We have more data about the world more measurements, more images of it, than ever before in history. Yet we live in a time when verifiable facts are trashed as fake; unreliable along with the expertise that identifies them. On the face of it, architecture should be immune from such post-truth forces because there would appear to be no more indisputable evidence of the form of the presence and shape of the past than a weighty and long-standing building. Architecture's longevity means that it is a material historical record just as much as a poured-over original document in an archive. And the virtue of a built record, as opposed to a fleeting, and possibly cynically edited, image of it, lies in this apparent permanence. It contributes to our certainty about our place on the planet. As Hannah Arendt put it: "The reality and reliability of the human world rests primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced."
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