Synopses & Reviews
In our architectural pursuits, we often seem to be in search of something bigger, grander, or more luxuriousandmdash;and this phenomenon is not new. In the spring of 1910 hundreds of workers labored day and night to demolish the Gillender Building in New York, once the loftiest office tower in the world, in order to make way for a taller skyscraper. The
New York Times puzzled over those who would sacrifice the thirteen-year-old structure, andldquo;as ruthlessly as though it were some ancient shack.andrdquo; In New York alone, the Gillender joined the original Grand Central Terminal, the Plaza Hotel, the Western Union Building, and the Tower Building on the list of just one generationandrsquo;s razed metropolitan monuments.
In the innovative and wide-ranging Obsolescence, Daniel M. Abramson investigates this notion of architectural expendability and the logic by which buildings lose their value and utility. The idea that the new necessarily outperforms and makes superfluous the old, Abramson argues, helps people come to terms with modernity and capitalismandrsquo;s fast-paced change. Obsolescence, then, gives an unsettling experience purpose and meaning.
Belief in obsolescence, as Abramson shows, also profoundly affects architectural design. In the 1960s, many architects worldwide accepted the inevitability of obsolescence, experimenting with flexible, modular designs, from open-plan schools, offices, labs, and museums to vast megastructural frames and indeterminate building complexes. Some architects went so far as to embrace obsolescenceandrsquo;s liberating promise to cast aside convention and habit, envisioning expendable short-life buildings that embodied human choice and freedom. Others, we learn, were horrified by the implications of this ephemerality and waste, and their resistance eventually set the stage for our turn to sustainabilityandmdash;the conservation rather than disposal of resources. Abramsonandrsquo;s fascinating tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent manifestations of sustainability, from adaptive reuse and historic preservation to postmodernism and green design, which all struggle to comprehend and manage the changes that challenge us on all sides.
Review
" Buildings Must Die is indeed a perverse work on architecture, architecture at its most raw and elemental, at the point of its decay and destruction, sometimes quickly, with spectacular effect, and sometimes slowly. Architecture is never fully living, and is always passing out of existence; as it makes, so what it makes is inevitably unmade. This book is a fascinating, articulate exploration of this movement of creative destruction that haunts the very project of architecture. The MIT Press
Review
Buildings rot. Buildings decay. Buildings die. But this sense of buildings' mortality can be a positive force, as Cairns and Jacobs illustrate so well. Out of the rubble, they have created a book of immense significance not just for the practitioners and theorists of architecture but for anyone who is interested in the ecology of habitation. Elizabeth Grosz, author of < i=""> Architecture from the Outside <>
Review
Buildings Must Die offers case studies and meditations upon architectural ends in the tradition of Neil Harris's Building Lives and Karsten Harries's The Ethical Function of Architecture. Yet Buildings Must Die is also uniquely life-affirming, showing practitioners how "death and waste can play their parts in architectural creativity." Nigel Thrift,, Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick
Review
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 do in Buildings Must Die. New conceptions of architectural order result from this approach: deformation is not devaluation, permanence involves perpetual perishing, and duration depends on alteration. Historically significant themes such as ruin and weathering are discussed, also topics that are particularly relevant today: disaster, demolition, and waste. A fuller understanding of endings emerges, which in turn leads to a profound reconsideration of beginnings, and thus of architecture itself. Daniel M. Abramson, Associate Professor, Tufts University, and author of < i=""> Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694-1942 <>
Review
Imagine a book on world leaders that looks at how they died, rather than their accomplishments, for an explanation of why the book's subtitle acknowledges that this perspective is "perverse". Despite and perhaps even because of these quirks, Buildings Must Die has the freshness of a project that takes a field and turns it on its head -- or, perhaps, blows it up. David Leatherbarrow, Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, and author of < i=""> Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography <>
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
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 François 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.
Synopsis
Things fall apart. But in his innovative, wide-ranging, and well-illustrated book, Daniel Abramson investigates the American definition of what andldquo;falling apartandrdquo; entails. We build new buildings partly in response to demand, but even more because we believe that existing buildings are slowly becoming obsolete and need to be replaced. Abramson shows that our idea of obsolescence is a product of our tax code, which was shaped by lobbying from building interests who benefit from the idea that buildings depreciate and need to be replaced. The belief in depreciation is not held worldwideandmdash;which helps explain why preservation movements struggle more in America than elsewhere. Abramsonandrsquo;s tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent tropes of sustainability, which struggle to cultivate the idea that the greenest building is the one that already exists.
About the Author
Daniel M. Abramson is associate professor of art history and director of architectural studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694andndash;1942 and Skyscraper Rivals: The AIG Building and the Architecture of Wall Street.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Inventing Obsolescence
2 Urban Obsolescence
3 The Promise of Obsolescence
4 Fixing Obsolescence
5 Reversing Obsolescence
6 Sustainability and Beyond
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index