girlscanscan collective

Girls, scan the urban fabric! Since the first project in 2020, we kept looking for the invisible layers and connections of the built environment around us. The collective was founded within the TU Budapest by young practitioners of architecture, urbanism and cultural heritage. Our research project Tripping on Modernist Monuments aims to understand the patterns behind the demolition of the 20th century heritage, especially present in Hungary:

Breaking with the (academic) tradition of looking to the West we travelled East to meet the non-governmental initiatives protecting the built environment, even buildings 50 years young, from demolition. Having visited Romania, Moldova and Ukraine – in the last months before the next front of the war opened – we encountered a myriad of exemplary projects and identified patterns. Our goal is to find a pan-European toolkit to save these endangered buildings, and view them in their true complexity of building materials, reuse potentials, historical and political context. After several exhibitions in Budapest (Design Week, Cities After Transition Conference) we wrote our first, awarded research paper.

Addressing the question of language barriers, not just as a challenge in the knowledge exchange in former Eastern Bloc, but also in our immediate community, and embracing the potential of language as an emancipatory tool: Our latest exhibition titled rontom-bontom (I demolish, I destroy) defined the lack of proper terminology describing the post-socialist Budapest’s transformation. In the past year, we curated an exhibition for Budapest 150th anniversary about semi-public spaces of resistance of the 70-80s, lead a university course at TU Budapest, unveiled the first non-allegorical female statue in the university garden on Women’s Day, gave tours and workshops for TU Graz and TU Berlin students visiting us, and concluded a research project exhibited at VUT Brno’s gallery. We would love to continue this work and open new horizons.