Lecture series

Johanna Blokker: End Times: Decay, Destruction and Demolition as Experience.

Preventing the loss of buildings as witnesses to history, as bearers of meaning and memory and as markers of identity is the raison d’être and core task of architectural conservation. Ultimately, however, loss is inevitable: the natural law of entropy dictates that all structures dissolve into disorder and must eventually disappear. It is also true that the transience of all things is precisely what makes them valuable and worth preserving in the first place. This tension between keeping and losing, this constant impulse to defy the very law on which our work is predicated, could be described as the inner driving force of architectural conservation, the perpetuum mobile at the heart of our thinking and practice.The lecture will be taken as an opportunity to reflect on the fraught but necessary relationship between conservation and disintegration. In an attempt to “stay […]