No. 12The sources

The polysemy of the word "source" is deeply rooted in the Latin term "fons," meaning spring or origin. Its definition is simultaneously linked to the existence of a constant support and to the flow of the changing water that emanates from it. It is in this latter condition of liquidity where research endeavors drink. The discussion of the fluid nature of knowledge sources is fundamental to understanding the processes of forming statements in relation to any discipline.

In the case of architecture, its more traditional history was dedicated to transforming the monuments of the past into documents, verbalizing everything that their materiality and composition were capable of transmitting tacitly. With the advances of the printing press, the first alphabetic or alphanumeric documents came to be accompanied by images, and their massive 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 legacy had established typographic written sources as cardinal points in the construction of knowledge, displacing others. In this sense, Michel Foucault pointed out how modern history had turned all those documents into the new monuments and proposed the metaphorical transformation of this into an "archaeology of knowledge" that would foster a critical encounter with that monumentalized documentary heritage. From the second half of the 20th century, other ways of approaching the past encouraged the questioning of this hegemony, and, to the radical changes introduced by the themes and methodologies of postmodern research, was added the search for alternative sources to the written ones, shown to be insufficient to address the new historiographical currents and interdisciplinary cultural studies, such as gender studies. This phenomenon, qualified by the French historian Jacques Le Goff as "the documentary revolution," allowed for the consideration of painting, images, orality, etc., as sources with reliable information about any object of analysis in question, including architecture itself.

This volatility of sources, both 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 thought, and more recently has emphasized the consequences of what he has called the leap "from the alphabet to the 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 data that inevitably contaminate the results.

If knowledge is derived from information, and this, in turn, from data, it is now more relevant than ever to ask about the sources that have nourished and/or nourish the logic of this syntagm. 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 how they all maintain their links with architecture, our primary source par excellence, because in times of such uncertainty it is convenient to remember the obvious.