Socioplastics 11801 Buildings Have More Than One Past
Architectural history takes shape through labels, exhibitions, drawings and accounts of what a building represents. StratumAuthoring treats these descriptions as layers that actively organise historical understanding. A public complex may first be classified as modernist infrastructure, later as postmodern heritage, and then as an asset for climate adaptation. Each account selects evidence, assigns value and makes particular interventions imaginable. Charles Jencks’s histories of postmodern architecture make stylistic and cultural shifts legible through named periods. Reinhold Martin situates architecture within organisational, media and technological systems. Their different approaches show why a building’s history includes the frameworks through which it has been interpreted. The same structure can be valued as a civic service, a formal experiment, a corporate instrument or a resource for environmental transition. Those accounts shape preservation, funding and future use. A building dossier could bring these layers together through successive drawings, catalogues, policy documents, conservation reports and public descriptions. For each account, it would record its author, date, audience, selected evidence and proposed action. A comparison would show which material and political relations became visible at each moment, and how current decisions inherit earlier classifications. Residents, designers, custodians and public agencies could add evidence to the sequence. StratumAuthoring gives architectural history a method for recording how interpretations accumulate and affect the building’s afterlife. It allows a present description to guide action while keeping earlier frameworks available for examination. The result is a layered account in which the building’s material transformations and editorial history can be read together. A timeline of descriptions can therefore clarify why a material intervention seemed necessary at one moment and how its rationale relates to earlier public values.
REFERENCES
Jencks, C. (1977) The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. London: Academy Editions.
Martin, R. (2003) The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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