We’re surrounded by an embarrassment of rich photography. Edward Byrtynsky gives us new ways to think about the material world. Michael Wolf has opened an astonishing view on urban density. We’re in the debt of Lori Grinker for her amazing images of a Dubai urban explosion and James Nachtwey for his saintly documentation of the human condition. In this vein the work of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre on the Ruins of Detroit will break an architect’s heart. People love to argue about the cause of Detroit’s problems. That argument is certainly well beyond the scope of bd-MAP, but I can’t resist comparing Grinker’s images of the building-boom on one side of the world with our crumbling city nestled up against the Great Lakes.
Whatever the global geo-political economic truth may be, the smaller tragedies documented in these images are the ones that catch you up short. The immense edifice, abandoned. The library – and all its books – abandoned. The once-noble domicile, abandoned. Theaters, dance halls, factories, neighborhoods, churches, streets: abandoned. Even banks, abandoned.
I’m reminded of Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us, or the Chernobyl exclusion zone. In both, mother nature oversees the slow re-adjustment of an ecosystem, taking down the buildings very much ahead of schedule, without their human curators to slow the clock.
Architecture is fundamentally about life on Earth, and not easily separated from ecology, economies, or politics.
