The tenth annual conference of the Research Center “Jaap Bakema” was held on November 22 and 23 at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (Delft University of Technology), as well as at the “Nieuwe” Institute – Museum of Architecture, Design, and Digital Culture in Rotterdam. The theme of the conference, “Architecture Archives of the Future”, explored the development of relationships between architectural practice, archival research, and curator practice.
Conference participants included professors, researchers, and doctoral students from around the world, from prestigious technological universities (MIT, Harvard, ETH Zurich, Politecnico di Milano, etc.).
ITS professor Jovana Tošić presented at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (TU Delft) as part of the “Social Media” session, with a paper titled “Continuity or Discontinuity of Architectural History: Digital Repositories and Social Media as Archives”. The discussion in the paper focuses on the intertwined and complex relationship between traditional archives on one hand (as fully controlled practices) and social media and digital repositories as innovative archiving practices (partially controlled) on the other.
The analysis of selected social media profiles suggests that guidelines for new archival moves can be found in the integration of traditional archival organization into the digital realm. In this way, social media users become historical archivists and curators of architecture’s future.
The main research questions raised at the conference were: How can archives and exhibitions be tools for innovation in education and research? How can the digital realm reconnect architectural design and practice with history? In short, how can we “futurize” the past and curate the future?
The papers have been fully published in the conference proceedings, both in digital and printed format.