Un-building: a utopia of receding construction

Abstract

Spanning the past two centuries, the world has seen voracious urban expansion premised on exponential population growth and radical transformations in the productive means and methods used to generate goods. This has resulted in built environments designed for social performance and economic production becoming indifferent (if not antagonistic) to the sustenance of pre-existing ecological relationships. In a world that is progressively broken by long-term and sustained environmental abuse, architects need to reconsider how architecture is produced in relation to regional biotic networks. Architectural production may need to be re-approached through non-additive strategies. It is time for architecture to assimilate subtractive strategies, that is un-building part of what has been built to rebalance the relationship between the ecological conditions and the constructed environment. This paper suggests two operating reformulations that could be considered utopian or lead to actual strategies of renaturalisation: succession, where structures would be reoccupied by natural ecosystems, and withdrawal, where structures would be progressively disassembled and removed to reinstate a natural landscape. The discussion on the two strategies will focus on the elimination of what is constructed, the assimilation of subtractive strategies, and the un-building of parts of what have been built to rebalance the relationship between the ecological conditions and the constructed environments.