Abstract
This chapter on obsolescence and architecture begins with an historian’s question about capitalism and modernity. The eminent scholar Eric Hobsbawm, in a 2010 interview, was asked, “to pick still unexplored topics … presenting major challenges for future historians.” Hobsbawm replied with a questi n of his own. “How is it, then, that humans and societies structured to resist dynamic development come to terms with a mode of production whose essence is endless and unpredictable dynamic development?”1 Hobsbawm directs us to one of capitalism’s contradictions, between the system’s necessity for change, on the one hand, and the human need for constancy, on the other. How are these reconciled? How does capitalism persist, in other words, in violation of basic human impulses?
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Notes
Reginald Pelham Bolton, Building forProfit: Principles Governing theEconomic Improvement ofReal Estate ( New York: De Vinne, 1911 ), 73.
John Roberts, “Obsolescence in the Marshall Field Wholesale Building,” Bulleting of the National Association of Building Owners and Managers 150 (September 1930): 44–45
Paul E. Holcombe, “Depreciation and Obsolescence in the Tacoma Building,” Bulletin of the National Association of Building Owners and Managers 137 (June 1929): 13–32.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, andDemocracy, 3rd ed. ( New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950 ), 83–84.
Florian Urban, Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Dexmocratic Republic 1970–1990 ( Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009 ).
James Marston Fitch, Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982 ), 31.
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1986; first published in English in 1931), 48, 263, 3, 138.
Alternately, Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 118, 262, 87, 183.
Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, trans. P. Morton Shand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965; first published in 1936), 54.
Antonio Sant’Elia, “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,” Journal of the Royal Institute ofBritish Architects 64 (1957): 138.
William Zuk and Roger H. Clark. Kinetic Architecture ( New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970 ), 134.
William Uricchio, “Replacement, Displacement and the Cultures of Obsolescence,” in Cultures ofObsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, ed. Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 ).
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of GreatAmerican Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992; first published in 1961), 7, 187, 189.
Vance Packard, The Waste Makers ( New York: David McKay, 1960 ), 4.
Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction toNon-Pedigreed Architecture (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), caption to Figure 1.
Paul Rudolph, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, intro. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (New York: Praeger, 1970 ), 18.
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© 2015 Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman
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Abramson, D.M. (2015). Architectures of Obsolescence: Lessons for History. In: Tischleder, B.B., Wasserman, S. (eds) Cultures of Obsolescence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463647_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463647_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-69200-2
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