From Obsolescence to Sustainability, Back Again, and Beyond

Abstract

This article traces the idea of architectural obsolescence in twentieth-century architecture and urbanism: where the idea comes from that buildings and cities can suddenly lose their value and utility, and how architects and others around the world responded to the perception that obsolescence characterized modernity. Evolving out of early twentieth-century US income tax policy and capitalist real estate development, the paradigm of obsolescence spread globally in the mid-century urban and social realms before impacting architecture directly. Some designers embraced obsolescence's liberating promise of expendability and short-life buildings. Others were horrified by its implications of ephemerality and waste, leading to preservationism, postmodernism, and ecologism. Obsolescence, as a paradigm for comprehending and managing change in the built environment, thus set the stage for its successor worldview of sustainability, it is argued. Yet obsolescence and sustainability are also intimately linked through similar views of performance and quantification, technology and the past. Understanding the complex relationships between obsolescence and sustainability historicizes both paradigms, critiques their inevitability, and thus looks beyond the horizon of sustainability to a possibly different future.