After starting to work on the artefacts, the idea for the proposal I originally had shifted, from wanting to work on the construction of urban utopias and building a machine that would generate collaborative ones, based on fiction, I am directing my research towards topics related to archives of places. The starting point is the question: what remains of architecture, or a place, once it is gone? How can we document the memory of a place, is it really by being scientifically exhaustive? Most of the ways in which we document architecture are visual forms, and mainly ones that use expert abilities to read them, such as technical plans, sections… Could we make use of technologies to both record places, and deliver these archives in a spatialized way?
Starting this new research, I found a valuable book that combines a “Combinatory essay”, and a “Combinatory exhibition”, both of which can be read in different ways, that opened research perspectives and is helping me formulate.
Architects and researchers Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli wrote and curated the exhibition Database, Network, Interface. The Architecture of Information, for the exhibition space Archizoom at the EPFL.
In this work they explore case studies throughout history, highlighting the “possible links between digital and non-digital cultural projects and their architectural counterparts.”
They show how architecture has been the place of organising information, within physical spaces, the effects of reaching the “utopian goal of an infinite available knowledge” with the advent of the internet. Yet, this information theoretically available in a dematerialised way comes in a confusing overwhelming form. How could we make the switch back to a spatial organisation of knowledge, by incorporating digital tools and archives into a physical space?
