Digital and Immaterial Museums of Architecture

From the small scale collections of dusty architectural material that were often stored in some room in an architecture school or museum of art, through the 1960s, when the idea of architecture as an object of display and as a curating discipline emerged, the idea of exhibition as a medium to understand the importance of design culture has constantly evolved. The traditional exhibition formats of original drawings hanged on the walls of museum spaces, photographs of buildings illustrated inside galleries and static arrangements of stalls supporting models has been rapidly supplanted by immersive installations and pavilions in which the narratives behind the exhibited objects could be met, interrogated and experienced. The emergence of the technological advancements in digital architecture at the end of 1980s’ and the beginning of 1990s’ drastically and permanently detached architecture and its exhibited indexes from the material place and new terms slipped into the practice of displaying architecture - digitization, multimedia, installation, interaction, interpretation, interviews, non-linear navigation, process-driven curatorial strategies, and collective culture. In addition, the question of memory of architecture in the digital age led institutions, like schools and museums of architecture, to think about the idea of a digital archaeology and collection. This book examines the global tendency of developing immaterial museums of architecture and digital indexes. Through structural and narrative analyses of some major immaterial museums, it explores the displacement of architecture - from the analog space to the digital one - and assesses the impacts of this transference on user experience through the perspective of post-digital humanities. In particular, it studies the non-linear interactive strategies of digital exhibition and acknowledges the narrative possibilities of the digital tools of the 3.0 era in the development of interactive online indexes.