Architecture in the Age of Obsolescence

FAIN: FA-53029-07

Daniel Michael Abramson
Tufts University (Somerville, MA 02144-2401)

This project brings together architectural, economic, urban, and social history towards the goal of exploring how the idea of obsolescence first came to be applied to the built environment in the early twentieth century, and then subsequently how this conceptualization of change came to be dominant through the 1960s across the developed world, productive of modernist visions and populist counter-reactions. It is one this project’s central arguments that obsolescence bridges capitalist and welfare state architecture, thus helping reassess relations between the two systems. Ultimately, this multidisciplinary project bears relevance for a humanistic understanding of culture and the built environment in society today.

Associated Products

Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Book)
Title: Obsolescence: An Architectural History
Author: Daniel M. Abramson
Abstract: In our architectural pursuits, we often seem to be in search of something newer, grander, or more efficient—and this phenomenon is not novel. In the spring of 1910 hundreds of workers labored day and night to demolish the Gillender Building in New York, once the loftiest office tower in the world, in order to make way for a taller skyscraper. The New York Times puzzled over those who would sacrifice the thirteen-year-old structure, “as ruthlessly as though it were some ancient shack.” In New York alone, the Gillender joined the original Grand Central Terminal, the Plaza Hotel, the Western Union Building, and the Tower Building on the list of just one generation’s razed metropolitan monuments. Abramson investigates this notion of architectural expendability and the logic by which buildings lose their value and utility. The idea that the new necessarily outperforms and makes superfluous the old, Abramson argues, helps people come to terms with modernity and capitalism’s fast-paced change. Obsolescence, then, gives an unsettling experience purpose and meaning. Abramson’s fascinating tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent manifestations of sustainability, from adaptive reuse and historic preservation to postmodernism and green design, which all struggle to comprehend and manage the changes that challenge us on all sides.
Year: 2016
Publisher: Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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