The year in architecture: 2024 was defined by destruction. Is ruin and decay all we have left?
In Malibu, California, Kanye West and architectural designer Bianca Censori (to whom he is married) tore down a Tadao Ando-designed beachfront house, purchased by the musician for $57.3 million. Following six weeks of rampant clearing, working with a lone contractor whose images and detailed confessional in The New Yorker rippled through our feeds this June, the house now sits stripped back to its base concrete structure and open to the elements. All domestic standards have been removed; it has no windows or doors, no handrails, no built-in cabinets, no kitchen or bathroom features, and no water or electricity, with the concrete left to deteriorate and the metal to rust. West and Censori’s act of destruction was matched only by the violence of the outrage unleashed by commentators and critics. The public shock exposed not only a widespread reverence for the so-called purity of architecture, but horror at the revelation that the financial boom and crash can happen even in a place as cloistered as a starchitect-designed house in Malibu. In the aftermath of the article, a known house-flipper bought the property for less than half its original value and is currently crowdfunding to restore the project. It is baffling that we live in a society that fights to preserve the values of the bourgeoisie. Why are we campaigning to protect a single-family home for the billionaire class?
The reality of all building is that erection requires subtraction, removal and demolition. Even when building on an empty plot of land, construction requires materials, like wood, stone and aggregates, that must be extracted, mined from somewhere else. Censori’s project is arguably radical in its dismantling of bourgeois taste. There’s a long history of ruins being fetishised by the architectural profession, from Piranesi’s studies of Ancient Roman cities to John Soane’s drawings for the Bank of England in deterioration, and more recently in Sub’s work for Balenciaga and in Anne Holtrop’s concrete work. What if ruin and decay is all we have left?
Preservation doesn’t always mean clinging strictly to the past, and yet our nostalgic culture constantly seems to be fighting to find ways to preserve bastions of a bygone era. We are engulfed in reproductions of old narratives: sequels, remakes, adaptations. For the reopening of Notre Dame after it was engulfed in flames, the decision was taken to follow a historical reconstruction that adhered to the past. Looking at images of the restored cathedral, you can feel the uncanny aspect of this glowing stone; the whole building looks and smells new, so why do we pretend it is history? It comes as no surprise that architecture is shackled by the desire to preserve the past. This autumn I saw Álvaro Urbano’s installation at the Sculpture Centre in New York, in which a revived Scott Burton-designed corporate plaza was brought back from the dead. Entering the room, you are faced with the remnants of a circular public bench. As if in the process of removal, its green marble parts are left unstitched. The installation uses time and destruction as a material to be seen and exposed. In the age of surveillance, satellite imagery and digital photography, can anything really disappear from memory forever?
Buildings make way for new buildings. Sometimes, the demolition itself is part of the spectacle, as in the case of the Tropicana, the last remaining mob-era casino in Las Vegas, which was imploded ceremoniously this October to be replaced by a baseball stadium. Smoke clouds filled with concrete particles engulfed the 23 floors as they collapsed into piles of bent steel, accompanied by a drone and firework show. In architecture, the solution to problems is always to build. But when the problem is the endless, unsustainable cycle of building, what is there left to do but to tear apart, remove, remove, remove, remove, erase, leave the scars and remember not all we stand on is ours.
The removal of spatial products that are obsolete is natural to architecture’s drive for regeneration, but this was a year of demolition as warfare, of urbicide and ecocide. We lost schools, universities, hospitals, religious buildings, shelters, fields and homes. The real architects this year have been 2,000-pound bombs lavishly financed by the United States and Russia to be dropped into Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine. In Palestine, these are dropped by the IDF from a high altitude so that, as a result of gravitational forces, they penetrate the soil; only once they have reached a depth of around 20 metres do they explode, creating mini-earthquakes that cause entire buildings to collapse, swallowed into the fluid ground. The myths of land ownership that propelled these acts of destruction can be so all-encompassing as to keep us from looking beyond. But communities are not products, and the removal of Palestinians from Gaza is the result of concerted efforts in genocidal pursuits. As Eyal Weizman, who has long confronted the Zionist settler-colonial project, stated in his book Hollow Land (2007), ‘Like the tank, the gun, and the bulldozer, here building materials and infrastructure were used as weapons to commit crime.’ These contractions of Palestinian urban life have been happening since 1948. ‘The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,’ an Israeli spokesman explained in October.
In May, Israel showed AI-generated plans for a new Free Trade Zone in Gaza. The images look like your prototypical vision conjured by the likes of global architecture practices such as Gensler or AECOM. Corporate firms now work within repeatable standards that are applied systematically to all projects, producing generic templates that increasingly remove the need for human input in the design process. Architects, it would seem, have been behaving like AI for so long now that they have rendered themselves replaceable by a machine. This new city of generic glass-clad skyscrapers shows a skyline that could have been lifted from London’s financial district, with a few towers sprinkled with qubbas to situate the scene in a Middle Eastern vernacular. The new city is surrounded by green fields with boats lining up in the Mediterranean ready to offload and pick up containers. Oil rigs can be seen in the distance. Desalination plants and solar fields are there to greenwash the massacre. As the year comes to a close, more than 70 percent of Gaza City’s building stock has already been damaged or destroyed. Alongside the destruction of buildings, Israel has been using attritional warfare tactics as they bulldoze through orchards and pump seawater into the aquifer, rendering the water undrinkable and useless for agriculture.
From the middle of the desert, another sinister rendering shows a skyscraper on its side, its reflective glass facade cutting across the arid dunes and blue waters with an air of indifference to the existing topography. This seemingly floating monolith is The Line, one of a series of smart cities and urban developments in Project NEOM (dubbed ‘New Mustaqbal’, aka ‘New Future’), part of Saudi Arabia’s ‘Vision 2030’, which promises a globalised Middle East. The Line has begun to rise on the northern edge of the Red Sea. A promotional video promises a revolution in civilisation ‘like nothing the world has ever seen before’, designed within a strip of 170 kilometres by 200 metres wide, and vowing to protect and enhance nature with zero carbon emissions. The reality has already started to crumble: since the announcement, the length of the line has decreased to 2.5 kilometres, a reduction of 98.6 percent. Reports have emerged that construction of Vision 2030 projects have already claimed the lives of 21,000 Nepalese, Indian and Bangladeshi construction workers. Some architectural practices, including Mecanoo, Morphosis, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Adjaye Associates, have resigned from NEOM after human-rights abuses came to light. Meanwhile BIG, Zaha Hadid and OMA continue to work on the project.
Architecture in 2024 continues to be the guilty instrument of despair. Yet the political pyrotechnics of war and the promise of new ‘free-trade’ zones can distract from other forms of violence within the built environment that make fewer headlines. The implosion of the 15 unfinished residential towers in the southern Chinese city of Kunming three years ago, destroyed in 45 seconds, was just the beginning. Today empty housing towers stand across China, with 64 million units unoccupied. What will China’s next financial pawn be if domestic housing proves not to be a financial reinvigorator? What is the next product? While in the West, the commercial property bubble crashed silently in the background of our lives. The ‘return to the office’ following the COVID-19 pandemic did not buoy the real-estate market as hoped. Instead downtown buildings across the United States were being sold for less than they were bought. Yet adaptive reuse is restricted, even though housing is in crisis, as we continue to play the same old instrument of modern control: city zoning-laws. If the building of these typologies no longer generates profit, what is the new typology that will?
It feels prophetic that, in a year such as this, the Pritzker Prize went to Riken Yamamoto, a Japanese architect who grew up in the rubble of postwar Tokyo. His work is characterised by his use of glass and transparency with a clear sense of social interaction. Yamamoto has said of his work (in his own foreword to his 2012 monograph): ‘I am not very good at design, I am well aware of that. However, I do pay careful attention to what is around me. By what is around me, I mean the surrounding environment, the existing local community, circumstances in contemporary society.’ This moment in our history does not offer us buildings through which we can unravel our present but rather it offers us rubble, implosions, blasted materials, tons and tons of debris. A monument informs our responsibility for action, but what does its destruction create, and what does the erasure of entire cities imbue?
Little specks of Ando, and the Tropicana, of Palestine, Lebanon and Ukraine, are flying everywhere, going into the Mediterranean, into the deserts, breathed into our lungs or eaten by fish. These are the ashes of our new future. The destroyed buildings and cities are memorials of what history is capable of. It is not for their foreign aggressors to wipe them away with gleaming visions of their own so-called future. Those who are left behind should be the ones to say who should pick up the pieces, in their own time and in their own vernacular. Until then, these remain sites of burials, of bodies, of truth, for those who will not learn from it are condemned to repeat it.
Luis Ortega Govela is a Mexican architect based in Los Angeles
