(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Organizations outlive us. Though they are often legally treated as human individuals, and though they share and mobilize much of the agency of persons, their comparative longevity makes them significant as heritage artefacts. They are distributed objects, making them difficult to conceive of as ‘whole’, but architecture has, since the advent of ‘programme’ as a central concern, been in the service of producing images of organizational structures in the form of buildings. Organizational structures are represented by and through the architecture to which they give form. There is, however, a fair amount of content that is not represented by buildings, but that may nonetheless be able to take the form of ‘built artefacts’. Examples of such content include (but are not limited to); curricular structures, hierarchical relationships in human resources, changes in use patterns over time, and policy development and implementation. An exploration of the modelling, mapping, representation and manifestation of a selection of those artefacts that currently fall in the void between building design on the one hand, and the organizations that commission buildings on the other, forms the backdrop of this paper. Digital and virtual representations of architecture invite us to imagine new directions for architectural practice that go beyond the design of buildings, while remaining located in the representation of space, the manifestation of aesthetically accessible objects, and the management of information. This paper will describe attempts at developing representations of organizational structures undertaken in postgraduate programmes (MArch and DArch) at the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design at the Tshwane University of Technology. The aim is to make suggestions for expanding the influence and capacity of architectural practice, while developing intuitively accessible tools with which to grasp the forces which have historically given form to our world, and continue to do so in the present.