Stored, Preserved, Archived

Fig. 01 For 67 dollars and 66 cents and a 10-day turnaround, you are able to purchase a title certificate of your property to hang in your home. The Land Data website asserts whilst only commemorative, the title certificate is a decorative memento that celebrates property ownership and makes pride of ownership tangible. This cannot be used for any legal purpose.

It could be understood that if that which is owned lies on the interior of the land titles office, its effects lie on the outside of it. Property in this instance is commanded by the head, yet it is expressed in different forms and gestures. In this project the land titles office, the title certificate, and the place that stores the title boundary is considered the jumping off point - I am interested in the effects that it holds on its periperhies. If the value for property lies within these rooms, stacked in rolls of paper - what is its effects on the built environment that surrounds it?

Fig. 01 Daniel Shays and Job Shattuck, two of the Shays Rebellion Regulators, from a 1787 woodcut on the cover of Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack.

Theories of property - who owns what and what they can do with it - hitch buildings to legal and financial systems. Real property, as opposed to personal property, includes land and things attached to it. While built on centuries of common law, a system of real property depends on continuously updated record-keeping. The registration, storage, and verification of official information on land ownership make up the program of the Hall of Records.

In 1786, Massachusetts farmers, back home from the American Revolution, marched on local courthouses to interrupt foreclosure proceedings. Postware taxes were high to defray the cost of war and the state government refused demands to issue paper money, leaving debts payable only in scarce gold and silver. As farmers failed in covering their mortgage payments, foreclosures spread. Eventually the veterans rebelled. They called themselves the Regulators and their emblem was a sprig of hemlock. Advancing from town to town, they chased out lawyers, destroyed court records and restored foreclosed lands to their previous owne

The Middlesex Registry of Deeds was relocated, a monument to the mortgage’s contested power, one small modification in the continuous adaption of a system of power to threats of disruption: a demonstation of how architecture instantiates the social facts produced by the market.

Fig. 02 Middlesex County Registry of Deeds, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Fig. 03 Plan Department, Middlesex County Registry of Deeds, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Fig. 04 The abandoned former Victorian Land Title’s Office at 283 Queen Street.

Fig. 05 The abandoned former Victorian Land Title’s Office.

Fig. 06 The abandoned former Victorian Land Title’s Office.

Fig. 07 Victorian Land Titles Office sale for privitisation.

Fig. 08 Proposal for a 30-storey commercial tower to host a Greek Museum by Bates Smart on the site of the former land titles office.

Fig. 08 Historic title documents found in the Public Record Office Victoria’s archive.

Fig. 09 Historic title documents found in the Public Record Office Victoria’s archive.

Fig. 10 Title documents show layered traces of previous owners.