SCOPE and EaaSI: Software Emulation and the Future of Architectural History
An archival revolution began unfolding a few years back at the Canadian Centre for Architecture alongside three blockbuster exhibitions featuring materials from the CCA’s Archaeology of the Digital collection.1 As the center amassed a vast number of files across twenty-five architectural projects from the heyday of the digital (that is, from the end of the 1980s through the early 2000s), collections staff began to set up a search-and-access system to make this digital archival material available to scholars.2 This has been an ambitious project. Rather than using the relatively simple approach of making only easily viewable files available (e.g., by turning everything into PDFs), the archivists have taken the much more technically challenging route of reanimating historical files (digital drawings, models, documents, and so on) within re-created historical computing environments that open in a seamless manner right on the scholar’s desktop—a method called “software emulation.”The two main components of the CCA’s system are SCOPE, a search interface, and EaaSI, providing software emulation through the search interface. SCOPE is up and running now in the CCA’s study room, allowing anyone who visits to access the CCA’s roughly six terabytes of born-digital material. Testing of the system with EaaSI integrated is expected to begin in January 2022, according to Martien de Vletter, associate director of the collection at the CCA.Software emulation is particularly important for historians concerned with how technics affect design.3 How, for example, have digital modeling and parametric manipulation, or older techniques like photography and orthographic drawing, affected the ways in which architects have conceptualized and carried out their practice? This line of questioning becomes especially tricky when software is involved. For at least twenty years now, virtually every aspect of architects’ practice, from modeling and drafting to visualization and communication, has relied on the use of software platforms that were themselves undergoing perpetual change. Moreover, these changes in software have frequently given rise to new design agendas. Put bluntly, software has now become an indispensable form of evidence for architectural historians.“Let’s study software,” you may say. But here historians face a dilemma. Software disappears. The problem has to do with the nature of software itself. Software runs on specialized hardware and in conjunction with other software applications—specific versions of operating systems, drivers, and dependencies. Computational platforms and their software resemble fragile ecosystems: remove a keystone species (or a key hardware component), and the whole system ceases to function. Inert software is arguably not software at all—what really matters is not the code but the interaction between a user and an interactive environment as it plays out fleetingly across the screen.The situation is not hopeless for architectural historians, however. Just as biomes can be re-created in controlled terraria, computational environments can be preserved as “virtual machines” and reanimated through software emulation. Obsolete physical hardware is discarded in favor of virtual hardware—that is, hardware emulated by software. Imagine booting up a ca. 1995 computer on whatever computer you currently use, and being greeted by the rolling hills and blue sky of the default Windows 95 background. You might then open up an old copy of form·Z, a digital modeling software package popular at the time, to view Asymptote’s New York Stock Exchange project from 1997, a work in the CCA’s collection.4Robust emulation environments of this sort have been available for many years, in both commercial and open-source options (e.g., VMware and VirtualBox, respectively). Large-scale computing environments such as those run by Google and Amazon make extensive use of virtual machines. Portals into remotely run virtual machines can be made available over the Internet, which turns out to be a great way to make old video games and Internet art accessible to wide audiences. For example, Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology (https://anthology.rhizome.org) works fabulously on this principle.The dream of software emulation for architectural history is to allow historians to open archived digital drawings and models in their native computational environments even after those environments have become obsolete. Librarians, archivists, and scholars have nurtured this dream for many years as the best answer to the conundrum of what to do with the material they have collected since architecture went digital. The FACADE project at MIT was an early effort, and more recently the Building for Tomorrow initiative has brought together architectural historians, architects, archivists, librarians, and digital preservationists to address collectively the challenges of accessing digital design documents.5 The various options for digital archiving and access are well known, and methods involving software emulation seem to be the most successful of these, although they are by no means the easiest to achieve. The investment and coordination required to bring such a system to fruition are finally happening at the CCA.The CCA’s digital archival access project is really a partnership among three organizations: the CCA, Yale University, and the open-source software company Artefactual Systems. Yale University Library’s Digital Preservation Services team has put together an “emulation as a service infrastructure” (EaaSI) as well as a collection of virtual machines that remote users can launch in their web browsers and in which they can easily open files from the library’s search interface. The next step for the project is to feed architectural files into this system, and this is where the CCA comes in, with its extensive Archaeology of the Digital collection. To connect these files to Yale’s emulation system, the CCA has partnered with Artefactual to develop SCOPE, a search-and-access interface for the digital collection that will allow users not only to locate desired files but also to open them in a virtual machine with the proper software.Once this search-and-access system is up and running, the process of using it ought to be easy enough that architectural historians can begin to experiment. It is at this point that emulation may affect historiography by allowing historians to experience a range of digital design techniques firsthand. The experiential dimension is key: among the foundational ideas of the cultural techniques school of media history is the notion that techniques come before concepts.6 For instance, architects worked with digitally malleable form before the emergence of the concept of parametrics. Emulated digital work environments will allow historians not only to view historical files but also to bring them to life at the sites of their conception. There is nothing to hinder the historian from playing around—editing files, manipulating forms, tweaking parameters—and in the process reenacting the moment of creation. (Note that the files available to historians are copies, not originals.) Where historians may once have resorted to vague accounts of authorial intention from the point of view of the principal of a firm, they will now have the means to develop a rich enough understanding to describe the genesis of a project within its technical and cultural milieu, including the perspective of the computer operators who carried out the technical labor of designing the project.It is possible that this sort of investigation will interest only historians of early digital design and specialists in design technics. It may turn out that architectural software will stabilize into an industry standard—perhaps some combination of free-form modeling software (e.g., McNeel Rhinoceros 3D), parametric software (e.g., McNeel Grasshopper), and building information management software (e.g., Autodesk Revit)—thus rendering the last decades especially interesting to historians as an unusual period of technological change. Or it may turn out that there is not much to see in the files that end up in research archives if they are sanitized of all the messy evidence of the process of creation. But if software continues to change, and if the files in the archives continue to hide within themselves evidence of their technical genesis, architectural historians will want to experience the files in the environments from which they emerged. Software emulation offers the best means of doing that. With its SCOPE+EaaSI implementation, the CCA is likely beginning an archival revolution that will transform architectural historiography in the coming decades.