Buildings are unruly and ever-changing entities. They consist of materials with different life expectancies, their purpose might be outmoded, and they cannot (and should not) be protected to the same extent as artworks or ancient artefacts. This special issue of Future Anterior deals with buildings not as static objects with fixed boundaries, but as flexible, networked, and co-authored entities with rich social biographies and complex afterlives.
While provenance traditionally documents the chronological history of objects in circulation, we propose to transpose the eighteenth-century concept from discourses on art, archaeology, and ethnographica into architecture. Provenance typically implies that the integrity of an artefact relies on endurance, even permanence. But no object lasts forever. Buildings are a nexus of cultural, material, social, technical, geopolitical practices, and varied interests.
Buildings can be referenced, replicated, adapted, moved, destroyed, or fragmented; fragments might take on new lives as collected objects, (down-cycled) material, or (up-cycled) spolia.
This issue will theorize and demonstrate a new operative field that considers how architecture, fragments, and building materials are distributed, appropriated, altered, reinvented and evaluated according to various settings, ideals and ethics. We encourage the reconsideration of core cultural and aesthetic concepts such as: origins, authorship, ownership, legitimacy, copyright, authenticity, authentication, patina, collective memory, crises, uses, and abuses. We also aim to recharge the temporality of the concept: architectural provenance can be a dynamic phenomenon, a forward-bound, creative instrument for change, applicable to understanding lost, present, and future potentials of buildings. We invite contributions that consider architectural provenance within a circular economy and re-examine topics spanning from material procurement and real estate to historical reconceptualization and practical transformation work.
Topics to explore can include, but are not limited to historical or contemporary processes of construction or adaptation; the provenance of an idea or material; reflections on the aesthetic traditions of provenance in regard to architecture; monuments, landscapes, real estate, property; provenance as a tool in the validation of particular objects/histories and the rejection of others.
Guest editors: Alena Rieger, Simon Mitchell, Mari Lending
