Call for Papers. VAD 12. The sources

The polysemy of the word source has its roots in the Latin word fons, which means spring or origin. Its definition is simultaneously linked both to the existence of a constant support and to the flow of the changing water that emanates from it, and it is in this latter condition of liquidity that research work is based. The discussion of the fluid nature of the sources of knowledge is fundamental to understanding the processes of formation of statements in relation to any discipline. In the case of architecture, its most traditional history was devoted to transforming the monuments of the past into documents, verbalising everything that their materiality and composition were capable of tacitly transmitting. With the advances of the printing press, the first alphabetical or alphanumeric documents came to be accompanied by images, and their mass mechanical copying introduced the paradigm shift that would lead one of the characters in Victor Hugo's nineteenth-century novel to predict the death of architecture.

Certainly, the Enlightenment heritage had established typographic written sources as the cardinal points in the construction of knowledge, displacing the others. In this sense, Michel Foucault pointed out how modern history had turned all those documents into new monuments and proposed the metaphorical transformation of this into an "archaeology of knowledge" that would encourage a critical encounter with that monumentalised documentary heritage. From the second half of the 20th century onwards, other ways of approaching the past encouraged the questioning of this hegemony and, in addition to the radical changes introduced by post-modern themes and research methodologies, there was a search for alternative sources to the written ones, which had proved insufficient to address the new historiographical currents and interdisciplinary cultural studies, such as gender studies. This phenomenon, described by the French historian Jacques Le Goff as "the documentary revolution", allowed painting, images, orality, etc. to be considered as sources with reliable information on any object of analysis in question, including architecture itself.

This fickleness of sources, quantitative and qualitative, has always been intimately related to the complexity of the media ecosystem in which they emerge, now exacerbated by the impact of the digital turn at the end of the century. Mario Carpo has masterfully evidenced the influence of changes in communication technologies on Western architectural thinking, and more recently he has emphasised the consequences of what he has called the leap

“from alphabet to algorithm“.

Indeed, in the current context, there is an infinity of data sources that 'feed' or 'train' different generative artificial intelligences to produce content (texts, graphics, images, videos, etc.). However, this disparity of sources, whose origin is often obscured, can provide outdated, erroneous and even biased and prejudiced data that inevitably contaminate the results.

If knowledge is derived from information and this, in turn, from data, today more than ever it is pertinent to ask ourselves about the sources that have nourished and/or nourish the logic of this syntagma. This new issue of VAD invites us to reflect on the value of these sources, the reliability they offer us and the changing condition of their supports, but also —let us not forget— to think about the way in which all of them maintain their links with architecture, our primary source par excellence, because in times of such uncertainty it is convenient to remember the obvious.

Submissions rules.
Check the SUBMISSIONS section to find out the procedure to follow to send the documentation.

Calendario.
Calendar.
Opening reception of articles: July 4, 2024.
Deadline for receipt of articles: September 30, 2024.
You can check the calendar in the ANNOUNCEMENT section.

Web.
All the information web.

Issue coordinated by Asunción Díaz-García.