Unfolding the Archive: New Dimensions of Access to Born-digital Architecture Collections is a research project conducted by Ania Molenda at Nieuwe Instituut between 2024-2025. It explored how affordances of born-digital design records could improve access to contemporary architecture collections in ways that are dynamic and networked, multimodal, and multivocal. Born-digital architecture archives present unique opportunities to study and interpret the intertwined relationship between built environment, digital cultures, and social change. However, due to technical limitations of the proprietary software, most of their contents remain inaccessible to the public at large, posing limits to both research and discovery. In the Dutch National Collection for Architecture and Urban Planning, where this research was conducted, currently as much as 60% of the collection is inaccessible.
Unfolding the Archive uses select properties of Computer Aided Design (CAD) Drawing (DWG) and Drawing Interchange Format (DXF) as a dominant CAD file formats found in architecture practice from their introduction in the early 1980s throughout the 2000s. It proposes new conceptual approaches to access archives including CAD archival records based on their embedded metadata. By doing so it allows the users to form a better understanding of born digital archives as data, not a collection of individual files. It allows to understand the relationships between archival objects and better contextualise archives, providing insights into the structure and unique characteristics of individual collections, that are impossible to see with a naked eye and without specialist technical knowledge. On the most direct level it aims to stimulate users to engage with born digital collections on the level of relations and help them to identify research questions prior to requesting files. It also hopes for creating new insights that would otherwise only be available to researchers with highly technical knowledge or significant funding and through that contribute to democratisation of research with born digital architecture collections, making them more multivocal.
Drawing from the concept of generous interfaces, the three prototypes developed within this project aim to open ways for researchers to study the history of contemporary design practices and their social implications in ways that go beyond the structure of the catalogue. Through a multimodal approach, each prototype focuses on a distinct digital property: the creation date, the file layer structure, and the geometry information. These different modes were selected to test if they can enable different readings supported by different forms of data visualisation. This first collection of prototypes, which undeniably excludes many aspects due to time and scope of the research, allows to make the complexity, interconnectedness, non-linearity, and collaboration of the design process more visible and open for interpretation.
The project has been supported by NWO Museum Grant in 2023. It was conducted by the Dutch National Collection for Architecture and Urban Planning held by at Nieuwe Instituut by Ania Molenda as the primary investigator and Costas Papadopulos of Maastricht University as academic supervisor.
The prototypes were designed and developed by krisenstab as part of the research project.