2024-11-23T20:19:45-05:00 https://archinect.com/news/article/150182502/managed-decline-leaving-architecture-to-rot Alexander Walter 2020-02-05T15:30:00-05:00 >2020-02-07T21:46:04-05:00 <img src="https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/e8/e8370d07cecec8445d6ee40a52568436.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=1200" border="0" /><em><p>Politicians, planners and policy-makers have frequently debated the benefits of allowing architecture to decay &ndash; neither demolishing nor preserving it, but letting entropy take hold. What makes this approach to ruins equally empowering and horrifying?</p></em><br /><br /><p>Writer and artist Owen Vince penned an excellent <em>Failed Architecture</em> essay on the intricate interplay between managed decline and indifferent decay, architectural reverence and conscious abandonment, preservation, erasure, and deliberate ruination. <br></p> <p>"To <em>allow </em>a structure to degrade &mdash; refusing to affirm it through erasure or preservation &mdash; is to look into the eyes of a thing while it suffers through its death," Vince writes. "It is to say: you have no power over me, and I will give you nothing in return."<br></p>