The average age of a building being demolished in the 1950s was 111 years, according to urban economist Richard Barras’s book, Building Cycles. By the early 2000s, the age was down to 60 years. That number seems to still be dropping: another study pegged the age of some demolished buildings at less than 50 years. Today, we treat buildings a lot like the way we treats smartphones or clothing: as products that need to be replaced regularly, whether because they’re unfashionable or unsuitable. Demolition is now a genre of satisfying aesthetic content unto itself, like ASMR or slime videos. “The Top 10 Demolitions Gone Wrong” has 25 million views on YouTube.
That’s the backdrop to Brutal Destruction, a new exhibition at Boston’s Pinkcomma opening tomorrow. Curated by the architect Chris Grimley, the show features mid-20th-century architecture as it’s being demolished–grisly yet beautiful portraits of buildings with one foot in the metaphorical grave. “You often hear of the buildings going away,” says Grimley. “You don’t often encounter their erasure.”
Grimley is one-third of the interdisciplinary design studio Over,Under, alongside alongside Rami el Samahy and Mark Pasnik. Grimley and Pasnik, along with Michael Kubo, are advocates for Boston’s mid-20th-century architecture, much of which has been threatened by demolition for years; they’ve produced a book (Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston), other exhibitions, and a map of Brutalist Boston in partnership with the popular Brutalist map series from Blue Crown Media.
“We get caught up in notions of what is considered beautiful,” Grimley says. “By the time things are allowed to be considered beautiful again, it’s often too late.” The curator points out that preservation itself is a relatively new phenomenon, and that every era has attempted to erase the “monstrous” architecture of the generation that came before it–take Haussmann’s demolition of Paris, for instance. Yet that cycle has steadily accelerated, and today, Postmodern buildings that are as young as 30 but considered unfashionable are under threat.
“Regardless of their stature, there’s a lot of embedded energy in [these buildings’] production,” Grimley adds. “And to take them down, without thinking of their potential for reinvention or renewal, is a nearsighted act.” Buildings account for almost 40% of CO2 in the United States. Globally, the building and construction industry produces a third of all emissions, from making concrete to shipping steel around the world. “[T]he current wave of destruction says more about our own pessimism, the weakness of our potential building legacy, and our lack of patience in finding ways to supersede the cycle of ugliness and make these monstrosities our own,” he concludes in an exhibition statement.
The most damning thing about our disgust at architecture’s recent past may have nothing to do with heritage, fashion, or history. It has to do with waste.
Brutal Destruction opens April 12 and runs until May 3.