The reference to Shinya Tsukamoto is not mere eye-wash. His definitive movie ‘Tetsuo the Iron Man‘ shows a metal fetishist becoming metal life. He hovers in a state of not quite being. Protocell architecture is also ‘not quite being’. It uses synthetic biologies. Hybridised life forms are created and form part of the buildings. These life forms grow and the buildings start to live. George Khushuf sees that here the incorporation of life into buildings brings with it an extra ethical dimension. He comments: ‘…ethical reflection must be incorporated up front, as a vital part of the research itself.’ The ‘Hylozoic Ground’ installation is an interactive geotextile that gradually accumulates ‘stray organic matter’ generated by passing traffic. It exudes for Philip Beesley a sense of ‘quiet death’ and ‘abject fertility.’
Cairns and Jacobs say that ‘[a]n obsolete building is in place but out of time.’ Fashion and its ‘upbeat temporality’ inaugurates the ‘reign of the ephemeral.’ This is Bret Easten Ellis’s ‘Glamorama‘ literary territory. Obsolescence becomes : ‘An architecture resisting fashion yet at the vanguard of style change.’ But in architecture resistance is not robust in a building’s second life (real life) as real estate. China is our current parade case. It’s a society ‘under construction.’ It is full of near completed but empty developments. It reverses the time sequencing associated with ghosts. These ghost towns are towns that were never alive. This form of obsolescence is incompleteness and near-completeness. There have been precursors in the modern times. Engels wrote that Ancoats in Manchester; ‘ … built chiefly since the sudden growth of manufacture… contains a vast number of ruinous houses, most of them being, in fact, in the last stages of inhabitableness. I will not dwell upon the amount of capital thus wasted.’ What Engels noted is what is now familiar and global, the creation of obsolescent neighbourhoods. Taxation and financial arrangements create zones of obsolescence. A logic of flexibility as a response to threat of obsolescence ironically actualises the threat. A logic of replacement encourages a forced temporality. Demolishing a building takes a long time. Deciding to demolish a building takes a long time. In these ‘long times’ obsolescence beds down.
Recent storms and floods, earthquakes and other disasters threaten buildings. The usual distinction between human and non-human agency breaks down with architecture. Buildings built on a flood plain tend to be drowned, but humans made the bad call. Build a stone building in earthquake country and who is to blame when stones fall on people’s heads? Barry Turner recommends approaching disaster as a ‘socio-technical’ problem to avoid ‘a very partial and inadequate way of understanding the disasters that are associated with (triggered by) natural hazards.’ Linking architectural disaster to the concept of vulnerability important sociologists and risk assessors. As Groak points out, ‘… all buildings necessarily interact with exogenous environmental and contextual conditions.’ What to build in an earthquake zone? Paper buildings, such as the paper dome church in Taiwan.
Ruins already have a long history of appreciation. Benjamin writes of the ‘baroque cult of the ruin.’ Derrida writes: ‘… in the past , great architectural inventions constituted their essential destructability, even their fragility, as a resistance to destruction or as a monumentalisation of the ruin itself.’ But, ‘[t]he age of the authentic ruin is over’ says Huyssen. In the 18th century ancient Roman ruins were valued as empirical evidence of a lost classical age. It then stimulated subjective states such as melancholy. In late modernity ruins signified dysfunction. Yet contemporary ruin enthusiasts respond to the excess of modernity by looking to dilapidated, illegal and unscripted spaces as inoculated from Capitalist energies. The new way of appreciating ruins is to see them as ‘insufficient architecture’. According to the standards of modern bureaucracies, such as health or education authorities, such ruins are not appreciated but condemned. But some insufficient architecture can be seen as ‘informal’. From this perspective architectures offer improvisation and alternative evaluations through an uncertain lens.
It is rare to look at ruins in terms of function. But Robert Ginsberg talks of ruins as a ‘loss of function.’ Dylan Trigg speaks of ruins as an ‘absence of reason.’ George Simmel talks of ‘nature’s revenge.’ Why are ruins not merely obsolescent? Ruins avoid obsolescence by avoiding the threat of demolition. Ruskin writes: ‘ He alone delights in both; it matters not what. Fallen cottage – desolate villa – deserted village – blasted heath – mouldering castle – to him, so that they do but show jagged angles of stone and timber, all are sights equally joyful. Poverty, and darkness, and guilt, bring in their several contributions to his treasury of pleasant thoughts. The shattered window, opening into black and ghastly rents of wall, the foul rag or straw wisp or wasting age of the inhabitants – all these conduce, each in due measure, to the fullness of his satisfaction.’
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The ruin is poised between wholeness and dissolution. Hegel writes: ‘ The sight of the ruins of some ancient sovereignty directly leads us to contemplate the thought of change in its negative aspect. What traveller among the ruins of Carthage, Palmyra, Persopolis, or Rome has not been stimuated to reflections on the transience of kingdoms and men, and to sadness at the thought of vigorous and rich life now departed… But the next consideration which allies itself with that of change is that change, while it imports dissolution, involves at the same time the rise of a new life – that while death is the issue of life, life is also the issue of death.’ However it must be noted, as Frank Salmon reminds us, that much contemplation of ruins was pragmatic, including systematic surveying. Not everyone was looking for that Romantic ‘awful astonishment.’ By 1840 Pugin started his Gothic revival, an alternative to classical forms drawing on northern European medievalism. J.M. Gandy’s ‘Presentation Drawing of the Bank of England in Ruins‘ of 1832 one of the most famous images of its time. Displayed with words from Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’: ‘The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces/The solemn temples, the great globe itself,/Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve’, it was also a statement of value that declared that Soanes’ building was good enough to join the library of ruins.
Cairns and Jacobs say: ‘Ruins are finely calibrated artifacts of the struggle between architectural agency and nature’s agency.’ Albert Speer’s architectural plans to rebuild Berlin in neoclassical style made future ruination explicit. Hitler’s architect was building for eternity. He planned to build so his ruins wouldn’t be dreary. He would use granite rather than ‘all elements of modern construction such as steel girders and enforced concrete, which are subject to weathering.’ He claimed that he designed to the ‘law of ruins’ in order to ‘transmit time and spirit to posterity.’ However Hans-Ernst Mittig thinks Speer thought up these ideas after the event: they don’t appear anywhere before his memoires of 1969. But Speer’s retrospective dreaming aren’t singular. The ruins of Hiroshima were captured in the photomontage project ‘Hiroshima Ruined Again in the Future’ for the Electric Labyrinch exhibition of 1968 by Arata Isozaki. In this, ruins becomes signs of the future. Rubble becomes anti-architecture. Isozaki says: ‘… rubble is the bare materiality of things. It is the bankruptcy of that mode of being signified by architecture, or urban design, or even mere d écor. What is dramatically revealed here is the materiality, the thingness, that had been hidden all along. This is the last stage before disappearance.’ Ruination becomes a source of a species of bankruptcy. He invents the ‘City Demolition Industry Inc.’ For him ‘Tokyo … was like a building whose foundations had decayed, walls collapsing and water pipes getting thinner, structures barely standing, braced by numerous struts and supported by a jungle of props and buttresses, patches and stairs from the leaks in the roof.’ Ruin becomes ‘… an enemy, a gigantic monster… that must be destroyed as soon as possible.’ Ruins are at the centre of Isozaki’s whole enterprise. Jameson writes: … for Isozaki ruins also express the same stark and simple forms as they emerge from chaos; ruins are also elemental building blocks –the architect scarcely knows whether he is constructing a building or the ruins of a building.’ ‘Ma’ is ‘a productive emptiness.’ The extreme somnambulant beauty of violence and death transcribed as a futuristic corpse landscape recalls the sinistral energies of Ballard’s perverted worlds and the pornographic histories relayed by Stephen Barber.
New ruins have no inspirational weight or evocative charm. This is their proof of newness. High rise schemes that were a ‘technological shortcut to social change’ resist the melancholic, which is old-school. There is a way of linking this element of ruin to the cranked up high fictions of Stewart Home. But new ruins kick off in several directions. The ‘broken window theory’ of George Kelling is where ruin indicates social dysfunction. Alice Coleman sees new ruins in graffiti , vandalism, excrement. They advertise as ‘design disadvantagement’. For Coleman ruins are experiments that have gone wrong rather than some perfection lost. Ruin Art is where ‘the artist actively harvests the vitality of decaying matter, sometimes indulging in slow time distress, other times blasting it apart with artistic agency.’ Through the logic of auto-destruction this links up with the work of Gustav Metzger and in turn, oddly, the strange violence of Vermeer’s paintings whose silence is that of the deafness that can be brought on by standing too close to an explosion.
New ruinologies proliferate. Bunkerologists, place hackers and psychogeographers abound. This is the new scene of Joann Greco’s ‘ruin porn’: ‘A wheelchair sits centre stage, its orange vinyl back echoes by a round tabletop that leans against a wall, painted in a familiar shade of institutional green. A mattress, flattened and grimy, lies tossed onto a floor that’s littered with fallen plaster. In the foreground, an overturned metal trashcan speaks volumes. A mirror reflects the whole sad scene. Its romantic, it’s nostalgic, it’s wistful, it’s provocative. It’s about time, nature, mortality, disinvestment. Pursuing and photographing the old is an addictive hobby. Dozens of blogs and online galleries share strategies for entry [to abandoned buildings], and showcase ever-bulging collections of moss-covered factory floors and lathe-exposed school buildings.’ Detroit is the headquarters of all this, and the internet. We’re updating Herman Melville’s ‘povertiresque.’ Is this more than leisure activity? Or is it about empowerment through transgressing forbidden space? Or has it social value, so that they become activities revealing the forgotten? We are reminded of Berlin’s second city, where squatting after the fall of the Berlin Wall was used as a source of an alternative aesthetic and politics. These were ‘spaces for experimentation.’ Stewart Home and Stephen Barber haunted this before Hanna Gobel’s architectural cultural entrepreneurs started reshaping contemporary Berlin by drawing on these subculture experiences.
Squatting and informal, unplanned settlements create new possibilities for architectural death. Peter Hall and Ulrich Pfeiffer talk about an ‘informal hypergrowth.’ In this domain architectural engagement becomes a dispute between a provider paradigm, on the one hand and a support paradigm on the other, according to John Habraken. In the latter, ‘residents’ reciprocal efforts are radically open, flexible, and provisional.’ In this ruination becomes a ruination of in-progress aspirations and becomes more about incompleteness than loss. The PREVI project in Peru provided mass housing but plans had to respond to what the residents wanted and future change in ways minimising negative effects. It ended up with ‘an almost total blurring of the original intentions.’ Those involved considered it ‘a successful failure.’ In Brazil the clearing of the favelas for the World Cup is an example of the political toxicity of this version of architectural death. The Mare Complex, a cluster of 15 favelas that is home to some 75,000 people, has been recently cleared by militia and police. Favelas become terrifyingly liminal hotels of sleepless nights.
Demolition is another option. Cairns and Jacobs remind us that; ‘Death hangs about some buildings.’ This is the conceit of the great contemporary horror films Ju-On and Dark Water. Cairns and Jacobs attend to Toyo Ito’s U-House in Najano-Honcho, Japan. ‘This house was associated with a family which had just been confronted with death and withdrew from the world outside behind a concrete wall.’ The building becomes an image of ‘an introverted family.’ The building reflected a darkness within the sister. A dark soil ‘that looked like the soil from the very beginning of time.’ Ito’s sister said: ‘I did not long for a gentle soft light.. but a strong light with the vitality to dispel the darkness.’ The odd light in the paintings of Georges de la Tour is referenced. This became a building ‘… full of life, at the same time, had the mystery of death concealed behind it.’ On February 28th 1997 they left the house and had it demolished. ‘It was demolished in a terrible way in front of his own eyes. Did an architect ever before watch the annihilation of a building that he had constructed?’ In fact, many have.
‘What is demolition without the building’s permission? Is this murder? Or indeed with its permission, is this euthanasia?’ asks Gerard Auer. Demolition and sacrificial logic turns unimproved land to productive use. Helene Liss discusses the move to showcase demolition as architectural death using demolition photography. This began in nineteenth century Paris. For Benjaminit comes as a ‘… gloomy awareness that along with great cities have evolved the means to raze them to the ground.’ Of New York another writes: ‘…the great steel frames of its structures will never disintegrate from rust – they are scrapped before the rust can start.’ Singapore is where ‘state-coordinated erasures were the hallmark of modernization’ and this continues. The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe building in the 1970’s was inflated by Charles Jencks to the moment when ‘Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972 at 3.32p.m.’ Was the design to blame or was it a scapegoat? Hubert and Mauss write: ‘ architectural eradication often aims at goals comparable to those of sacrifice: to get rid of an impure status or to reach a superior one.’ Deleuze and Guattari write about how: ‘deteritorialisation follows a line of active destruction or abolition.’ This feeds in to all the conversations condemning Brutalism and tower blocks, for example. Owen Hatherley rejects this.
In architectural natalism there is the impulse to both architectural melancholia and demolition. This buckles trauma to bereavement. The Rubble Club worry that the pace of building mortality rate increasing. But it also contains the impulse to reach out to ecological horizons. This translates into an environmental activism that looks for sustainable design. Michael Braungart and William McDonough’s ‘Cradle to Cradle‘ identifies a virtuous circle of perpetual renewal. In this, design becomes reorientated to accommodate lifespan by extending the idea of environmental stewardship realised through design itself. This perspective rethinks recycling as ‘upcycling’ by considering not just form and function but the actual chemical composition of materials. ‘A cradle to cradle building should behave like a tree… connected to the flow of natural energies around it (sun, wind, water), so that it is, for example, change with the seasons, produce more energy than it consumes, and purify its own water.’ Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of biological systems as having redundancy built in allowing for flexibility feeds the idea of an architecture of perpetual beginnings. But the books resists any move towards the fantasy of deathlessness in architecture.
Cairns and Jacobs suggest we should design for deconstruction as well as construction. Derrida wrote in 1990 to the architect of deconstruction, Peter Eiseman: ‘What kind of deconstruction is this? What could bring the architecture of ‘the period’… back to the ruin, to the experience of ‘its own ruin.’ Cairns and Jacobs argue against ‘the tempting option of doing away with death entirely through the cyclical fantasy of eternal renewal.’ Zizek writes: ‘ the proper aesthetic attitude of a radical ecologist… [is about]… ‘accepting waste.. [of] discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of decay, of the inertia of rotten material which serves no purpose.’ The Austrian artist Friendensreich Hundertwasser looks to an architecture of decrepitude ‘… when mould forms on a wall, when moss grows in the corner of the room and rounds off the geometric angle.’ These ask that architecture must strive for ‘inhabitability and creative mouldering.’ But the book thinks this would result in a truly dead building. ‘It was not our intention to point to deteriorating, decrepit, and destroyed buildings and merely whisper gratuitously: “buildings must die”. We offer this investigation as an extended memento mori for architecture to help recalibrate its purpose. In short, this book about the death of buildings is composed in the name of architectural agency and its capacity to make the world differently.’
David Leatherbarrow writes that ‘Of all the versions of the body-building analogy – from Vitruvius to Alberti, Le Corbusier, Aldo van Eyck, and architects today – few, if any, have invoked mortality as the term of comparison, as Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs have done…’ In the months immediately following the death of Shelley in 1822 Mary Shelley wrote a journal of sorrow whilst living at Albero outside of Genoa. She writes of the elastic feelings of youth having not yet deserted her. For her Shelley’s death won’t be assimilated and it won’t go away. An architectural agency that accommodates architectural death looks like a proclamation of its own denial.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.
