One (3) Three Nine

~1 (plus 2)

Abandoned buildings within neighborhoods reveal the enormity of our capacity for ruination; with decline as a societal construction.  The problem is that neighborhoods today are defined as either an economic space or a social space when it is the case that a neighborhood must be both.  Abandoned buildings, or vacancies, serve as neither, progenerating the gap between economic and social space.

+3

The increasing rates at which vacancies have been produced across the urban landscape disclose a narrative of society that has become overly concerned with financial gain (economic space), rather than social networks (social space). Building today has surrendered itself to the circumstances of accelerated markets, technologies and developments. As a result, building has grown into something that has become more global, generic and market driven, leaving behind that which is no longer of any use.

+9

These vacancies do not provide the results we expect from architecture, but instead act as spaces of disorder that serve as a critique of regulated urban space. Spaces in which the interpretation of the city becomes liberated from constraints which determine what should be done and where.  Instead, the aesthetics of abandoned sites offer a unique perspective that stand in contrast to commodified social ways of being. There is no economic space. They create an alternative world in which we as spectators, with our assumptions and expectations, are strangers. Thus, there is no connection between the barren structures and their communities, since they have never fulfilled their intended function. There is no social space.  Spaces of disorder can critique the highly regulated urban spaces which surround them, as sites which can combine both the economic and social spaces into one. They are indispensable eyesores.