produces as much as it records the event, Moelven's archive has been largely re-produced. To develop a more open archive, I had to reach further.

## ASSEMBLING THE ARCHIVE

To mediate archival gaps and silences, I traced the barely visible threads, following clues and hints as proposed by Carlo Ginzburg in his essay 'Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm'.<fnref n="10" /> Reflecting the nature of the subject – a large techno-scientific entity that operated across state institutions and different bureaucracies – I used materials from labour and union archives, architectural collections, industrial and state agencies, and city archives. Most importantly, the research benefited from an OCR-searchable digitised database of all major Norwegian periodicals, books and newspapers published in the second half of the 20th century.<fnref n="11" /> If the advent of digitalisation has introduced higher complexity, it has most profoundly impacted the history of the ordinary.<fnref n="12" /> Information gathered from local, regional and national newspapers allowed me to write an entirely different history of the company and its architectural production, a story that would have ended on page three if I used 'proper' architectural sources.

Despite the fact that Moelven buildings and products were absent in the post-war version of Norwegian modernity told by architectural magazines,

<footnote n="3">3 Trygve Dalseg, *Med Moelven-hjul på vei gjennom tiden: historien om Aktieselskabet Moelven Brug i de første 50 år, 1899–1949* (Moelv: Moelven Brug, 1966). More on Moelven Brug products see catalogues at the Nasjonalbiblioteket archive, Oslo, Norway.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 See more at Maryja Rusak, 'Factory-Made: The Everyday Architecture of Moelven Brug, 1955–1973' (PhD diss., The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, 2022).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Oddvar Hemsøe, *Moelven 1899–1999* (Moelv: Moelven industrier, 1999), 76.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 The expression of course refers to the title of Bernard Rudofsky's exhibition catalogue "Architecture Without Architects" (MOMA: New York, 1964). However, since then the term has been appropriated in the discussions of prefabricated architecture, for example in the introduction of Gilbert Herbert, *The Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann* (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984), or Roger B. White, *Prefabrication: a History of Its Development in Great Britain* (H.M. Stationery Office, 1965).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Kjetil Fallan, 'Modern Transformed: The Domestication of Industrial Design Culture in Norway, ca. 1940–1970' (PhD diss., Fakultet for arkitektur og billedkunst, University of Oslo, 2007), 268.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Marlene Manoff, "Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines," *portal: Libraries and the Academy* 4, No. 1 (2004): 11. Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, 'Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression', *Diacritics* 25, No. 2 (1995): 9, https://doi.org/10.2307/465144.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 David Greetham, "Who's In, Who's Out: The Cultural Politics of Archival Exclusion," *Studies in the Literary Imagination* 32, 1 (Spring 1999): 1–28.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Carlo Ginzburg, preface to the Italian edition in *Clues, Myths and the Historical Method* (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), xi.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 For example, my research largely benefited from archives of the main newspaper of the Norwegian Labour Party – *Arbeiderbladet* with its various regional editions; as well as series of publications by the Norwegian Building Research Institute; survey books on Norwegian housing; grey literature on planning; collections of professional magazines, like *Byggekunst*, *Bonytt* and *Bygningsarbeideren*.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Silje Svadberg, Andrea Holand, and Karl Joachim Breunig, 'Beyond the Hype: a Bibliometric Analysis Deconstructing Research on Digitalization,' *Technology Innovation Management Review* 9, No. 10 (30 October 2019): 39, https://doi.org/10.22215/timreview/1274.</footnote>
they were very much present in the experience of ordinary people, as
revealed by thousands of articles in the lay press.<fnref n="13" /> By browsing through
thousands of entries in regional and local editions of newspapers, I was able
to reconstruct an impressive roster of projects whose records long vanished
in the company's archives. As I was learning new Norwegian toponyms,
the names of the newspapers—*Arbeiderbladet*, *Bergens Arbeiderblad*,
*Hamar Arbeiderblad*, *Oppland Arbeiderblad*—spoke for themselves. Most
of these titles retained a strong affiliation with the then-ruling Norwegian
Labour Party and reflected the everyday experience of ordinary people in
1960s Norway. Incorporation of these other sources allowed me to expand
the conventional frameworks of the field, writing a more open, 'popular'
architectural history related to everyday experience of people. The open
and more democratic nature of the sources—made accessible by the
digitalisation efforts—thus had a direct impact on the research outcome.

The OCR search made no detail, name or reference too obscure to trace,
allowing me to expand the narrow canon of Norwegian architecture and
bring up names and projects unheard of before—for example, little-known
architects, professional networks, figures of construction workers or female
specialists. Quilting together information from newspaper entries, yellow
pages, advertisements, histories written by local history clubs and several
archives, I have amassed a curated *archive of research*.<fnref n="14" /> If the project relied
on re-archivisation, a process akin to re-forestation, assembling an archive
from the sources that were previously discarded, what happens with this
reassembled archive once the project is completed?

MARGINALIA: EXHIBITING THE ARCHIVE

My PhD defence was then accompanied by an exhibition titled *Marginalia* that dealt with the question of margins, of the leftover project archive, and the throw-away bits that didn't make it to the final publication. The idea first originated from the feeling that much of the material that has been accrued during my project was left yet again outside of the margins imposed by the formal requirements of a PhD monograph and defence presentation. The final product—a printed book—was limited by a maximum number of pages and images, where only 40 or so could be in colour. My project archive, on the other hand, consisted of more than 1,000 unique images and several

thousand newspaper clippings that I wanted to share with the broader public. Beyond the re-assembled archive of Moelven projects, my collection had yet another layer—that of project notes. The fleeting notes taken on the go, short scribbles of ideas, flimsy thoughts, potential research directions, good sentences that came to mind, paper structures, ideas from conversations with colleagues, doodles during phone calls, intermingled with miscellaneous to-do and shopping lists—all constitute a different, extra-textual layer of our own project archives. The exhibition was then not a curated collection but rather an assemblage of images, documents, texts and archival pieces accumulated over the last four years that I wanted to share with more people.

In exposing personal notes, the meta-layer of the project's archive, I saw
parallels with the marginalia on the books—side notes scribbled by previous
readers that we sometimes encounter. These marks offer an intimate insight
into the usually-conceived process of thinking, while the next reader could
continue this inter-textual conversation with their own markings. By showing
personal notes documenting the thinking as the project progressed, the
exhibition exposed this often-concealed world of a PhD in the making, of the
many ideas, thoughts and indeterminate detours that any research can take.
The exhibition then featured several large notebooks filled with notes on the
research process, alongside secondary literature pieces with bookmarks and
printouts from academic journals with notes on the margins. A stationary
computer positioned in the middle of the exhibit contained a collection
of more than 3,000 project and archival notes amassed with note-taking
software, as well as images of several thousand archival documents.

By establishing a horizontal relationship between the primary archival
materials, secondary literature and my project notes—all laid out on
a horizontal datum of a table, I wanted to forego the hierarchical differences
embedded in the way we approach historical information. The table became
a mock version of a historian work-station, where visitors would be able
to browse through both the primary and secondary sources, follow some
of my project notes and perhaps discover something on their own. By
taking their own notes along with the already-existing ones, the visitors
would contribute to creating a hyper-textual document that testifies to the
multi-layered potential of any historical research. In doing so, I specifically
wanted to highlight the indeterminacy of the way in which we structure
our research—the many often arbitrary decisions that shape the narrative
arcs of our work. The exhibition then was conceived not as a static project
but rather as an illustration of a work-in-progress, a workshop, a working
station. Indeed, as the exhibition stayed open for more than a week, visitors
interacted with original material and approached me as they recognised their
homes, schools and playgrounds in the company's many projects. It was
particularly exciting to see an IT department person or one of the technical
management employees lighten up as they discovered a direct connection
between the perceived detached 'academic' research and their own lives.
The exhibition thus offered a more open format of the outcome of academic
research, rather than the formal PhD book or a defence full of hard-to-
decipher professional jargon.

<footnote n="13">13 Moelven projects were entirely absent in the main Norwegian architectural magazines that both defined and reflected the professional discourse on architecture and interior design—*Byggekunst* and *Bonytt*. In terms of history books, Moelven projects could be literally only found on the margins on survey books on post-war Norwegian housing, for example Anne-Kristine Kronborg, *OBOS: 100 borettslag 1929–2013* (Oslo: Forlaget Press, 2014), 234–35. The company is absent in books like Arne Gunnarsjaa, *Norges arkitekturhistorie* (Oslo: Abstrakt, 2006); Nils Georg Brekke, Per Jonas Nordhagen, and Siri Skjold Lexau, *Norsk arkitekturhistorie: frå steinalder og bronsealder til det 21. hundreåret* (Oslo: Samlaget, 2003); Odd Brochmann, *Bygget i Norge: en arkitekturhistorisk beretning* (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1981).</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 For local history books see Ove Johansen, *Moelvboka: modalshistorie i tekst og bilder* (Moelv: Moelvboka v/ styret, 1986); Ola Alsvik and Jan Haug, *Storkommunen: Ringsaker* (Brumunddal: Brøttum historielag, 2006); Ola Alsvik et al., *I krig og fred, Ringsakboka* (Brumunddal: Brøttum historielag, 2001). The role of local historical collectives in preserving the history of the company becomes apparent when comparing a local wiki page dedicated to Moelven against a general, and far less detailed, Wikipedia entry. See https://lokalhistoriewiki.no/wiki/Moelven_Brug; https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moelven_Industrier. Accessed April 10, 2022.</footnote>
RESEARCH FOR AN OPEN SOCIETY

Expanding the conventional toolkit of architectural history and venturing
into different types of archives – lay press and popular newspapers – allowed
me to write a different, more democratic architectural history, often
overlooked in conventional architectural historiography. Defined by the
conditions of archival scarcity, this led me to re-assemble a broader and
more open archive of research. If we are to build better, more egalitarian
and open architecture, these works need to be grounded within more open,
accessible, egalitarian sources that incorporate a polyphony of voices and
opinions of multiple actors. By exposing the archive of my research that
would otherwise be discarded, I wanted to engage with broader questions
on the nature of archival practices that we both encounter and propagate in
our research. As historians of the every day, we often deal with incomplete
archives, lamenting gaps and absences. At the same time, our own research
remains an opaque artefact, while the archive is stored privately and
discarded. Could we apply the developments in digitalisation to our own
archives? Could archives of research become more open and accessible?
Removing opaqueness from the process of research could be the first
step towards dismantling the academic ivory tower and making academic
research more transparent and welcoming to others.

<figure><img src="image_22.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>Three-dimensional urban assembly based on different forms of 3D scanning. Image by Maria Kyrou.</figcaption></figure>

# Immersed in a Virtual Harvest: Formation of a Narrative-Driven, Spatial Archive Based on 3D-Scanned Architectural Assemblies

## TRACING THE CONTEXT-FUSING THE PRACTICES

Weaving together practices of urban documentation with emerging digital media, this paper outlines an experimental educational format. Situated in the city of Berlin, its scope is to create a 3-dimensional, virtual archive comprising 3D-scanned, urban fragments. In this process, it seeks to enable participants to formulate subjective spatial narratives, while initiating through the archive a dialogue on their collective experience of the city.

Informed by the multiplicity of the Berlin University of the Arts, this educational format addresses a wide range of study programs that relate to spatial practices—including architecture, communication and costume design, as well as art in context and scenography. A unified creative workflow and a diverse spectrum of applied media enable transdisciplinary groups to collaborate in an open exploration and co-creation process.<fnref n="1" />

The proposed virtual archive emerges from an association between the practices of Psychogeography and the medium of 3D scanning. While Psychogeography explores the subjective experience and connections between different urban places, 3D scanning has a unique way of producing spatial artefacts that, depending on the selected technology, can vary widely from their original subject. Treated as a technological détournement,<fnref n="2" /> this representational deviation is applied as an expressive creative medium, which subjectively transforms the spaces that it captures. By further interpreting Unitary Urbanism's ideal of an urban space that fuses the functional with the ludic,<fnref n="3" /> these 3D spatial fragments are collected

<footnote n="1">1. This interplay on format, lying between an educational scenario and a future form of the architectural archive, is inspired by the author's current engagement in the field of experimental media didactics, in the context of a three-year, transdisciplinary project of the Berlin University of the Arts, Project InKüLe – Innovationen für die Künstlerische Lehre, which is supported by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre. Beyond the excitement of digitisation, emerging digital media are treated here as drastic catalysts, affording new ways of creating and experiencing, teaching and learning. For further information on the objectives and the documented results of the project, see Maria Kyrou, “Convergent Infrastructures – a Two-Part Tale on Tools and the Narratives That Drive Them from the Berlin University of the Arts,” 2022, https://www.inkuele.de/inkuele-schriften-vortraege/details/convergent-infrastructures.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Detournement,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007), 14–22.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Gil Wolman, “The Alba Platform (Lettrist International, 1956),” in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 22.</footnote>