FORMAT FACTORY - AJ Online & AF Online : exploring new media
Magazine and Website
Format Factory is issued in print and displays selected pieces digitally. The project understands of the structure of the building as well as the structure of the website, architecture beside itself.
The relationship between the three-dimensional objects on the table and the two-dimensional drawings on the computer or television screen are transcribed into a visual index: the website.
Although the digitization of the analogue book is merely an act of reformatting, the electronic format presents the option of cross-referencing by hyperlinking words with html code language readable by any web browser. The interface is designed in correlation with the device which provides the technical process by which a certain type of content can be displayed.
The website is mainly designed to be scrolled, to search the navigation and presents content in a fragmented constellation, similar but more bound than Aby Waburg's Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-29).
Some parts can only be accessed given the subscription fee is paid. The visitor pays a certain amount to have the pleasure to absorb its content, ironically, as in the gallery.
The website allows to merge the horizontal and vertical plane in an image which is at once flattened and deep. The depth is experienced by travelling through consecutive virtual planes. Due to lack of time, the content of the project was fed into the structure of the website as objet trouve, following the layout of the Architect's Journal (but could equally have been Domus), to present the final version of the project to my audience and the tutors at the end of the year jury.
Cultural Memory
With regard to Aby Warburg, one can speculate that
the ''cultural memory'' is not only physically stored in the book but as much in the database.
Analogue and digital ''memory capsules'', such as the book or the website, do not exclude one another but
become part of the architecture. They do not necessarily kill the edifices, historical structures or buildings which used to be charged with symbolic meaning. Any storage facilities (buildings, vaults, archives, monuments, tablets, books) have claimed a shared status within the infrastructure of the city of the global village. Indeed the old dream of the city centre is has been
fragmented and a sense of desillusion impacts
our sense of orientation. Culture entails the notion of dispersion, both materially and psychologically. Hence it is ever more important to learn and speculate about past, current and future formats and their possibilities.
Marshall McLuhan's understanding of the seismic
cultural and neurological shifts which take place
with the advent of new technologies may help
the architect understand his evolving role in the
dissemination of ideas through format.
Utlimately, our educational models need to be
rethought in order to understand architecture as a
physical and invisible structure.
''You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says
the environment that man creates becomes
his medium for defining his role in it. The
invention of type created linear, or sequential,
thought,
separating thought from action.
Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and
action are closer and social involvement is
greater. We again live in a village. Get it?''
Marshall Mc Luhan, Quentin Fiore, The
Medium is the Massage, 1967