Temporary Contracts. On the Economy of the Post-Industrial Landscape.

In our post-industrial world, everything is perceived as temporary. Strip malls existing for over 30 years are seen as old and in need for extreme renovations, or abandonment. The divorce rate in the US is at 60%. Wal-mart sells the land on which they are constructing a new store, and then lease the land until the store inevitably shuts down. In fact, today it is almost unimaginable for our society to think long term. What disgusts me is the devalue developers employ on buildings, when they consider them as an object with a timeline. All the embodied energy it takes to build a building is not lost; it is transferred as heat, pollution, and wasted non-renewable resources into our environment. We must shift our perception to thinking of the built landscape as ever-changing, instead of temporary. Instead of designing for an anticipated end, we must design for an anticipated change. Architects must begin to think ahead, beyond 30 years, and imagine possible technological and economical changes which in turn change the way we theorize architecture altogether. Maybe one solution to a building system will be a structure built into the landscape which can be modified in size or form over time to suit the needs of the changing program of the occupants. Or maybe architecture all together should be temporary, transportable or collapsible.