In an effort to preserve the sanctity of the archive and it’s privileged and profound role in culture, this project seeks alternative ways in which to disseminate the contents of the archive, alternative materials for inscribing into the history of the city of Venice. The premise of the work is: Is it possible to create at this site a building that will allow Venetians to engage the archive through theater typology, thereby expanding upon the sense of performance implicit to all public spaces, and the history of theatricality in Venice. Can the public be used as a tool for inscribing the histories of Venice into an architectural space, where the topos resides in the dramatic act and where the nomos becomes implicit to a city where the performing public is in a continuous act of engaging, editing, and curating it’s archival material? Given the brief to design the archives of Venice upon the current bus depot of island, while maintaining the depot’s functionability as a major transportation node, this project operated within the ambiguity of placing the archive at the precise location where it is most likely to erode -- directly upon the horizontal asphalt territory of the terminal. The banality of the bus depot coupled against the sanctity of the archive yields an architectural problem that can not, and indeed is not meant to be solved. Often times in architecture, problems that are ambiguous can be made definite through the standard set of tools that we use as architects to understand things... formal analysis, historical research, data collection and processing, etc. However our problem here is structured such that it falls apart under the scrutiny of protocols that are typically associated with the early stages of understanding a project. The proliferation of printed material inevitably results in an increase in archived material, such that it’s organization comes into our current understanding of the archive as a sort of database structure with corresponding systems of retrieving useful information. In this scenario, the authoritative nature of the archive begins to weaken, in a sense that people are able to interpret the archives themselves, democratically, and in doing so put together their own story about their culture’s history. The digitization of the archive erodes its topological or nomological value. By entering the realm of the digital, the archive loses it’s status as privileged material with privileged topos: its capacity for disseminating precise knowledge is compromised. It begins to behave as and be treated with an attitude of disposability which characterizes data culture.