Proving Ground: UNESCO’s Laboratories

This studio examines the international holdings and architecture of UNESCO, whose World Heritage Sites program dates to its earliest postwar campaigns. Departing from previous vocabularies of culture and ecology, the organization more recently describes its Sites as laboratories, aligning preservation with both scientific practice and the familiar architectural type. In site proposals to UNESCO, the laboratory program is clear: ruins are retained for the data they will generate, and forests become future sites of information extraction. In the era of globalization and climate change, what is the architecture of the UNESCO laboratory?