Review: Obsolescence: An Architectural History, by Daniel M. Abramson

Abstract

Daniel M. Abramson Obsolescence: An Architectural History Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 208 pp., 68 b/w illus. $35 (cloth), ISBN 9780226313450; $28 (paper), ISBN 9780226478050 At the beginning of the twentieth century, commercial buildings in the United States were being demolished within as little as five years. Histories of modern architecture have started their accounts with the development of the large U.S. office building before, but Daniel M. Abramson begins his new narrative with their destruction, and with a novel body of research into the office building as real estate and tax liability. This first chapter—which locates the invention of the concept of obsolescence—introduces a book that concludes with obsolescence's seeming nemesis, sustainability. It is a fine dialectic, Abramson shows, since the two paradigms do not so much oppose one another as address the same conundrum: how to manage change. Abramson is a member of Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, a fulcrum of what we might term our discipline's materialist turn, by which architecture again represents material interactions that tell us about society's modes of production, economic relations, uneven development, and ecological precariousness. Obsolescence furnishes the perfect lens for such a materialist architectural history, since obsolescence was advanced by real estate experts in the 1910s and 1920s to explain seemingly premature demolitions, especially in the Chicago Loop, as the “result of changing technology, economics, and land use, in which the new would inevitably outperform and devalue the old” (3). The author shows that obsolescence—for all its lofty antecedence in Heraclitus's or Baudelaire's philosophies of transience, and for all its hold over popular culture, from the triennial automobile model change of the 1920s to the throwaway consumer culture after World War II—was initially entirely prosaic. Obsolescence was an invention of the U.S. real estate industry, which sought to write into corporate income tax code allowances for the depreciation of building investments. This the industry had achieved by the early 1930s, largely thanks to its cozy relationship with …