The 2024 edition of the Virtual Fellowship Program invited applicants to put forward proposals as to what constitutes urgent architectural media today. Whether considering short-form documentary, lens-based image making, vellum drawings, or digital renderings researchers engaged with our Collection to surface diverse forms of “evidence” to support their claims about the forms and practices of representation that should be valued in contemporary architectural discourse.

The program investigates how the affordances of specific representational media position “urgency” across its social, environmental, economic, and political registers; for example, practices of colonial surveying across diverse geographies relied on the production of topographic maps to claim jurisdiction over territories; how the fire risk maps produced and used by corporate insurance companies can elide the negative effects of gentrification and for-profit zoning; or how Cedric Price used questionnaires to reflect the wide and diverse social dimensionality of a given project. In each case, the capacities of media to capture empirical realities and be captured by ideological and/or design positions reflects their potential to determine legal claims or other contexts for which “evidence” is of paramount importance.

Over the past decade, the work of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London has illuminated the relationships between the production of architectural media and the pursuit of evidentiary projects in conflict zones, migration justice, and data sovereignty movements. Following these lines of questioning, the 2024 Virtual Fellows were asked to study how a medium-specific analysis attentive to a close reading of contexts of production can shape how urgency is experienced and understood. Representational media, whether highly material and analog or those living in the “cloud,” are the primary means through which designers reflect on the most pressing issues of our times. This reflexive approach aligns with the CCA’s focus on film as a curatorial tool and the documentary as a genre to highlight how spatial interventions illuminate and make malleable social norms around housing, aging, and family arrangements.

The Fellows undertook research that put the CCA Collection into conversation with material held elsewhere to address a range of topics that put forward specific definitions and framings of “urgency” and the media on which they are built and depend. These topics could include:

• The relationships between design and building evidence
• Reliability, fakes, doubling, and other questions related to architectural evidence
• Historically specific and contingent understandings of architectural media
• Explorations of the social construction of urgency and its reliance on media technologies
• Considerations of “documentary” as a film/photo genre of relevance to architectural discourse
• Multimedia projects, digital or otherwise, and boundaries/connections across media