BACHELOR

Entwurf: 8/StS 06/V:A / 39

Studio Raum II focuses on institutional spaces. How do these spaces embody social rituals and rules and how are the latter formalized with their help? The institutional context of Karlsruhe provides the framework: BGH/KIT/BST/ZKM/HFG/BVG.

In the current semester, the studio focuses on the institution of the Archive and in particular on its ambivalent character as a hermetically sealed storage-space and as a public infrastructure.

The State Archive, the vessel of our cumulative memory, stores material from authorities, courts and their functional predecessors and makes it publicly accessible for unlimited time. The oldest documents in the State Archive Baden-Württemberg are medieval charters from the 9th century. Since then, the archive material has been growing exponentially and requires more and more storage space. Today, the State Archive stores approximately 320 shelf-kilometers of parchment and paper. At the same time, the archive is confronted with increasing digitalization, which promises the protection of valuable unique items as well as their access from anywhere ant any time.

The studio takes on the challenges of the current exponential growth of analog archival materials and the inherent promises of its digitalization in order to sound out the future social relevance of the archive as a public infrastructure.