Baby, What’s ROM? The Architectural Historian as Retro-Gamer

In his 2017 essay “Inside the Black Box,” architectural historian Bernard Colenbrander raised concern of a sea change in architectural historical research methodologies. Colenbrander, then chair of the Eindhoven University of Technology’s department of architectural history and theory, had interviewed a set of prominent archivists in the field and came to the conclusion that the traditional tools for historical research in architecture were not enough to study the periods after the shift to digital production. According to Colenbrander, because many buildings after 1990 were designed using various specialized software, architectural design had “become a mysterious activity that is beyond the understanding of outsiders.” Although architecture has long been an esoteric and introverted discipline, little outside technical expertise has been required to appreciate the drawings and sketches that constitute the design process. However, where once physical media would provide the evidence and documentation of an architectural act, after the digital turn this evidence is now buried in hard drives as files and data that require many more layers of interpretation than paper documents. For scholars researching recent eras of architectural production, this poses a problem of accessibility-simply having access to files-as well as expertise-experience using the software required to open such files.