The fragile agency of the draftsman's house

Dismantling an architectural scholar and draftsman’s apartment leads to an interrogation of the concept of agency of buildings and place. The setting is a rental flat in an Italian working-class neighborhood, a place of life and work for an architecture historian, a specialist in survey drawings, who used it as his workspace for decades. Upon entering the apartment, the rooms and objects within it appeared as physical and spatial entities testifying to a deep connection with the former owner. The objects, the interiors, and the building itself seemed to possess an agency that had resisted the departure of the human dweller and acted with disquieting power over those in charge of reordering his archive. Further investigation, however, also revealed that this same place witnessed the progressive vanishing of memory of the draftsman and scholar during the last years of his occupancy. The fragility of the bond between individual and place was exposed.