Architectural repositories like archdaily, dezeen, divisare, emerged with the internet 2.0, have made possible the ‘democratization of visibility’, by which small platforms and/or architects can opt for great visibility previously only accessible to large structures. They offer a large amount of built and unbuilt projects everyday, as their sustainability is based on quantity instead of quality, creating a huge flow of information difficult to classify. These platforms have become the place where architectural knowledge is stored. They also make obsolete the traditional approaches based on chronological and geographical contexts, and establish a simplification based on the culture of the immediacy. These repositories are no more only dissemination tools but more and more inspiration sources for new developments, making the analysis of their influence nowadays relevant.
Today’s History of Architecture could be narrated through online repositories, as they are the place where a huge number of projects localized worldwide are stored, creating multiple asynchronous links between them. It is a provocative approach, but it also shows there is not only one history to be presented, but multiple, sometimes parallel, histories. We face a situation of dispersion, where the multiple theoretical contributions have to be made compatible, a very different context compared with the beginning of the 20th century.
Until now, research in the field of Architectural History has not applied the quantitative approach based on big data (and why not, AI). Also if creating a history of present architecture exclusively from digital sources has methodological flaws, new approaches, tools and strategies can be applied. Together with repositories, social networks have turned the user into a producer, editor and critic of architecture –often at the same time– and this is changing the traditional rules of architectural dissemination...
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