ABSTRACT
This essay traces the idea of obsolescence, how buildings and cities might suddenly lose their value and utility and so become expendable. Evolving from early-twentieth-century U.S. real estate and tax policy, the paradigm of obsolescence spread globally to urban, social, and architectural realms. Many mid-century architects accepted obsolescence’s inevitability, experimenting with flexible, modular, indeterminate, and short-life designs. Others, however, were horrified and sought to reverse obsolescence’s logic through tactics of preservationism, postmodernism, adaptive reuse, and green design. This essay explores and historicizes, in terms of obsolescence, today’s dominant paradigm of sustainability, and ponders how it might evolve in the future.
