Archiving born digital material
David Peyceré
EXPLORING THE FIRST BORN-DIGITAL
HOLDINGS RECEIVED AT THE CITÉ DE
L’ARCHITECTURE IN PARIS
The Archives Centre of the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine has collected, among
some 400 architectural holdings, only two which contain digital files produced by the
practices.
So far, the Archive Centre has only been able to draw exploratory missions on these two
holdings. Funding for the actual description of the holdings – the next step – still has to be
found.
The first mission (on Pierre Riboulet’s archive) dates back from the Gau:di project and has
already been presented to the ICAM colleagues at the Venice and Athens conferences
(2004, 2006). The second one has been going on irregularly for three years about the
Adrien Fainsilber archive. A grant from the State administration of Archives allowed us to
make a survey during the school year 2013-2014, which ended last July, and we are
considering applying for a new grant to continue the study in 2015.
Adrien Fainsilber is best known for his conversion of a former slaughterhouse of the 60s
into the Cité des sciences in Eastern Paris district La Villette, in the early 80s, with the
adjacent spheric movie theatre La Géode. Earlier, he made ambitious urban planning (not
much implemented) in the late 60s and built two large university complexes near Paris in a
brutalist vein; later, he designed a large number of public buildings, never getting back to
the popularity and self-evidence of the Cité des sciences. The digital files in the archive of
his practice were created mainly between the early 90s and year 2003. The practice used
a software which is important in the history of architectural programs, still maintained
today but not so widespread, Arc+.
A private company has been put in charge of defining the best possible way to ingest the
files, store the metadata, describe the files (in native and output forms) in the in-house
database of the Archives Centre, and give access to them. Right from the beginning of the
mission in Sept. 2013, it became clear that, while the company was bringing a knowledge
that nobody at the Archives Centre has (IT and architectural training), on the other hand
they couldn’t work out by themselves such issues as the harvesting of file metadata in the
database. A very close working process has thus arisen, with much more active work than
expected for the Archives staff (namely their IT manager).
The survey leads to the following remarks and conclusions:
Arc+, basically a 3D tool, was used by the firm as a simple 2D drafting tool. We now
access the files through a much more recent version of the software.
The software (or at least the way it was (mis-)used within the Fainsilber practice) creates a
specific intricacy of compound files, in which some components prove difficult to retrieve
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while they are necessary for the file to be consistently read; a special attention to be paid to
the ‘libraries’ of the program proved an issue specific to Arc+.
The loss of plotter and/or presentation files makes that only a trained architect (not a
regular archivist) will be able to produce correct output files (which we expect to be a
recurrent problem with further archives).
A long and patient study has been dedicated to the innumerable duplicates, wearing or not
identical names, in search of a method to identify them and to get rid of them before
converting the files.
Indeed, a double conversion process has been deemed useful, but only for those drawings
that can be considered presentation drawings.
After much discussion, it was decided that the original files will be stored in their Arc+
version, so that they can be opened again ‘in case of need’ as long as Arc+ will be
supported and a compatible digital environment will be present; but that, in parallel, two
outputs of the presentation drawings will be created and stored, in DXF (not DWG as first
intended) and in PDF/A format. The PDF output is expected to be suitable for typical
architecture history researches (the PDF), while the DXF is supposed to be useful for
further architectural use of the drawings.
Another problem was the conversion tools, since Arc+ does not directly offers the
possibility of creating DXF files, so an intermediary DWG file has to be created and then
converted. Although complicated, this process doesn’t seem to generate much waste of
time, nor significant losses in the information.
A number of complications arose from our insistence, at the Archive Centre, to monitor the
whole process from within our database, which must in the end be the access tool between
the archival inventory (contained in it) and the digital files. As said earlier, the IT company
wasn’t familiar enough with the elaborate database of the Cité Archives Centre, which
explains some time and toil spent. But they also claimed that our strong will to use the
database for all the steps of the description and access is in part not relevant and makes
things more complicated.
We may now apply – with the same company – for a new grant which should give us time
to complete the actual description and management of some digital records of Fainsilber.
Then we will know if the company is right pretending we should leave the database for
some of the steps. We will also, at last, have an idea of the length and the cost of the
process once the various choices are made. And perhaps, at that point, will some of the
Fainsilber holding be classified, converted, and, who knows, used by a researcher.
David Peyceré is a senior archives curator, head of the Centre d’archives d’architecture du XXe siècle, Cité
de l’architecture et du patrimoine since 1995. He previously worked on contemporary archives for the
National Archives. He worked on the digital archives section of the European Gaudi programme (20022008).
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Archiving born digital material
Ann Whiteside
Harvard University Graduate School of
Design
e-architectural documentation: methods
and tools for preservation
FACADE: preservation of architectural materials and preparing for archiving
contemporary architectural documentation.
In this case study, I propose to discuss the FACADE research project that took place at
MIT from 2007-2009, and an ensuing project conducted by the MIT Libraries and the
Harvard University Graduate School of Design during the past two years.
In 2007, the MIT Libraries, with the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, began
work on an IMLS-funded grant to research methods and best practices for capturing,
describing, managing, preserving, and making available CAD models created by architects
during the building design process.
FACADE investigated the complexities of acquiring, processing, archiving, preserving,
and disseminating digital materials produced during major architectural projects. The work
focused primarily on 3-D CAD models of buildings, but also included the myriad other
files that are generated during such projects (documents, images, videos, spreadsheets,
websites, and so on). During the course of the project we acquired the digital files of
several recent buildings designed by noted architects who rely on 3-D CAD modeling, and
we processed these collections into a prototype digital archive based on the DSpace
institutional repository (or digital archive) software.
Beyond the scope of the original proposed deliverables, but necessary to process the
extensive collections received from architectural firms to the specifications of our target
audience, was the creation of a workbench-like software system for use by archivists. The
workbench-like tool allows staff to apply metadata tags and other designations (e.g.
selected objects) to the tens of thousands of files received from a firm.
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In addition to what we learned about the archiving of digital documentation, we
encountered two particular issues that have bearing on how we think about archiving this
kind of data going forward. One is the legal landscape and the other is how to develop
software that can easily be adopted by the larger community of architectural archives.
In 2012, the GSD and the MIT Libraries received a Harvard Library Lab grant to further
develop the workbench tool created in the first FACADE project. As of this writing, the
tool is under construction, we have seen a demo of a prototype, and it looks extremely
useful. By icam 17, the tool will have moved from test to production, and workflows for
archiving architectural documentation will be in development.
Ann Whiteside is Librarian/Assistant Dean for Information Resources in the Frances Loeb Library at the
Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The focus of her work is expanding digital resources in close
collaboration with scholars, digital library collection building, and the use of technology to support teaching
and research.
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Archiving born digital material
Kurt Helfrich, Chief Archivist and
Collections Manager, British
Architectural Library
RIBA’s “Archiving the Digital”
Conference—Lessons Shared, Lessons
Learned, and Tasks Ahead
In October 2013 the RIBA’s British Architectural Library hosted a two-day conference
“Archiving the Digital: Current Efforts to Preserve Design Records” to assess how digital
design materials are being managed and preserved. Speakers included staff from Aberrant
Architecture, Bath University (UKOLN), the Building Research Establishment (BRE), the
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Cité d’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Glasgow School
of Art, Harvard University, the Heatherwick Studio, John McAslan + Partners, the
National Gallery of Art (USA), and the Victoria & Albert Museum. The event brought
together experts from Europe and North America to share emerging best practices and
discuss methods for continued collaborative work to preserve digital design records.
Presentations ranged from practical/scaleable OAIS protocols for ingesting digital design
records created by the National Gallery of Art’s internal Design/Facilities Management
department to the CCA’s Archaeology of the Digital project that is collecting
contemporary digital design records from international practices to manage and preserve
them in a public-facing museum setting. Other talks reviewed the “history” of digital
design records archiving projects and their outcomes (beginning with the Art Institute of
Chicago and the GAUDI Programme in 2003), discussed the current state-of-play in
preserving these records using the Digital Preservation Coalition’s 2013 report Preserving
Computer-Aided Design (CAD), and provided a glimpse into current archiving challenges
posed by 3-D Modelling files and BIM.
Contemporary British design practices were included presenting discussions about the
scope, content and preservation of digital design archives from current office records
management perspectives, the ongoing development of “virtual” design practices, and the
changes in curatorial techniques that arise from working with analogue and digital objects.
Lively Q&A sessions sparked discussions providing important insights by the various
speakers, which ultimately raised more questions than provided answers. The conference
focused attention on the need for an effective forum/platform to allow the makers and
preservers of these digital design records to interact and share information. Despite
invitations to participate, the lack of representation from Computer-Aided Technologies
(CAx) software firms like Autodesk was disappointing especially given the proprietary
nature of these emerging technologies and the need for open-source file formats to ensure
long-term preservation of original (versus normalized) files for collecting archives.
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The British Architectural Library used the conference to assess its own project to ingest,
manage, preserve and publish digital design records. Like most of its fellow ICAM
members the Library has been acquiring digital design records and creating digital
surrogates for analogue objects for almost a decade. Its collecting context for these records
remains hybrid with materials arriving in both analogue and digital formats. Our pressing
challenges include collecting and selection criteria/strategies, rights transferral, software
licensing and migration, metadata standards, and developing a digital asset management
system that will work in tandem with the Library’s online catalogue and image database to
publish these born-digital records within an archival context. Progress is being made and
this talk will present our current efforts to collect digital records and make them available
for users.
Kurt Helfrich is Chief Archivist and Collections Manager for the RIBA’s British Architectural Library. A
certified archivist and architectural historian, he was curator of U.C. Santa Barbara’s Architecture & Design
Collection, before joining the British Architectural Library in 2008.
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Archiving born digital material
Sophie de Caigny
Preservation of hybrid architectural
archives.
Case-study from the Centre for Flemish
Architectural Archives
The Centre for Flemish Architectural Archives (CVAa) forms part of the Flemish
Architecture Institute (VAi). It assists archival institutions and museums in taking care of
their architectural collections. As most architectural institutes, the CVAa is confronted
with the increasingly important role of digital design processes in architectural practice. As
a result, there is an urgent need to develop a strategy specifically tailored to the long-term
preservation of digital architectural archives that enables later research, as well as cultural
and educational activities. Since 2009 on, the CVAa undertook several steps in order to
find solutions for the question of preserving digital born architectural records:
In Phase 1 (2009-2010), a digital depot was developed using open source software and
international standards
Phase 2 (2011) saw research conducted into the creation and the management of digital
archival records within architectural firms
Phase 3 (2012-2013) involved a study of the CAD-software and files that are used within
architectural firms and their preservation
Phase 4 (2014 - ongoing) focuses on document management in architectural firms. What
can architects do to make an essential selection of digital records and to preserve
these for the longer term?
Phase 5 (2014-2015 - ongoing) processes two (complex) hybrid architectural archives in
order to study questions of selection, migration, ingest and long term preservation
in a two different digital repositories. This phase is a collaboration with the
Architectural Archive of the Province of Antwerp and the University of Leuven.
The presentation will shortly address the five phases, and will elaborate mostly on the
results of Phase 4. Inspired by the methodology of selection and preservation of the digital
key outputs in a design process, developed by Kristin Fallon for the Art Institute in
Chicago, and in very close collaboration with Martine Demaeseneer Architects (MDMA),
the CVAa is working on best practices for the management of hybrid architectural
archives. The presentation addresses issues such as selection, arrangement, migration and
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workflows, by focusing on one case study project. This is the Bronx Theatre in Brussels,
the MDMA project that was one of the five finalists of the Mies van de Rohe Award in
2011.
Sofie De Caigny is coordinator of the Centre for Flemish Architectural Archives (CVAa) at the Flemish
Architecture Institute (VAi) and assistant professor at the Design Faculty of the University of Antwerp. She
holds a PhD in architectural history of the KULeuven (BE) and a Master Degree of Cultural Management of
the University of Barcelona (ES). She published and curated exhibitions on dwelling culture, reconstruction
in Flanders and architectural archives.
ICAM17, abstract, David Peyceré • 9
Archiving born digital material
Emilie Retailleau and David Stevenson
The exhibition as an investigative tool.
Ingest and curatorial approaches to
Born-Digital material
The CCA’s history of acquiring digital material and addressing this from a curatorial perspective dates back
more than two decades. In recent years CCA’s efforts have intensified, and are presently immersed in a
variety of efforts surrounding the practice of acquiring, preserving, and making digital content available to
researchers. CCA is also historicizing and contextualizing architectural practice through the elaboration of
research dossiers, investigating history and theory on digital practice in architecture since the early 1970s to
the specificity of the profile of some major actors, young designers and technicians. The increasing
awareness of the richness of the field has suggested the production of a series of exhibitions and publications.
These efforts have generated the elaboration of a project denominated “Archaeology of the Digital” 1.
Greg Lynn is the curator of the project and has selected 25 projects to acquire (as donations), exhibit and
publish. These projects, in all their diversity, show how the use of the computer facilitated experimental
thinking in the creation of architecture between 1985 and 2005. It is the ambition of CCA to make these
projects available for research and by doing so, to learn how to deal with born-digital archives on a much
larger scale for the future, which inevitably includes more digital material. The first exhibition and
publication (2013) identified the earliest practices adopting computation to serve architectural ambitions that
predated, anticipated or led to the invention of digital technologies. The projects included in the second and
current exhibition Media and Machines share one thing in common: they extend what would be considered
an architectural object or environment beyond a mere building through the intensive use of digital tools. In
the projects presented in the galleries, architects looked to technology to shape new and unprecedented
experiences, in many cases approaching the digital as both a design medium and as media content to be
integrated into architecture.
Working on both exhibitions, the print publication and the e-publication series forced CCA to address
technical and critical issues regarding archival and exhibition practices, challenging the institution to adapt or
expand its methodologies in order to accommodate new forms of digital material. The difficulty in collecting
and displaying the material is emblematic of the questions that these projects posed for the discipline of
architecture in the 1990s and continue to pose today. The cultural landscape was very different at that time,
as both architecture and art rethought the edges and centres of their fields in light of the immersion,
interaction and immateriality made possible with digital media. As architects expanded the scope of their
design work into art and media practices, they explored an interest in addressing people in intelligent,
interactive environments along with the proposition that buildings should be active rather than passive.
In an ideal world, a collecting institution would have the workflow of receiving, ingesting, preserving and
cataloguing of material in place before it is made available for use. However, our reality was different and
possibly to a positive end. Working on Archaeology of the Digital has taught the team to work differently
and more creatively on the born digital material since the specific digital expertise that we needed was not
easily found.
1
Greg Lynn, curator of Archaeology of the Digital will present the project and the conceptual ideas behind it
as well as the current exhibition.
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While still discussing and testing standards and procedures (even testing different softwares), the
preservation team had to give access the material to the curatorial team. They had another reality: the reality
of a deadline of an opening or publication date. This required access to the original files, though copies (of
copies). In the presentation we will clarify the two simultaneous tracks that teams were working on:
curatorial, and also ingest, with each their specific problems, limitations, failures, and thankfully, successes.
For the Collections team the main focus has been to find software for digital file harvesting and forensics, file
processing, technical reporting and ultimately cataloguing and preservation. That software needs to connect
and fit in the IT-structure of the institution and it needs to communicate with other systems that are in place,
like the collection management system (TMS). Our presentation will address the problems that we have been
encountering, as well as our minor successes.
For the curatorial team it is crucial to understand the legacy of the work of an architect, to unravel the
different timelines in a project with different types of objects and documents related to this, and to compare
design strategies between architects and the project within the digital archives in order to develop a cultural
reconstruction.
Running these tracks simultaneously is problematic for different aspects in terms of timing and realities.
However, an unexpected by-product of this is that the exhibitions and publications of Archaeology of the
Digital has served as an investigative tool that has fed our understanding of the process and structures within
digital archives.
Émilie Retailleau has served as Curatorial Coordinator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture since 2010.
She has been working on the project Archaeology of the Digital for the last two years. She previously worked
as writer, editor and public facilitator at Fonds régional d'art contemporain du Centre in France.
David Stevenson works as a Conservator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. In addition to traditional
conservation practice, he maintains a focus on the preservation of digital and audio-visual material. He holds
an MA in Digital Heritage from the University of Leicester School of Museum Studies.