THIS SOLID MASS OF CONCRETE, THIS USELESS OBJECT…*
BY MIGUEL LEAL
In every building, there is the anticipation of the construction’s eventual ruin. Inscribed in each project there is also the memory of a future ruin. Our cities – especially the dense and heterogeneous spaces they have become in the last two centuries – have served as laboratories for such an expectation, even more so from the moment in which the idea of architecture was seized by the voraciousness of consumerism and where the lifespan of a building, in purely economic terms, is presently estimated at about 25 years, with this end inaugurating a spiral of demolition-construction in which the cycles come one after the other in a syncopated rhythm. The economic dynamics of cities – or more precisely, the urban conglomerations that we still refer to by that name – is relentless.
The life cycles of buildings coincide with the economic cycles that reconfigure the urban space, the industries, and the flow of people and goods. Contemporary ruins are the instant ruins of demolition**, and no longer the slow and idealized ruins of Romanticism, sculpted by time, but rather the lightning-quick ruin of fast-building.
