en route

The landscape of geige, sprawling and derelict, of pock-marked outlines lineated with age, bunkers and warehouses, hangars and Quonset huts, parade abandoned and forgotten in the passing of time. Like burlap and kraft upon emptying its contents, they sway vacuous in the silence that lulls the deep evening. I see their silhouettes crisp against the glow of lady la luna, veiled in the dank mists descendant from Siberia. They are my brethren, once titans that dotted the landscape of industry, of progress, of movement, now laid to waste by their inescapable oblivion. Barren, motionless, and timid against a time that refuses to look back, contemplative on their forsaken state, of various degrees of disarray, disrepair, squalor and destitute dereliction.

This is the fate of all architecture. In as much as it is an extension of humanity's ego, and a manifestation of his attempt at corporeal immortality, the buildings and spaces he envisions and creates are only as lasting as his generation. Architecture is, in essence, an envelope for human habitation, an experience that is defined by cultural and sociological climates. But the lifetime of a building is only as persisting as the relevance it commands on the culture and society that inhabits it. The moment the space loses relevance and importance in the inhabiting consciousness, it begins to deteriorate and forecloses its grip on human use.

The transience of humanity's attention span, and interest, is a polar contradiction to what architecture presupposes – permanence, completeness, and an expectation to weather against the test of time, and well, weather.

We cannot produce permanence, nor seek it in a medium that is inherently corporeal and diminishing. Construction methodology, building technology, and esthetic palettes and palates shift as unexpectedly and swiftly. In the cultural expressway, design and innovation are only as novel as your last objet d'art. This unquenchable, insatiable provocation to envision the newest brand, or version, of cutting-edge puts a strain on the urban fabric.

Obsolescence is an eventuality for any structure, it creeps and manifests without any perceptible symptom or gradient. This asymptomatic quality makes it even more potent. Because, eventually, the urban quality of today will become irrelevant and deformed as well. Soon, the glaring sheen of metal and glass, of geometric forms that cut across the urban landscape, the convoluted interpretations of modernism, will lie diametric to the new nouveau. The proud will fall, and become dusty, rust-encrusted reminders of the tempering of time, of the transient and forgotten, much like those we see today. They, too, will lose they luster, and will fall in line on the route to irreverent cultural insomnia.

The first-world, post-industrial, capitalistic consumerist perspective on urbanity is one replete with pitfalls, oubliettes and trapdoors. A lesson that we are lamentably learning only now.

Original image from here.