Does a building have a spirit? Does an innovative building design make certain kinds of creativity and collaborations possible that could not be realized in a traditional structure? Are the ways that humans have used a building in the past — their accomplishments, experiences, and artworks — an inherent part of that building’s legacy? How can we use virtual reality to preserve a structure (and its spirit, or its archival legacy) that is otherwise abandoned and off-limits?

In 1971, the radical media art and architecture group Ant Farm designed a visual arts studio building on the campus of Antioch College, in Ohio. Since 2008 the building has been closed, and is slowly falling into disrepair. In 2021, a collective of filmmakers, architects, curators and students came together to create a virtual version of the building, using the original architectural drawings. The Mozilla Hubs space, which we call AFAAB (Ant Farm Antioch Art Building) in VR is simultaneously a virtual gathering space, an archival exhibition space, and a workshop for re-envisioning the building itself. We envision this space as a location for collapsing the real and the virtual, the past and the present. Students can see how the building was constructed and peer through layers of time via an archive of different eras of creative activity in the space.