Weather Station

Undertaken as part of Archiology, this project sought to investigate novel approaches to the conservation of a historic interior, while exploring the potential of graffiti as a spatial record of occupation.

The historic Baldwin Spencer lecture hall, constructed in the 1880s, contains over two hundred desks retaining a remarkable archive of student inscriptions scratched and written into the timber desktops. Spanning three centuries, many of these inscriptions are dated, and sometimes include a student’s name, pseudonym, drawing, or a comment. Until now, our interest was to develop new methods for documenting and conserving this material record.

The first phase involved the digital capture of the desks using a roll scanner, with the resulting data integrated into a highly detailed and interactive 3D model. This enabled the inscriptions to be accessed, examined, and interpreted at a level of detail difficult to achieve through conventional recording methods.

The second phase proposes the analysis of legible names and dates to reconstruct historical encounters and patterns of co-presence between individuals, as evidenced through the accumulated graffiti. In this way, the inscriptions are approached not simply as isolated marks, but as traces of social relationships embedded within the fabric of the space.