Archinect - News

Managed decline: leaving architecture to rot

2020-02-05T15:30:00-05:00

Politicians, planners and policy-makers have frequently debated the benefits of allowing architecture to decay – neither demolishing nor preserving it, but letting entropy take hold. What makes this approach to ruins equally empowering and horrifying?

Writer and artist Owen Vince penned an excellent Failed Architecture essay on the intricate interplay between managed decline and indifferent decay, architectural reverence and conscious abandonment, preservation, erasure, and deliberate ruination.

"To allow a structure to degrade — refusing to affirm it through erasure or preservation — 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."

Going from bad to worse: Penn Station's massive tunnel system is aging rapidly

2018-01-11T17:35:00-05:00

I’d been assigned to write a story about Pennsylvania Station, but I wanted to get a caboose-eye view of the decaying tunnels leading up to it, because the only imaginable way the station could be any worse is if it were underwater. Penn, the Western Hemisphere’s busiest train station, serves 430,000 travelers every weekday—more than LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports combined.

"As the gateway to America’s largest city," Devin Leonard writes in his piece for Bloomberg Businessweek, "Penn Station should inspire awe, as train stations do in London, Paris, Tokyo, and other competently managed metropolises. Instead, it embodies a particular kind of American failure—the inability to maintain roads, rails, ports, and other necessary conduits."

Mexico's mass residential construction program decays into slums

2017-11-27T20:07:00-05:00

It was a Levittown moment for Mexico — a test of the increasingly prosperous nation’s first-world ambitions. But Mexico fell disastrously short of creating that orderly suburbia. The program has devolved into a slow-motion social and financial catastrophe, inflicting daily hardships and hazards on millions in troubled developments across the country.

The Mexican government collaborated with private developers to undertake the largest residential construction program in all of Latin America. From 2001 to 2012, an estimated 20 million people moved into newly built developments. The program cost more than $100 billion promising affordable housing to one sixth of Mexico's population. Yet most of this new suburbia was improperly built leading to the eventual breakdown of these communities.

On the outside these developments appeared normal, however as residents moved in the structural issues became apparent. These new suburban developments were in many cases abandoned by builders leaving unfinished communities and services. Incomplete or broken waste water systems and electrical grids lead to sewage in the streets and fires in the homes. Water treatment plants broke and were never repaired leaving many of the developments without running water for years now. Improperly built houses were destroyed by flooding resulting in many of the ...

Salk Institute to be refurbished by The Getty Conservation Institute

2016-09-27T14:38:00-04:00

Fungal biofilm and water sealant failure have added a black patina to the Salk Institute's iconic teak paneling, making the material vulnerable to decay. In order to save what is considered to be one of the world's finest architectural projects (and coolest structural alignment of the sunset save for perhaps Manhattanhenge), the Getty Conservation Institute undertook three years of careful study and is now ready to start implementing those improvements.

According to Getty Conservation Institute project specialist Sara Lardinois, “The GCI sought to address issues on a long-term basis while preserving cultural significance and addressing the needs of those managing the site. Our aim was to help the Salk Institute incorporate a conservation approach into its overall site management at a critical point in the building’s history—the 50-year mark often coincides with the need for a first major repair in modern buildings.”

For more on all things Louis Kahn:

Kimbell’s $135 Million Expansion ...

AA Summer DLAB :: RED is now accepting applications until July 20

2015-05-15T13:03:00-04:00

Summer DLAB from London's AA School of Architecture is gearing up for its 2015 cycle. Starting July 27 through August 14, the summer workshop emphasizes the integration of algorithmic / generative design methodologies and large scale digital fabrication tools. Student participants get to explore natural formation processes and interpret them as innovative architectonic spaces.

Continuing its yearly color-based agenda with RED, the 2015 Summer DLAB will investigate the process of decay in nature.

The program is open to all current architecture and design students. The application deadline is July 20. (Application form below)

More details below:

By investigating the process of decay across various scales in natural organisms, DLAB participants will formulate rules of generating decomposition as their design research area. These rules will then evolve into design strategies for the creation and fabrication of a large-scale prototype. The design and fabrication process will be informed by t...

This Guangzhou skyscraper still stands unfinished after 16 years

2015-04-07T15:12:00-04:00

An abandoned skyscraper still stands incomplete in the bustling capital of Guangdong Province after 16 years because no one is brave enough to ask for it to be torn down. The 46-story building looks strange as it towers over Guangzhou, a commercial hub in southern China with a population of more than 12 million. Its location just behind a golden high-rise building -- popular in China -- and luxury hotels makes the concrete shell look especially creepy and eerie.

The rise and spectacular fall of Venice Beach's Pacific Ocean Park

2014-07-29T17:45:00-04:00

If you had walked along the beach in Venice in the early 1970s, you would have come across the sagging, crumbling, partially incinerated ghost of an old amusement park on a pier. [...] But when it opened in July 1958, more than half a century ago, Pacific Ocean Park — or P.O.P., as it came to be known — was the thing: an amusement park that married Venice Beach's kitschy seaside carnival culture with the space-age Modern architecture of the late 1950s.