Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (MIT Press)

(David Leatherbarrow, Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography)Imagine a book on world leaders that looks at how they died, rather than their accomplishments, for an explanation of why the book's subtitle acknowledges that this perspective is "perverse". But this sense of buildings' mortality can be a positive force, as Cairns and Jacobs illustrate so well. (Elizabeth Grosz, author of Architecture from the Outside)Buildings rot. This book is a fa

Huge disappointment Wright Fan Most tedious book I've had since college (40+ years). It is written like a philosophy doctoral paper - all references to other, heretofore unheard-of architectural philosophers. I wonder if the people who wrote the splendid reviews on the back cover actually read the book. I've tried and tried and tried to read it, but each time I start, I slog through a few pages and put it back. This is one I'd love to get money-back guarantee on, because I'd have returned it by now. The idea behind the book is great. As an architect, I. Four Stars Angela H.Kim good. "Excellent book." according to Filomena Daleandro. Very scholarly and insightful! Excellent book.

Stephen Cairns is Scientific Director of the Future Cities Laboratory at the Singapore-ETH Centre. Jane M. Jacobs is Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.

Cairns and Jacobs offer an original contemplation of architecture that draws on theories of waste and value. Their richly illustrated case studies of building "deaths" include the planned and the unintended, the lamented and the celebrated. They take us from Moline to Christchurch, from London to Bangkok, from Tokyo to Paris. It does so not to kill off architecture as we know it, but to rethink its agency and its capacity to make worlds differently. Buildings, although inanimate, are often assumed to have "life." And the architect, through the act of design, is assumed to be their conceiver and creator. They examine spalling concrete and creeping rust, contemplate ruins old and new, and pick through the rubble of earthquake-shattered churches, imploded housing projects, and demolished Brutalist office buildings. But what of the "death" of buildings? What of the decay, deterioration, and destruction to which they are inevitably subject? And what might such endings mean for architecture's sense of itself? In Buildings Must Die, Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs look awry at core architectural concerns. And they feature the work of such architect