Degradation, Disintegration, Ruin

“There is no such thing as ancient architecture… They are all contemporary structures that are allowed to display their natural state, and they act as a bridge for us to consider a new way of designing,” said architect Barry Wark in his lecture “Ancientness and Future Forms of Coexistence,” hosted by SCI-ARC. Wark presented a model of eco-centric architecture, which de-centers humans within the built environment and makes intentional space for human and non-human lifeforms to cohabit. According to Wark, humans need to consider the aesthetics of ancientness—irregular masses, patinas, craggy facades—not as an immutable feature of the past but as contemporaneous a look as any monolithic, all-glass supertall.

Such a model requires a re-evaluation of temporal perspective. Thinking in terms of Earth-time—eons rather than millennia—allows architects’ definition of the built environment to broaden; one takes both the macro- and micro-worlds into consideration, and plans for a building’s use to extend far beyond its human occupants’ needs. Wark shared several projects featur…