Each year the Bauhaus Lab is confronted with a specific material object to unravel its histories in an exhibition. The 2020 edition took a sulphur concrete block as its point of departure. The block was designed by the Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG), a research unit at  McGill University which experimented with sulphur concrete as a low-cost building material in the 1970s.

 

The Lab was meant to travel to the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which held the MCHG archives (and block). However, worldwide travel restrictions led to an unprecedented situation: the archive was physically inaccessible. 

 

Online archaeology replaced the imagined countless hours in archival fonds. The overbearing presence of screens introduced a novel dimension to the exhibition, questioning the influence of the digital on the production of engaging knowledge.