Structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata

Over millions of years, the inland megacities of Delhi and Moscoqw will largely erode into sands and gravels, to be spread by wind and water into unreadable expanses of desert. The coastal cities of new York and Amsterdam, those claimed soonest by the rising sea levels, will be packed more carefully into soft-settling sediments. It is the invisible cities – the undercities – that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock. The above-ground structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata: medleys of concrete, brick and asphalt, glass compressed to a milky crystalline solid, steel dissolved to leave trace impressions of its presence. Below ground, though, the subways and the sewerage systems, the catacombs and the quarry voids – these may preserve their integrity far into a post-human future.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) pp. 170-171 

They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful

They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It’s all simply a matter of degree. An Earth Man thinks: ‘In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of things I happen to see.’ A Martian, far cleverer, would say: ‘This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and the mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (HarperCollins, 1995) p. 109

Stanza of the ternary dance

Life is a ternary movement far from equilibrium.
‘We parasite each other and live among parasites’.

We inhabit the perennial genesis: — natura naturans, the never-ending chain of organisms devouring one other right down to the invisible ones:

‘The fruit spoils, the milk sours, the wine turns into vinegar, the vegetables rot... Everything ferments, everything rots, everything changes’.

Microorganisms take our dead body back to the soil — putrefaction is still life.

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 6

Outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them

Somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed form the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 23-24 

Därför måste det gamla bort

Och det är en människas största lycka att få bygga opp vad hon själv behöver och visa vad hon duger till, och därför måste det gamla bort. Och så tyckte jag mig förstå varför Vår Herre låter riken falla och städer krossas och människoverk bortsopas som löv för vinden. Det får lov att vara så, för att människorna alltid ska ha något att bygga opp och få visa vad de förmår.

Selma Lagerlöf, Jerusalem (III) (Åhlen & Åkerlunds Förlag, 1935), p. 249

The difference is in the touching

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) pp. 200-201

The desert of uncertainty and effort

The Hebraic tradition manifests two kinds of lack, expressed by two deserts, emerging one from the other, heart of everything, in its heart everything. One is named Shemama, despair and destruction, and the other is Midbar, which is a desert not of dereliction but instead a field of uncertainty and effort. The shemama is, rather, polarity of the City-State (City of Ur – Our, light), its desert is the tragical one of laws, ideology, order, as opposed to what could have resulted from wandering.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 27

Everything could collapse

Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 53

Amnesia-ridden hills

Everything you now think of as a room—as space, as volume, as creation—will soon just be a suffocation of sand grains packed together in dense, amnesia-ridden hills, landscapes almost laughably quick to forget they once were architecture.

Geoff Manaugh, 'When Hills Hide Arches' on Bldg Blog, http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/when-hills-hide-arches.html (31/03/2014)

Perfection vs disintegration

I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 57

Write in water and cast in sand

Today an artist must expect to write in water and to cast in sand.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 41

History is now

The best part of history, Goethe said, is that it inspires. This is a maxim by which all creative people have lived and worked, including those who become creative because they have no choice. Willful destruction obviates the burdening weight of history, leaving only the liberating elixir of its inspiration. History is now. The accumulated remnants of the past are important elements in culture, and in the individual's existence, but exist only to be transformed into the material of the present. Willful destruction is an attack on history that at the same time drives its survivors to react by elevating history to a near-religious importance. Whenever this happens, history becomes pernicious, infecting the present with the odor of the dead.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 29

The poetic and the paradox

Only through aesthetic evocations of the paradoxical – in other words, through the poetic – can such contraries as war and peace, construction and destruction, suffering and pleasure be resolved without a loss of creative tension. In this sense, if in no other, Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said that "the word can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon." And it is true for societies at least as much as for individuals. This is what is meant finally by the term "culture," the highest pinnacle of which is invariably occupied in any society by conscious manifestations of the poetic.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 22

Broken buildings

Wherever buildings are broken by the explosion of bombs or artillery shells, by lack of maintenance or repair, by fire or structural collapse, their form must be respected in its integrity, embodying a history that must not be denied. In their damaged state they suggest new forms of thought and comprehension, and new conceptions of space that confirm the potential of the human to integrate with the building, to be whole and free outside of any pre-determined, totalizing system. The new spaces of habitation constructed on the existential remnants of war and natural disaster do not celebrate the destruction of an established order, nor do they symbolize or commemorate it. Rather they accept with pride what has been suffered and lost, but also what has been gained. They build upon the shattered form of the old order a new category of order inherent only in present conditions, within which existence feels its strengths, acknowledges its vulnerabilities and failures, and faces up to the need to invent itself as though for the first time, thus seizing the means to continuously refresh and revitalize itself. There is an ethical and moral commitment in such an existence, and therefore a basis for community.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) pp. 15-16

FREEDOM: a state emptied of preconceived value, use, function, meaning; an extreme state of loss within which choice is unavoidable; a condition of maximum potential, realised fully in the present moment.
[...]
KNOWLEDGE: the invention of the world in all the complexity and multiplicity of its phenomena.
ARCHITECTURE: instrument for the invention of knowledge through action; the invention of invention.
[...]
HIERARCHY: a predetermined vertical chain of authority that works from the top down.
HETERARCHY: a spontaneous lateral network of autonomous individuals; a system of authority based on the evolving performances of individuals, eg, a cybernetic circus.
[...]
CONSTRUCTION: the invention of reality.
REALITY: a state necessitating the invention of construction.
OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE: terms of dualism divorcing experience from reality.
[...]
BEAUTY: 'knowledge without interest'; ideas embodied in and transcended by forms.
[...]
MEANING: the free interaction of values.
[...]
RELATIVITY THEORY: the great destroyer of hierarchies; description of the world according to an observer.
[...]
CONSUMERISM: a state of becoming limited by the total entropy of a system.
MASS CULTURE: a system diminishing the autonomy of individuals; a state of undifferentiated nature within which the making of distinctions is difficult.
REVOLUTION: self-cancelling mass political machinations; the necessity of formlessness.
[...]
FORM: the condition of boundaries, perceived as exterior to self.
SPACE: the condition of boundaries, perceived as interior to self.
[...]
STRUGGLE: the essential condition of freedom.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Glossary' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 142

Accidents, in the deterministic sense, are not designed, but simply "happen." They are out of control in that their what, where, or when can never be predicted exactly. But they are designed, in the Virilian sense, because the creation of any working system insures their probability, thus their inevitability. In that sense, we had better learn how to live with them, if they are not always to be catastrophic, or to work creatively with them, if anything constructive is to emerge in their aftermath. The first step is to acknowledge that accidents arise spontaneously not from an infinite number of possibilities, but from a limited set of probabilities: a matrix, a trajectory field of unpredictably transforming vectors.

Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and The Fall (Princetion Architectural Press, 2004) pp. 117-119

Människan måste tolkas, det måste inte Gud. Gud är harmoni genom sig själv, människan kan endast nå harmoni genom en kamp (mellan ljus och mörker, samt massa andra dimensioner). För det andra, Gud frammanar Skapelsen, människan är blott ett subjekt som skapar. För det tredje, människan skapar endast territorier (länder, städer, taggtrådsstängsel), inte jorden (Earth, die Welt). Trots allt detta utgör människan “hjälten” i romantiken, som vi ändå måste primärt tänka som tysk. Tyskt territorium, grekiskt jordklot. Denna spänning skapar romantikens imperialism, hanfågeln som markerar sitt revir genom kvitter. Imperiet som kodar toner mot distinktionen territorium – jord. Vår enda väg är “protestantisk” kritik.

 Christopher Kullenberg, 'Barocken och romantiken, mot en teori om den musikaliska fromheten.' at http://christopherkullenberg.se/ (29/10/2012)

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (Penguin Classics, 2006) p. 99

Every built structure (to paraphrase Virilio) is the possibility of a new disaster. To build is thus also to construct infinite lines of destruction.

Eyal Weizman, 'Seismic Archaeology' in Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (Tate Publishing, 2007) p. 33

Oddly, Aristotle inflects both time and change in the direction of deterioration or passing away: “we regard time in itself as destroying rather than producing,” a standpoint which would seem to neglect growth, physis, emergence. But we have to understand that, for the Greeks, change and movement are inextricably intertwined: even decay is by them figured as a kind of movement, and to that degree no doubt we can assume that change is a subset of the topic of motion as such.

Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2009) p. 479