Destruction Worthwhile to Rethink Architectural History

I think that the destruction of old buildings for the place of newer buildings and modern transportation has always been a worthwhile topic of rethinking architectural history. I believe it is worthwhile since this topic brings us to the two spheres of value. One is to modernize the city while the second is to preserve historic monuments and designs of the past. Is it right to knock down historic precedents that are considered treasures gave by previous designers? Is it also right to hinder the process of growth in technology and advancement by simply clinging on to the past? Investments and transportation are the engines that push us towards new designs. It is up to us to find the balance between preservation and innovation.

In this week's Architectures of Destruction lecture, professor Eray Cayli talked about the history of London's urban planning and also the reasons why buildings are destroyed. The reasons are categorized as iconoclasm, unexpected, opportunity, and infrastructure. What interested me the most is the example of the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe, a housing project in Missouri. While it was considered a model for future low-cost housing, it was ultimately destroyed due to the crime and vandalism that thrived within its facility, which was marked as the death of modernism by architectural historian Charles Jencks. Besides the popular opinion that this incident tells us the ignorance of master planning without user feedback, I believe that by looking at it from another perspective, we can also see the importance for the designers to educate the users. Creating a sustainable infrastructure is a two-way relationship between the designer and the residence of the facility. If the residence of Pruitt-Igoe understood the design intentions and also tried to create a sustainable environment on their own, things could have turned out very differently.

At the end, it is the users of the infrastructure that ultimately decides what kind of environment they want to live in. Designers are there to create the bones while the residence is the ones that add the flesh and blood that makes a building alive.