VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

Architectural history is the material history of ideological form, as Henri Lefebvre reminds us, through the construction and articulation of our shared built environments. Always asymmetrical, the preservation of histories privileges the dominant, particularly the built form which requires large-scale manipulation of political and economic resources. How, then, can we cultivate and preserve alternate landscapes and promote an inclusive and egalitarian society? We believe that XR (eXtended Reality) provides a powerful new way of worldbuilding. Inspired by Lefebvre and Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, we utilize XR to identify historic absences in existing built environments, in order to unearth feminist spaces historically obfuscated and construct alternative futures born from our embodied experiences. Our grassroots community project, “Things I Wish to See,” demonstrates the productive potential of such inquiry. In close partnership with community members in a Bedouin village, this multi-year, co-created worldbuilding acts as a preservation tool, unearthing forgotten histories and buried landscapes. We look at how the virtual or “imagined” environments simultaneously re-historicize and reconstitute heretofore erased urban forms, particularly the untold stories of Bedouin women in the Middle East. We hope to show how XR enables a powerful form of virtual ethnography that animates suppressed narratives in a newly embodied built environment. We propose this new method that works to remap our phenomenological understanding and embodied experience of what it means to both live in, and adjacent to, historic societies in transition.