AR Reading List 017: Time, loss, and preservation

For the first episode of our new podcast, AR Bookshelf, we spoke to masters of slow time and adaptive reuse Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats about the death of drawing and books that hold memory. We have since taken the opportunity to leaf through the pages of our own archive, to bring together a reading list about preservation and decay, about careful intervention and about what gets lost to time.

What is replaced, restored, relegated to the past, or frozen in aspic for evermore is a choice that is made, and those that make it become the authors of history. It is too much to save everything, impossible to achieve and altogether too nostalgic to attempt – but where will the line be drawn? Who holds the right to decide, and what liberties can be taken with the rest? And finally, what ghosts, shells or idle fragments, will eventually remain?

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• Slow time: Casal Balguer Cultural Centre in Palma de Mallorca by Flores & Prats and Duch-Pizà, AR March 2019, Eleanor Beaumont
  ‘Time is built into the architects’ almost archaeologically detailed drawings and cupboardfuls of models. “We are interested in learning to include the doubt, uncertainty and chance as part of the creative process”, Flores & Prats write, “in the slow time of drawing by hand”’
• Experimental preservation: challenging what we keep and why, AR December 2019/January 2020, Jorge Otero-Pailos
  ‘The word preservation has come to be associated with a sort of deference to the past over the needs of the present that subjugates contemporary action, normalising and confining it via legal regulations and thwarting alternatives to the status quo’
• Preservation in New York, AR August 1962, Ada Louise Huxtable
  ‘Until we realise that cri­teria for preservation must be enlarged beyond that standard sentimental bromide, “George Washington slept here,” we will have confusion, obstruction, and little real progress’
• Hôtel Wolfers: Henry van de Velde’s frozen ruin, AR September 2018, Eleanor Beaumont
  ‘“As time passes, when the building is a ruin, the spirit of its making comes back,” Louis Kahn said in 1973. Hôtel Wolfers is preserved as a modern ruin, frozen in an everlasting temporary condition of decay’
• Reading the ruins, AR December 2017/January 2018, Catherine Slessor
  ‘The cultural fetishisation of decay is not new in itself, dating back to Grand Tour potterings around Italy and Greece, but Detroit has had the misfortune to be trapped in the libidinous glare of the digital multiverse’
• Continuing disasters, AR December 1970, AR editors
  ‘It is an unending campaign of vigilance to forestall the piecemeal destruction of character, to put and end to unsympathetic design, to prevent errors of scale, to save skylines from being ruptured and to anticipate decay by neglect’
• Buildings within buildings: on fragments, blurred thresholds and endless interiors, AR April 2017, Douglas Murphy
  ‘There’s something of an uncanny quality to these kinds of spaces, a disorder that comes from seeing architectural elements out of their natural position. There’s also the fact of their fragmentary qualities, the gaps and incompleteness that are made possible’