About the project
Located at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Provenance Projected. Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity develops conceptual and methodological models for investigating the social, material, and historical lives of buildings and their future potentials.
Situated in the distinctly multidisciplinary field of architecture (architectural history and theory, preservation, landscape architecture, urbanism, technology, and artistic practices), and involving experts from anthropology, art history, art, and the digital humanities, we theorize and demonstrate a new operative field through comprehensive studies of specific buildings and their materials.
Although no object lasts forever, provenance in art and archaeology typically implies that the integrity of an artefact relies on endurance, even permanence. Architecture is all about fluctuating interests, change, use, the passage of time, deterioration, maintenance, alteration, and multiple temporal regimes. Here, questions of autonomy, authenticity, authentication, movement, migration, and circulation need to be explored on a different plane, employing diverse epistemologies. In the field of architecture, provenance should be understood as a cyclic and multi-trajectorial phenomenon rather than as a linear, retrospective documentation. Provenance Projected deals with buildings not as static objects but as flexible, networked, and co-authored entities with rich social biographies and complex afterlives.
Provenance enables the idea of a building as a nexus of cultural, material, social, technical, and geopolitical practices, and prompts a reexamination of topics spanning from material procurement and real estate to historical reconceptualization and practical transformation work. Buildings are living archives; repositories of material history and social life, and sources to understand the origins, elements, material fabrics, use, sentiment, and public debates that make up a building’s provenance. Provenance Projected reconsiders core cultural and aesthetic concepts such as origins, authorship, ownership, legitimacy, copyright, authenticity, authentication, patina, collective memory, crises, uses, abuses, and trajectories of emotions.
Buildings are unruly and ever-changing entities. They consist of materials with different life expectancy and environmental impact, their purpose might be outmoded, and they cannot (and should not) be protected to the same extent as artworks or ancient artefacts. With the architectural object placed center stage, Provenance Projected articulates new ways of operationalizing architectural values and strategies for the reuse of buildings within a circular economy.