Day 1, Group 2

Howard Schubert, Ivanka Iordanova, and Alexis Lenk, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), DOCAM Conservation & Preservation Committee, Montréal

Preserving and cataloguing digitally born architectural projects is a challenge that should be met quickly in order to ensure access to some (master-)pieces of contemporary architectural heritage. The case study on the Embryological House, a pioneering conceptual project conceived by Greg Lynn, recommends parallel methods for the conservation of this digital archive...

... It also identifies the cataloguing information required by curators, conservators, researchers and the general public. Interviewing the author was found to be extremely helpful for understanding his design process, and for defining cataloguing priorities. Another challenge of our project is the need to reconcile the CCA’s existing cataloguing system (TMS) with the new “digital” fields we propose to add. An essential curatorial concern is the need to perform a single “search” across physical and digital objects.

Howard Schubert is Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture where he oversees the archives of Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Cedric Price, Aldo Rossi, and James Stirling. He holds degrees in Economics, Art History, and Architectural History from McGill University and the University of Toronto.

Ivanka Iordanova graduated as an architect from the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Sofia, Bulgaria. For the last ten years, she has been specializing in digital architecture and taught studios and courses at the School of Architecture of the Université de Montréal. She recently finished writing her PhD thesis in this domain. As a research assistant at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, she works on the DOCAM project on the conservation and cataloguing of digitally born architectural projects.

Alexis Lenk is the Coordinator, Collections Documentation, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She graduated from the University of Leicester, with a Masters in Art Gallery Studies, and from McGill University, with an undergraduate degree in Art History.