YEAR:

2026


TYPE:

Peer-reviewed publication. Published in Thresholds (2026) (54): 189–202.

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An otherworldly species breaches our servers in search for blueprints of our modern world, only to find thousands of Revit models versioned in agonizingly iterative succession... Our extraterrestrial researchers consult Earth’s calendar and discover, perplexingly enough, that this immense effort in precise technical banality is occurring at a critical juncture in earth’s recent history—that of climate breakdown.

Why does this society insist on safekeeping this bottomless pit of digital ephemera, in seeming ignorance of their own climatic demise? This essay examines architecture’s digital footprint in the climate crisis: from storing the sheer volume of born-digital architectural records in the present, to the potentially radical priorities and materialities of the record drawing, and to architecture’s legacy systems, in the double sense of obsolete software persisting in the present and of the hubris of everlasting digital media.