ARCHITECTURE
Architecture of the Undying I)
Every building is immortal. Every building is a manifestation of the ideas that led to its creation. And ideas cannot die. Buildings are materializations of their physical and geopolitical context. Their existence no matter how brief or seemingly insignificant has left a permanent mark on the world’s physical form and pervasive psyche.
II)
All buildings should be designed and constructed to last forever. When society progresses past the building in terms of capital, cultural, or practical relevance the building enters a separate urban typology. These Buildings become a part of the undead society They become tombstones of the societal conditions that created them and monuments to the conditions that led to their devaluation. They are neither Private nor public. They are neither programmed nor without use. They reject every human categorization because they no longer belong to the society of the living. Their time has passed. Undead Estate forces us to live with the mistakes of the past and the pain of beauty taken for granted.
III)
Society is no longer allowed to pick and choose the constructions it preserves as historically valuable. The ideals of modernism built the Villa Savoye The ideals of War transformed it into a Barn House There exists a well of power in this transformation - a conversation on the consequence of war and its ability to negate developments of art and philosophy. This conversation is lost after a renovation occurs. This negation of the second set of values creates a perverse historical narrative. A life after death – contaminated with bias and historical revisionism. A Zombie – a building brought back to life but removed from its natural progression through society.
IV)
Undead architecture interweaves itself through the environments of the living. Undead buildings serve as constant reminders of human fallibility and mortality as a species. Only when human kind is confronted with the evidence of their mistakes can we begin to design and build more responsibly.
Society is no longer allowed to pick and choose the constructions it preserves as historically valuable. Every construction is historically valuable. Every instant in a buildings life is just as important and as the day it was built.If we can not restore the built environment then we are forced to live with the consequences of our actions forever. Future generations will see tarnished beauty at the hands of greed and war and a more responsible building industry will emerge.
No building should ever be renovated or restored. Restoring a building is washing away the values and ideas that destroyed it and creates a false history and a zombie building.
No building can ever be destroyed. Demolishing architecture creates a Dorian Gray portrait of society where the lessons of ages and ideologies past are lost to the hunger of the real estate economy.
Entire cities will be left abandoned as reminders of human society’s mortality. They will occupy an undead society that contrasts the living society that we inhabit.
Lost histories of the built environment create a patchwork of architectural evolution. Undead Architecture allows for a linear timeline to be expressed in physical form. Buildings become inescapable reminders of ages and attitudes past.
buildings should be designed to age gracefully and integrate themselves with their environment after their programmatic use becomes irrelevant.
The demolition of buildings removes the potential of future interpretations to be imposed on historic objects. The juxtaposition of old and new allows for deeper understandings of built form and will help progress society towards its utopian ambitions
“It is neither nature not art – traditionally, ruins have not only collapsed, the have been overrun by a nature they no longer exclude. It is neither past nor present: it is a past that has never been present, a presence that is not of the present it inhabits. A ruin is a distempering of times, that puts time out of joint. Ruins are persistence, insistence, survival. The word suggests more than a continuance of existence. Sur-vive names a kind of ‘over-living’ – living on, living beyond one’s time – and thus is also a kind of anomaly or scandal. A ruin has always gone beyond or retreated from the death and decay to which it bears witness. Ruins in fact hold death at bay: having undergone a first, pseudo-death, the process of decay seems now to have been arrested in them. Ruins are a kind of annealing of the mutability to which they testify. There is nothing but mortality in ruins, but it is too late for them to die, they are too old, too ruinous. …” Steven Connor