Listen
Participate
Exchange
It is time to listen to the buildings, their stories, their needs, their vision.
Listening to the buildings
To address complex issues for preserving both cultural heritage and the future of the planet, we would like to give the floor to the buildings themselves to tell us their stories, and why not also their opinions. Shifting the perspective to the main protagonists of the SINCERE project, the Cultural Heritage buildings, challenges conventional authorship, and promotes nonhuman agency and unique connections with architectural materiality.
Exploring for example the history of a building takes an intriguing turn when we contemplate the notion of the building itself becoming a storyteller. Imagine a scenario where these architectural structures come to life, where their histories, memories, and experiences are shared through a conversational exchange. This concept aligns with the Actor-Network Theory, which emphasizes the agency and influence of nonhuman actants in shaping narratives and networks.
The different ways a building could talk are infinite. Sound, images, sensor measurements, stories, and other types of data and information can be curated, transformed, and mixed in different combinations to produce the voice of each building.
Participation
Having established the idea that a cultural heritage building has things to say that need to be listened to, the challenge of giving actually a voice to this building becomes a very creative and empowering process.
For example, the provocative question “if this buildings could talk what it would say?” can stimulate the co-identification of local needs and pressures with key local stakeholders and actors, and fostering of collaboration among stakeholders, local communities, and decision-makers, to advocate for urgently needed actions on climate change across the SINCERE pilot sites, and beyond.
Having these voices being recorded on dedicated digital media platforms, e.g., a web blog for each building given a voice, and then put together in the form of a collection or even an imaginary dialogue between buildings can further amplify those voices and allow coalitions and joining of forces, very difficult to achieve otherwise.
This is the role of the building stories platform, a sort of Facebook for buildings!
The building-stories platform
Building stories is imagined as an open federated digital platform, which will aggregate content created and disseminated independently by each building. The buildings will be personified and run its own separate blog and knowledge base, in 2 languages, the local language and in English. The English versions will be the ones collected through the RSS protocol and filtered through appropriate tagging at the federated platform, which will be implemented according to NetHood’s Really Simple Federation concept.
Having separated sites hosted on permanent domain names of the corresponding host institutions will ensure the long-term sustainability and impact. It will also allow for the integration of similar content from external projects which will be invited to participate and why not build a global alliance, the “United Buildings Alliance” in a similar spirit with the Parliament of Things by Bruno Latour.
