Buildings Must Die Cairns Stephen Programme Director Future Cities Laboratory

Part memento mori for architecture, and part invocation to reimagine the design values that lay at the heart of its creative purpose.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. What of the decay, deterioration, and destruction to which they are inevitably subject? But what of the "death" of buildings?

In Buildings Must Die, Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs look awry at core architectural concerns. And what might such endings mean for architecture's sense of itself? 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.

Their investigation of the death of buildings reorders architectural notions of