Documenting spatial and built environments
The Archives de la construction moderne (Acm) preserve and organize original documents — plans, models, photographs, technical files, correspondence — produced by actors in architecture, civil engineering, and territorial planning, but also by photographers, publishers, and other professionals connected to the built environment. These archival holdings contain technical, spatial, and social data, and bear witness to the processes of design, decision-making, construction, and transformation of the built environment.
They cover a wide range of issues: urban dynamics, networks and infrastructures, techniques, materials and building cycles, policies and social conditions of the built environment, planning in urban, peri-urban or mountain areas, representations of the territory, climate issues, as well as project governance.
Archives as information systems
Rooted in the fields of Information Science and Archival Science, the Acm consider archives not as a mere collection of historical documents, but as structured information systems. Each document contains raw data — textual, graphic, technical — as well as relational metadata (hierarchical relationships, production contexts, inter-file connections). A document becomes fully operative when placed within a coherent overall structure, which can be queried at multiple scales.
Systems, standards, and interoperability
The core of our work here — beyond preservation and access — lies precisely in this: structuring these information systems according to international standards, and making the corpus accessible, searchable, usable, and interoperable over time through standardized formats.
The inventories we produce thus function as genuine documentary datasets, usable in research, modeling, or visualization environments — even when working with analogue materials.
Structuring to enable inquiry
By ensuring the preservation, structuring, and accessibility of these complex data sets, the ACM provide a critical resource for research, teaching, and interdisciplinary projects led by the ENAC Faculty and EPFL.