Another rabbit hole bringing together some reflections on creativity, demolition, patrimony, and poetic ruination, as so often in this blog inspired by architectural insights and metaphors.

My attention was triggered by an article in the Jan 11, 2020 weekend edition of De Standaard, a Flemish newspaper. The article was about landscaping, and more specifically “ontharding” (I would literally translate it as “softening”). In this case, softening that what was hardened in the first place. Abandoned and neglected residential and industrial sites, where the soil is still covered by the concrete and rubbish of empty buildings.

It was part of a study supported by the “Vlaamse Bouwmeester”. “Bouwmeester” means “master of building”, “bau-meister”. The term is ill-translated into “Flemish Government Architect” on the official website. The full study can be found here (PDF in Dutch).

The core mission of the Flemish Government Architect is to promote the architectural quality of the built environment. The Flemish Government Architect and his team advise public patrons in the design and realization of buildings, public space, landscape and infrastructure. In addition, the Flemish Government Architect stimulates the development of visions and reflection, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral initiatives. The Flemish Government Architect acts as an advisor to the entire Flemish Government.

In short, the article and the study plea for restoring public space by the demolition of 1/5^th of hardened space/surface in the Flemish landscape by 2050.

I had a flashback to “Cradle to Cradle”, the 2002 book that alerted me for the first time to a possible vision of sustainable production and architecture. The idea at that time was that reducing waste was just not good enough, and to be sustainable we needed to add value back into the system. As an evolution, the article about the softening of landscape goes one step further: from reducing waste to creating open space by the demolition of vacancy.

“Sloop geeft blijk van falen” – “Demolition evidences failure”

It was happenstance that I was reading around the same time Dan Hill’s 2015 book “Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary”. I will come back to this book in subsequent posts.

Dan Hill was/is looking for (open) spaces as well, quoting ex-FC Barcelona football player and current Al-Sadd (Quatar) football team coach Xavi Hernández:

 “Think quickly, look for spaces. That’s what I do: look for spaces. All day. I’m always looking. All day, all day. Here? No. There? No. People who haven’t played don’t always realise how hard that is. Space, space, space. It’s like being on the PlayStation. I think ‘shit, the defender’s here, play it there’. I see the space and pass. That’s what I do.”

Already more than 20 years ago, architect Cedric Price was arguing for demolish-able buildings with open re-usable spaces.

Cedric Price’s Fun Palace – inspiration for Centre Pompidou in Paris

OK – I confess – as from that moment I went down the rabbit hole and saw demolition and abandoned architecture everywhere. Like in this recent Guardian article, arguing the case for fully demountable buildings.

“We have to think of buildings as material depots,” says Thomas Rau , a Dutch architect who has been working to develop a public database of materials in existing buildings and their potential for reuse… He has developed the concept of “material passports”, a digital record of the specific characteristics and value of every material in a construction project, thereby enabling the different parts to be recovered, recycled and reused.

But there is also something poetic about abandonment, up to the point where we could consider keeping these ruins and equipping them with sensors to listen to patrimony.

In his beautifully reflective post “Instrumental Revelation and the Architecture of Abandoned Physics Experiments”, Geoff Manough introduces the concept of “poetic ruination.

Like menhirs, these abandoned seismic sensors could now just stand there, silent in the landscape, awaiting a future photographer such as Grigoryants to capture their poetic ruination.

Lebbeus Woods was inspiration to Geoff Manough and London-based architects Smout Allen for the project L.A. Recalculated:

Woods depicts an entire city designed and built as an inhabitable scientific tool. Everywhere there are “oscilloscopes, refractors, seismometers, interferometers, and other, as yet unknown instruments, measuring light, movement, force, change.” Woods describes how “tools for extending perceptivity to all scales of nature are built spontaneously, playfully, experimentally, continuously modified in home laboratories, in laboratories that are homes.”

Instead of wasting their lives tweeting about celebrity deaths, residents construct and model their own bespoke experiments, exploring seismology, astronomy, electricity, even light itself.

Seismic Counterweights
From L.A. Recalculated by Smout Allen and BLDGBLOG

Like architects think about (industrial) sites listening through sensors to seismic undercurrents, I started wondering whether we could not use this metaphor to reflect about our organizational structures; structures not only as hierarchical structures but the more encompassing set of system rules and patterns of an organization – I referred to it before as organizational patrimony.

How can we listen to and signal about the pulse of this organizational patrimony? How can we be aware of it, appreciate it, respect it, and build upon it in our rebellious acts of creative destruction?

I imagine a cohort of humans – like a colony of ants – having 24/7 sensors and laboratories everywhere in organizations; in every office, cubicle, meeting room, coffee corner, etc. And I don’t mean robotic sterile sensors feeding AI models. I mean real humans, measuring, documenting and signaling patrimonial changes in the structure of corporate structure, so they can send early warnings of experiments that have become useless and therefore have to be ruinated, or – in the worst-case – signal cases of patrimonial breakdown and demolition. In search of the material depot and passport of our organizations.