As much as I like to look, design, study and live Architecture, I have never really thought about them dying. Yes you see buildings get knocked down, bridges buckling, vandalism and removing them all the time but you never really stop to look at one and think about the life its had, what it may of gone through, the restoring and care which may have gone into keeping it “alive” and how long it may have left until someone decides they want to create something better in its place as its just too plain and old to be there any more.

Now I am so happy to have come across this book “Buildings Must Die A Perverse View Of Architecture” by Stephen Cairnes and Jane M. Jacobs, and cant wait to start reading this as its going to give me another perception into the life of buildings which I may or may not never of had throughout my life of becoming an Architectural Technologist.

Here is a small description of the book:- “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. But what of the “death” of buildings? What of the decay, deterioration, and destruction to which they are inevitably subject? And what might such endings mean for architecture’s sense of itself? In Buildings Must Die, Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs look awry at core architectural concerns. 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 creativity, reshapes architecture’s preoccupation with good form, loosens its vanities of durability, and expands its sense of value. It does so not to kill off architecture as we know it, but to rethink its agency and its capacity to make worlds differently.”

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/buildings-must-die