Anti-Architecture: Reflections on Ruination

by Lee Lip Jiang Ruminations on the decay, abjection, and absurdity of Architecture. As practitioners to be of architecture, It may seem bleak, and slightly premature to ruminate about the possible ruins of our creations. A design idea after all, requires a gestation period which spans months, even years of practice, reiterations, blood, sweat and labor, to produce. Who would want to even consider the demise of their own creation, and why does the death of an architectural object even affect us? In this essay, we explore ideas and discourses which surround anti-architecture – that is to say the decay, the abjection, the waste, and finally the death which eventually occurs to all architectures, and the same fatalistic ideas that may be present in architectural processes. In Buildings Must Die, Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs explore the natalistic characteristic of architecture, the temporality of a building’s life, and “the hauntings of entropy necessarily visits upon all creative practices”. Often times, we also forget how the second law of thermodynamics is a binding rule in this world. Entropy always increases, and chaos, decay, moisture, algae, and other normally “undesirable” characteristics (exacerbated in our hot and humid tropical climate) flourish as time passes. Roofs leak, structures and claddings require replacements, steel rusts and once pristine architectures that could have once been hubs of activities are neglected due to their dirtiness. Often times as students, we fail to make provisions for maintenance, and fail to think about how an architecture can be upkept – these are afterthoughts reserved for when we are eventually in practice. To go further, architects rarely design for a (“permanent”) building’s eventual destruction as well, even though in a rapid changing metropolitan city such as Singapore, the demolition and re-construction of architectures not past their centennial is commonplace.

Stephen Brand’s Shearing Layers

Much like bodies and the rest of matter, decay and implosions are also normal processes in buildings. Stephen Brand, in his book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (Brand, 1994), re-conceptualisations Frank Duffy’s idea of “Shearing Layers”. In the above diagram, he splits architecture into a series of layers, each with their own life span and life cycle, and speaks about how the different lifespans cause the building to tear itself apart from the inside out. Like tectonic layers, different rates of decay and and needs for replacements create cracks in between the layers over time. Here, architecture is stratified, and the disunity and disjunction between the layers are what gives rise to the eventual demise of the architecture.

Istana Woodneuk, Singapore. Once belonged to Sultun Abu Bakar of Johor.

Yet, decay and ruin also creates new meanings for architectures. Ruins as objects carry with them a multiplicity of meanings. They may serve as a symbol of a glorious era – for example in the Angkor Temples of Cambodia, or as the symbolic ends of eras, such as in ruins such as the Istana Woodneuk here in Singapore. Perhaps ruins also reveal greater reversions and can be seen as anachronisms which induce reflections on existentialism- In literature such as J.M Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”, an overarching thematic - the dichotomisation of civilisation and savagery – was often expounded using the architectural ruin to manifest the decay of civilisation, and the reversion to a primordial barbarism. Perhaps then, ruins remind us that our own civilisation and society cannot possibly last forever. Yet, no matter how bleak the representation of ruins may be, one cannot deny that there is a certain beauty in natural decay. There is definitely a certain magnetism to architectural decay, to the point that such decay and ruination has been sought after by so called “urban-explorers”, individuals and groups who carry out expeditions to various artifacts for the purpose of adventure, exploration and documentation. Anti-Architecture may also arguably manifest itself in the typologies of modernity. In the essay Junkspace, Rem Koolhaas conceptualises the eponymous Junkspace as “the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built ... product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.” He writes of Junkspace as the buildings which have been assembled, repeated, multiplied in the era of modernity. It exists as a condition and a tendency, and much like the enjambments which form its fluid prose, it is overwhelming, atmospheric and inescapable. Junkspace, the essay, reads like an elegy for architecture and design, where Koolhaas almost alludes to the death of the design process in this mass of architecture without meanings. He writes that “Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in junkspace. There is no form, but proliferation.. Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creativity, we honor, cherish and embrace manipulation…” For Koolhaas, much of the modern city is this claustrophobic junkspace, a wasteland which we have created without realising on the face of our earth.

Cleaners clearing out the “Model Graveyard” of the level 2 studios.

Of course, this rough survey of ideas don’t really affect our practice as students for now – they affect practicing architects who are directly involved in the construction of projects at a 1:1 scale. As students, for now, while we reflect on these possible ends of our eventual architectures, we also may forget that minute deaths also affect us in our own design processes. For example – how does decay over time affect the organic matter we place into our models? Which design ideas die in our head, and which design ideas do we choose to develop and continue? The above images are taken from an event which happened late last year, where the heaps of models in studio were being cleared out by the cleaners, during studio hours. This created a mini-spectacle, where students stood around lamenting the death of their models and creations, while others went scavenging for larger materials that could be re-used. This whimsical, rather comedic event stands as a stark parody of the wasteland of materials that are often left behind at the end of every semester in studio, where large amounts of models, drawings, materials, ideas, and labour go to waste, waiting to be cleared around when no student is around to feel the pain (or happiness) of the loss. Perhaps we should start thinking about anti-architecture, waste, decay and death here in school, in studio, by reflecting on the eventual ends of our own projects, and our own personal feelings towards such fates. This article was published in the Paperspace: Anti-Architecture Pamphlet

brand, stewart. how buildings learn: what happens after they’re built. penguin books, 2012.

cairns, stephen and jacobs, jane m. buildings must die: a perverse view of architecture. mit press, 2017.

koolhaas, rem. “junkspace.” october, vol. 100, 2002, pp. 175–190.,