Each fragment of a city was once a fiction, only a few materialise in the physical world.

 

Retroactive Archives #... is a series of projects about cities that could have been. It takes roots in architectures that remained drafts, drawings, texts, models, and extends on them, drawing parallel paths.

Some were never meant to be built, they have been called paper architectures, utopias, fictions, fantasies that shaped the minds of builders. Others didn’t come to be for the multitude of reasons that prevent things from happening. The first one of the series can be visited at the Digital Fantasy Pavilion. Electronic Poem existed for two months at the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Fair in 1958. Over two months, two million visitors experienced the shape drawn by Iannis Xenakis, they saw the projections of Le Corbusier and listened to a spatialised 8 minutes composition by Edgar Varese. This is an invitation to take an 8 minutes stroll within a reproduction of an ephemeral event using available tools of Virtual Reality.