Building Data: Architecture, Memory and New Imaginaries
Vast amounts of data of the built environment are continuously generated, stored, retrieved, updated, edited, and resaved – a seemingly endless cycle of coding and recoding of the past and the present, and of possible futures. Up to such a point, its material infrastructures even disrupt national energy and water grids. We are looking at a new kind of living memory system being constructed, that is generative and transformative.
Vast amounts of data of the built environment are continuously generated, stored, retrieved, updated, edited, and resaved – a seemingly endless cycle of coding and recoding of the past and the present, and of possible futures. Up to such a point, its material infrastructures even disrupt national energy and water grids. We are looking at a new kind of living memory system being constructed, that is generative and transformative.
Important questions we want to address include, but are not limited to:
How can we explore digital archives to think new imaginaries and develop new narratives about and by buildings?
In which visual and written languages are the new narratives and imaginaries created, and how are they organised?
Are there other kinds of narrative systems, non-visual, non-linguistic? Material and sensory ones? And what would that mean?
Who is developing the narratives, and for whom?
If post-humanism might (re-)direct the new data-landscapes, what sort of data buildings might come out of this shift?
And, how do data collections change architectural research and practice regarding the past, present, and future?
The conference is connected to ‘The New Open’, the new flagship project of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, led by Georg Vrachliotis and the Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture Group. It continues some of the themes of the 2020 conference: 'Repositioning Architecture in the Digital', in which we explored the emergence of the data society in the 1970s.
Dates
Deadline submissions of abstracts: 13 June 2022
Notification of selection: 4 July 2022
Submission of full draft papers (ca. 2000 words): 5 September 2022
Conference dates: 23-24 November 2022
Organising Committee
Dirk van den Heuvel (HNI, TU Delft)
Georg Vrachliotis (TU Delft)
Fatma Tanış (HNI, TU Delft)
Dennis Pohl (TU Delft)
Advisory Board
Tom Avermaete (ETH Zürich)
Hetty Berens (HNI)
Maristella Casciato (Getty Research Institute)
Carola Hein (TU Delft)
Georg Vrachliotis (TU Delft)
Locations
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft and Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
Selection
The selection is in the hands of the convenors Dirk van den Heuvel and Georg Vrachliotis, and advisory board of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre.
Criteria are relevance and focus in relation to the call, state-of-the-art research, an innovative and challenging approach, and an eloquent and evocative articulation of the proposition. Academics and practitioners alike are invited to submit. We are aiming for a diverse group of speakers, in terms of nationality, seniority and academic and institutional background, among other categories, so as to assure a productive and lively exchange of knowledge.
