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Archiving project information was once merely a matter of collecting, organizing, and filing away paper drawings, each one created anew as design progressed. Chicago, Illlinois based architect Kristine Fallon, president of Kristine Fallon Associates, heads the project, which involves a team of architects, academics, museum curators, and technology experts who are reviewing the challenges of maintaining digital archives and will ultimately provide recommendations for best practices. To combat obsolescence of archival documents, a proposed global registry could alert architects to digital file types that are in danger of disappearing and provide a way for architects to reformat their files.

Perhaps no other American city's identity is so entwined with the profession of architecture as buildings of Chicago, Illinois. On April 4, the Art Institute unveiled a hypothetical skyline for the Windy City, one recorded in pixels and on paper rather than in concrete, glass, or steel. Chicago architect Dan Wheeler, of the firm Wheeler Kearns, drew from the Institute's collection of more than 130,000 architectural objects to showcase some 90 drawings, renderings, and models of never-built projects dating from 1880 to the present. The show reveals Chicago's long history as fertile ground for design ingenuity at all scales. The theoretical work Expanding Skyscraper by Reginald Malcomson, a tower to which cantilevered floor plates could be added over time, is an intriguing attempt to weigh the fluctuating demands of the city against the immutable nature of completed buildings.