Archive Z

Synthetic Memory. Digital Decay and Speculative Reconstructions of Zaha Hadid's Archival Fonds

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A collaborative doctoral research with the Zaha Hadid Foundation, funded by Techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. 

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This thesis investigates how digital archives generate synthetic memory, reframing artefacts as fluid agents in shaping meaning. By establishing advanced indices for digital material, the study seeks to enable dynamic, multi‑layered interpretations of architectural records beyond fixed narrative structures. It examines the distinctive challenges of born-digital fonds, calling for a conceptual shift in addressing this type of material that moves beyond an act mimetic of the traditional archival practices.

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This research analyses Vision for Madrid (1992) and the Phaeno Science Centre (1998–2005) as critical sites for understanding the challenges of preserving digital architectural archives. Positioned on either side of the Zaha Hadid Architects’ transition from analogue methods to early computation, these projects expose the difficulties of compiling, linking, and interpreting multi‑layered digital registers. The study argues that Hadid’s novel design practices cannot be grasped through flat archival surfaces alone - such as writing surfaces (text), architectural surfaces (drawings/paper) or digital surfaces (screens and digital representations); instead, they require archival translations capable of registering processual, multi-scalar, and computational traces. 

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By positioning digital decay as a condition of obsolescence, the research foregrounds the inherent fragility of born‑digital objects. These synthetic entities—opaque, encapsulated, and layered through successive translations of code—function as ‘objects without a skin’; dispersed, unstable, and perceptible only through intermittent, glitch‑like traces that are continually at risk of disappearance or partial revival. Rather than treating decay as a deficit, the thesis frames it as a productive condition that reveals how digital objects should be described (glossary), captured (images), and engaged with (diorama). In this sense, digital decay operates as a conceptual mechanism, algorithmic, curatorial, and interpretative, through which absence in the archive can be negotiated, repaired, or reimagined. Their instability requires forensic and archaeological approaches that assemble approximations from surviving traces: software residues, hardware dependencies, metadata, and fragmentary geometries. The methodology unfolds through three modes: projective (inferring from absence, where no file survives), extractive (drawing out residual data), and generative (building new behaviours from partial or unstable fragments), each responding to distinct archival gaps.

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Synthetic Memory makes several original contributions to knowledge, historicising the computation in architecture by revealing hidden narratives of the ‘digital’ in the works of Zaha Hadid and her studio in the early 1990s, bringing new archival evidence; it advances the idea of digital architectural humanities and proposes various unique prototypes to displaying absence, drifts and reappearances of decayed objects; through multidimensionality and interplaying between analogue and their digital dependencies.