A converted factory may retain its walls and name while losing the work, users and obligations that previously defined it. PersistenceRemake examines how continuity is claimed when a building or institution undergoes substantial change. Simondon treats individuation as a process; Maturana and Varela describe biological autopoiesis; Luhmann analyses social systems through communication; and DeLanda examines heterogeneous assemblages. These accounts differ, and none can by itself decide whether an adaptive-reuse project legitimately continues an earlier collective. The essay proposes examining material retention, continued practices, patterns of access and institutional claims separately. PersistenceRemake is not a guarantee that every transformation counts as survival. It requires explicit criteria, a traceable sequence of changes and space for those affected to contest the claimed continuity.
Who Decides That Something Has Continued?
A factory becomes a cultural centre. Its masonry remains, but its machinery is removed, its workers are gone and public access follows new rules. Calling this heritage continuity may be accurate in a material sense and misleading in a social one. PersistenceRemake examines precisely that difference. The concept asks which elements continue, which relations end and who is authorised to describe the new institution as the same entity. Evidence might include plans, employment records, ownership, uses, access agreements, testimony and changes in public obligation. The aim is not to decide that physical preservation is less important than social continuity. It is to keep the different claims separate so that a redevelopment cannot use one kind of continuity as proof of another.
The distinction is not between authenticity and change. A perfectly preserved façade can support an institution that has abandoned every social commitment previously associated with the building, while an altered structure may sustain practices whose continuation matters more than the original material layout. Identity cannot therefore be read exclusively from physical resemblance. Nor can it be established merely through the testimony of those who hold legal title. PersistenceRemake is an operator of comparison across time, requiring the investigator to specify what counts as a continuity-bearing relation. Such relations might include use, reciprocal obligations, custody, spatial access, material components, memories or the capacity of a community to recognise and contest decisions. Different cases require different criteria, but the criteria cannot be changed opportunistically at each stage to ensure a desired conclusion. A rigorous interpretation must be able to identify the point at which claimed persistence becomes replacement, even when the replacement is materially attractive or institutionally successful.
Simondon: Individuation Before the Finished Object
Gilbert Simondon offers a powerful challenge to theories that assume individuals exist fully formed before entering relations. Individuation is understood as a process rather than the simple achievement of a fixed identity. This provides an important alternative to heritage discourse that treats buildings or institutions as objects whose essential character must either be preserved intact or lost. A structure participates in successive configurations of material, technical, social and environmental relations. It can undergo transformation without being reducible to either its first documented state or a sum of replacement components. Simondon's thought encourages the analysis of the tensions and potentials through which a new configuration becomes possible. For an architectural researcher, this means investigating not only what survives but the conditions in which new capacities emerge through adaptation.
Yet individuation cannot itself settle the political question of legitimate continuity. Describing redevelopment as an unfolding process may obscure the power exercised over those whose labour and attachment constituted the earlier place. A project can generate a technically coherent new arrangement while displacing its former inhabitants. PersistenceRemake therefore departs from a purely ontogenetic account by insisting on accountable inheritance. To say that an institution has continued must mean more than that some transformation can be narrated as a process. It requires evidence concerning the relationships inherited and the parties able to question that inheritance. Simondon helps loosen the assumption that identity is static, while the Socioplastics operator presses the issue of who is entitled to speak for continuity. Such an intervention does not refute Simondon; it identifies a practical obligation arising when a processual ontology meets decisions about property, conservation and public memory.
Maturana and Varela: Why Autopoiesis Cannot Be Borrowed Casually
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela developed the concept of autopoiesis in the context of living systems, describing organisations that continuously produce the components and relations constituting their own unity. The concept is attractive for anyone studying an evolving archive or research system because it seems to capture continuity through ongoing production. The temptation is to call a publication series autopoietic whenever its new texts cite earlier ones and its categories are revised from within. Such a transfer risks erasing the distinction between a living organisation and a cultural infrastructure sustained by human decisions, servers, funding, editorial judgments and material supports. A bibliography does not reproduce itself; a conceptual Marker does not possess the biological organisation of a cell. Metaphorical borrowing may offer insight, but literal equivalence would require an argument far more precise than a resemblance between recursion and self-production.
PersistenceRemake allows a more disciplined comparison. Instead of asking whether an archive is alive, it asks which operations of continuity must be performed to maintain its identity and how those operations change over time. The number assigned to a node may persist while its interpretive relations expand. A project may replace an indexing platform yet retain the provenance and retrieval pathways necessary for readers to recognise its historical composition. Conversely, a site may retain a familiar name while losing the records that would allow anyone to reconstruct its earlier claims. The analytical point is not the self-sufficiency of the system but the character of its dependencies. The operator treats maintenance and external support as part of continuity rather than as embarrassing exceptions to an image of autonomy. Autopoiesis remains an illuminating interlocutor precisely where its differences from documentary and institutional processes are made explicit.
Luhmann: Communication and the Boundaries of an Institution
Niklas Luhmann introduces another account of system reproduction, centred on communication and the distinction between system and environment. His theory offers a useful lens for examining institutions that remain recognisable even as their personnel and material supports change. A university can replace buildings, departments and staff while reproducing procedures through which teaching, appointments, credentials and research are recognised as university communications. Yet this account does not coincide with Maturana and Varela's biology, and it cannot be inserted into PersistenceRemake as though all three described the same mechanism. Luhmann's emphasis on operational closure offers a challenge to Socioplastics's rhetoric of permeability. If a system necessarily interprets its environment through its own operations, what would it mean for an external critique to modify its identity rather than merely become another internal communication?
The question becomes tangible in an institutional reorganisation. A cultural centre may publicly invite participation while reserving all significant decisions to the categories recognised by its board. It can absorb criticism as evidence of successful engagement without modifying the structure of authority. Communication continues; the institution persists; yet the meaningful inheritance of collective commitments may have been broken. PersistenceRemake demands attention to this asymmetry. Its task is not to decide whether the centre is a system in Luhmann's technical sense, but to locate the difference between organisational reproduction and the persistence of a particular social promise. An institution may reproduce operations with remarkable stability while replacing the very relations through which its identity was historically justified. The analytical criterion must therefore be declared, not assumed from continuity of administrative communication.
DeLanda: Assemblages and Degrees of Detachment
Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory shifts attention toward heterogeneous components whose relations are neither fixed by an organic whole nor exhausted by a single essence. Materials, organisations, expressive practices and territorial conditions can enter configurations with capacities that change when components are detached or recombined. This approach offers architectural research a language for understanding why a building's meaning cannot be reduced to its geometry and why its uses are not merely secondary functions attached to a stable object. A market hall is an assemblage of structures, vendors, prices, routes, infrastructures, informal agreements and legal permissions. Alter one component and the collective may change in ways disproportionate to the apparent physical intervention. The material remains available, but its capacities are reconfigured.
Assemblage thinking nevertheless leaves an evaluative problem that PersistenceRemake cannot avoid. If an assemblage is continuously changing, which transformations count as persistence and which amount to the destruction of a prior collective? The answer requires criteria additional to the descriptive observation that components are heterogeneous and detachable. An investigator might trace continuity through an inherited public function, the right of previous users to remain, the survival of economic relations, or the persistence of a building's material structure. These are different and potentially conflicting measures. PersistenceRemake can organise their comparison without pretending that one measure deserves automatic priority. The operator becomes critical when it exposes the politics of choosing a continuity criterion. A redevelopment that preserves masonry but destroys social access may be materially conservative and socially discontinuous at the same time. The possibility of articulating both judgments is more useful than deciding in advance that the project must be either preservation or replacement.
The Adaptive-Reuse Trial
A research protocol could follow the transformation of a public industrial building over five years. It would reconstruct the initial material and social arrangement through drawings, contracts, interviews, photographs and patterns of occupation. It would then document each consequential alteration, identifying the actors who authorised it and the capacities they intended to preserve. Four analytical registers would be kept separate: retained material components; continued practices and forms of access; institutional claims about historical identity; and the experience of affected users, including those who could no longer participate. The objective would not be to assign a single continuity score. It would be to build a sequence of transformations whose different claims could be examined alongside one another. Researchers could compare the official heritage narrative with the evidence of use and displacement and ask whether a declared continuation remains warranted by the criteria initially used to justify the intervention.
An especially valuable result might be disagreement that cannot be resolved by an aggregate indicator. Former workers may recognise the building but reject its current function as a continuation of their history. New visitors may experience a meaningful public facility created through the adaptation. Conservation specialists may demonstrate exceptional material retention while community researchers identify severe social rupture. PersistenceRemake should not erase these differences under a reconciliatory term such as regeneration. It must identify the exact sense in which something persists and the sense in which something else has ended. The operator would fail if it became a device for celebrating every change as evolution or for condemning all adaptation as loss. Its explanatory value emerges from the discipline of making inherited relations explicit, temporal and open to contradiction.
Continuity Must Be Specified
Simondon, Maturana, Varela, Luhmann and DeLanda offer competing accounts of continuity. Simondon focuses on formation rather than fixed identity; Maturana and Varela describe the organisation of living systems; Luhmann treats social systems through communication; and DeLanda examines heterogeneous arrangements whose capacities change. PersistenceRemake does not combine these into one theory. It uses their disagreements to require explicit criteria for continuity in an actual case. Retaining a name, a façade or a legal entity may establish one kind of persistence while concealing the end of another. The value of the operator lies in making those claims comparable and contestable, not in celebrating transformation as an end in itself.
Socioplastics can apply this test reflexively. Its archival structure remains continuous through successive conceptual Cores and changing publication media, but that continuity requires more than recurring authorial labels. It depends upon preserved addresses, retrievable versions, relations between revisions and the ability to identify where earlier meanings have been transformed. A new Marker may extend a former concept or effectively replace it. A future edition might retain a number while revising a definition in ways that require an editorial history. The project need not remain identical to remain recognisable, but it cannot claim persistence independently of the documents enabling readers to reconstruct change. PersistenceRemake finally proposes a right to contest inherited identity. If that right is absent, continuity becomes a statement issued by those who control the name. If it is present, a system can change without making its own history disappear.
A further complication arises when different groups inherit the same entity through incompatible histories. The architect may describe a hospital's adaptive reuse as a continuation of its civic function, while former patients regard the transformation as an erasure of a history of care or confinement. Neither memory can be treated as the transparent essence of the building. An accountable inquiry could retain both positions and investigate the institutional procedures through which one became the official heritage narrative. PersistenceRemake thereby offers a means of separating continuity as a publicly asserted identity from continuity as a set of relations experienced and documented by affected groups. It would be a mistake to require unanimity before allowing any inheritance to be recognised; historical judgments often remain contested. But a judgment should identify the evidence on which it rests, its temporal boundaries and the constituencies it does not adequately represent. What persists is never determined solely by the form that remains visible. It is also shaped by the conditions under which past participants can continue to make claims upon the present.
DeLanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.
Luhmann, N. (1995) Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Simondon, G. (2017) On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. (French original, 1958).
Varela, F.J., Maturana, H.R. and Uribe, R. (1974) 'Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model', BioSystems, 5(4), pp. 187–196.
Anto Lloveras is a Spanish architect, curator and founder of LAPIEZA. His work has moved between architectural practice, exhibitions and experimental research infrastructures. In Socioplastics, he studies how concepts, materials and institutions preserve identifiable histories while changing form, use and interpretation across successive contexts.
