Australian Architecture Museum: How can we save artefacts? This research imagines an optimistic architecture that salvages lost or destroyed artefacts, while confronting the psychological tension that arises from excessive accumulation.
The archive’s movements remain concealed yet continuous. It preserves not through monumentality but motion, its repetitive mechanical systems turning the archive into logistical shadow, detached from its origins as vault.
The columbarium is driven by the same compulsion that shapes archive fever: the need to preserve, to hold onto what is vanishing, to delay the final disappearance.
The Columbarium refrains from specifying the number or volumetric parameters of artifacts. Repeated cubic voids, meticulously arrayed and vertically stacked, gesture toward a containment logic that's simultaneously methodical and indeterminate.
Artifacts are organised into capsules, generating a controlled archival field. Each capsule safeguards documents, models, and material remnants otherwise susceptible to degradation, ensuring continued accessibility within a stable curatorial framework.
Nakagin capsules are cleared and repopulated with archives. They arrive as ordered packages, memory enclosed in compact rooms moving on rails, creating an itinerant archive dispersed through infrastructural motion.