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 historical-

ly 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. Restor-ing 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 soci-ety 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 mortali-

ty. They will occupy an undead society that con-trasts the living society that we

inhabit.

Lost histories of the built environment create a

patchwork of architec-tural 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 graceful-

ly and inte-grate them-selves with

their environ-ment after their pro-

grammatic use becomes irrel-

evant.

The demolition of buildings removes the

potential of future interpretations to be

imposed on historic objects. The juxtapo-sition 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 per-sistence, insistence, survival. The word suggests

more than a continuance of existence. Sur-vive names a kind of ‘over-living’ – living on, living be-yond one’s time – and thus is also a kind of anom-

aly 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 pro-

cess of decay seems now to have been arrested in them. Ruins are a kind of annealing of the mu-tability to which they testify. There is noth-

ing but mortality in ruins, but it is too late for them to die, they are too old, too ruinous. …”

Steven Connor