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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? — Failed Architecture
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... View full entry
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. — Bloomberg Businessweek
"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... View full entry
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. — Los Angeles Times
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— Nikkei Asian Review
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.
— latimes.com
