The sources

Abstract

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 and variability of the water that emanates from it, and it is in the latter condition of liquidity that research work is based.

The discussion of the changing 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, textualising 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 with drawings, 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.