Part memento mori for architecture, and part invocation to
reimagine the design values that lay at the heart of its creative
purpose. Buildings, although inanimate, are often assumed to have
"life." And the architect, through the act of design, is assumed to
be their conceiver and creator. But what of the "death" of
buildings? What of the decay, deterioration, and destruction to
which they are inevitably subject? And what might such endings mean
for architecture's sense of itself? In Buildings Must Die, Stephen
Cairns and Jane Jacobs look awry at core architectural concerns.
They examine spalling concrete and creeping rust, contemplate ruins
old and new, and pick through the rubble of earthquake-shattered
churches, imploded housing projects, and demolished Brutalist
office buildings. Their investigation of the death of buildings
reorders architectural notions of creativity, reshapes
architecture's preoccupation with good form, loosens its vanities
of durability, and expands its sense of value. It does so not to
kill off architecture as we know it, but to rethink its agency and
its capacity to make worlds differently. Cairns and Jacobs offer an
original contemplation of architecture that draws on theories of
waste and value. Their richly illustrated case studies of building
"deaths" include the planned and the unintended, the lamented and
the celebrated. They take us from Moline to Christchurch, from
London to Bangkok, from Tokyo to Paris. And they feature the work
of such architects as Eero Saarinen, Carlo Scarpa, Cedric Price,
Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas and Francois Roche. Buildings Must Die
is both a memento mori for architecture and a call to to reimagine
the design values that lay at the heart of its creative purpose.
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